Ward Hayden & The Outliers

Name: Ward Hayden & The Outliers
Start: 2026-01-30T20:00:00-05:00
Location: Narrows Center for the Arts

Schedule

Fri, 30 Jan, 2026 at 08:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

Narrows Center for the Arts | Fall River, MA

Friday, January 30, 2026
$35 Advance | $38 Day of Show
[all-in pricing, no additional fees]
Doors 7pm | Show 8pm
THE TIE THAT BINDS: Ward Hayden & The Outliers Employ Unity Through The Boss
The story of “Little by Little,” the new album by Ward Hayden & The Outliers, began like so many Bruce Springsteen songs do: in a car with the radio on, hurtling down a highway, headed for distant destinations. Except that instead of one of Hayden’s longtime favorites like Hank Williams taking him on a journey through the airwaves, it was a voice whose sour rhetoric rubbed him the wrong way and ultimately inspired action.
“It was born from something negative,” concedes Hayden, a rueful tinge shading his words as he relates the story. It all started when he and his band were driving to a gig in the heartland of America a couple of years back. “The person being interviewed on the radio was someone who rose to fame in a Massachusetts hard rock band in the ‘90s who then did the classic thing of turning to country for the late stage of his career,” says the Outliers’ singer-songwriter. “And he was telling his audience, his fans, not to listen to Bruce Springsteen. And although I don’t feel I’m a very angry or hotheaded person, my initial reaction was disbelief that anyone would say that, or disavow one of the most meaningful collections of songwriting and work, and do such a disservice to their own audience just because they didn’t completely align with a few things Springsteen had said away from the stage. It felt like an exploitation of our differences, and he was using a meaningful and significant generational touchstone in Springsteen to further divide people and profiteer from negative sensationalism.”
After all, with a legendary career in music that at this point spans more than half a century’s worth of creating quintessentially American tales of small-town striving and big-time heartbreak, Springsteen, Hayden says, is “a universal tie that binds, someone who transcends age and country and generations. Everywhere we go, everywhere we’ve toured around the world, his name comes up. And I know how much his music has meant to me.”
Hayden knew what he had to do to counteract the negative: Offer a balance to the negative bluster by working resolutely to create a positive reaction with Bruce’s music as the vehicle. That small but symbolic act of appreciation and resistance initially came in the form of recording and releasing a trio of Springsteen songs: “Glory Days,” “Brilliant Disguise,” and “Dancing in the Dark.” Little did the band know the gesture would be a creative catalyst and roadmap for the foreseeable future. “What ended up happening was” – here Hayden brightens with a broad grin – “we couldn’t stop, and the project took on a life of its own. We literally went nuts. It was too much fun.”
So much so that Hayden and The Outliers wound up with a clutch of 16 finished Springsteen songs, all interpreted Outliers-style, that they decided to split down the middle into two separate, yet thematically linked albums. Their respective release dates will likely coincide with the Outliers always-busy touring schedule so fans will have fresh, new music to latch onto live and on record. “Little by Little” drops first on April 18th, with the second installment, “Piece by Piece” (both titles are gleaned from Springsteen’s lyrics to “Racing In The Street”) due later this year, right around the time the band heads for Europe & Scandinavia.
“We could have done 16 more songs, but we started to run out of money,” Ward says with a laugh. “So we had to pump the brakes at some point!” On top of that, the sessions proved so fertile that the band also came away with an entire album’s worth of brand-new original Outliers’ compositions that will also see the light of day at some later date. “Little by Little” is comprised of an eclectic mix of cherished chestnuts and rare gems (such as the previously unreleased “County Fair,” a slice-of-life studio outtake that later appeared on Springsteen’s “Essentials” collection). But if you’re under the impression that these guys merely fired up a greatest hits karaoke machine, you’d better think again.
As any fan of this prolific Massachusetts-born band knows, whether you’re a newcomer or whether you first heard Hayden when he first arrived on the Boston scene as the charismatic leader of the multi-Boston Music Award-winning outfit Girls Guns & Glory, the music on “Little by Little” is outfitted in the inimitable Outliers’ style. That is to say, with a marvelously effective, updated dose of Country & Western flavor; tasty instrumental flourishes thanks to Tyler Marshall’s and Sam Crawford’s restrained-yet-ripping guitar licks (the latter also employs lap steel guitar). And a supple rhythm section supplied by bass player-multi-instrumentalist Greg Hall (who co-produced the album with Hayden) and drummer-percussionist Patrick Brown, plus a select handful of the Outliers musical collaborators who lent their talents to this recording. All told, the musicianship here is so comfortably tight you could bounce a jukebox quarter off of it – that is, if jukeboxes still took quarters.
Of course, the sonic package is topped off by the Outliers’ calling card and ace-in-the-hole: Hayden’s emotionally resonant, supremely silken vocals. It’s a voice that, in the span of a verse or a moment, can effortlessly summon the highest of spirits or sink the saddest of hearts. And as if that wasn’t enough to draw listeners in, for “Little by Little,” Hayden even taught himself to play harmonica, which you can hear augment the wistful, twin elegies of “Used Cars” and “Promised Land,” the latter of which is slated to be the album’s first single. Taken together, what the whole shebang sounds and feels like, unmistakably, is nobody but Ward Hayden & the Outliers.
“Well, you can’t out Boss The Boss,” says Hayden, who spent his formative years on the South Shore listening to Springsteen and watching Bruce’s videos on MTV (back when the video channel actually played music). “We had always felt a little intimidated about trying to tackle his songs because some of them are so iconic. We knew that if we were gonna do them, we had to play them the way we play our music, and that was the first challenge.”
“We really chose the songs that meant something to us,” Ward says of the selection process. “A lot of the songs have been the soundtrack to growing up – back when you were hanging out with your friends in the kitchen, songs you’d listen to while driving home from school, or during the course of you just living your life. And with this collection, I felt we were able to say some things that I’ve not been able to say myself yet in my own work, and here we were able to cover some ground that I’ve been wanting to cover.”
Whenever Ward found himself driving around town, he’d listen to “Born To Run,” Springsteen’s audio book of the singer-songwriter’s acclaimed 2016 autobiography. A fan had gifted Hayden the “book on tape” after a show, and he’d constantly pop it in to listen. The memoir hooked Hayden and gave him a window into Bruce’s world, from the Boss’s hardscrabble boyhood beginnings in Freehold, New Jersey, to his eventual global superstardom. Most important, it gave Hayden a greater understanding and appreciation of the stories behind the legend.
“Youngstown,” the intended second single off “Little by Little” that chronicles the true tale of the demise of Youngstown, Ohio’s steel industry, especially hit home for Hayden: “I wanted to record that from the moment I heard it decades ago. That story, of industry booming and then busting a town has played out quite a bit, where townspeople give everything and then the town is kind of forsaken. Here in Massachusetts, it’s played out with shoe factories and textile mills and in the fishing industry.”
“In evolution, specialization is a key ingredient to extinction,” he adds. “If you can’t adapt to a change in environment, you’re left twisting in the wind, because for generations it’s all you’ve known. You’re not ready for moving on to the next thing.” It’s not a political song, Ward contends, but rather speaks a greater truth. “I think that it’s a very human, very American song. And few folks write those better than Bruce.”
The band recorded the bulk of the tracks for both Outliers Springsteen albums at 37' Productions, a welcoming state of the art studio just outside Boston, with award-winning engineer Sean McLaughlin (known for his work with Elliott Smith) at the helm. The rest of the album was recorded over a six-month span during breaks between touring, with the finishing touches added with Hayden’s friend, fellow roots musician David DeLuca, who now runs Noise in the Basement Studio in Canton, MA. But before ever setting foot in the studio, the band members were able to rehearse what they heard in their heads, thanks to the generosity of Patrick Norton, who runs the venerable Narrows Center for the Arts in Fall River, Massachusetts.
“What was great about the Narrows is that it’s an old mill building with a big, cavernous room that has a natural echo. The room helped shape the sound of the record because I like the way the music reverberated in that room,” says Hayden. Those echoes provided a visceral sense of sonic detail and nuance. “I was living and breathing these songs for almost two years, running the lyrics through my head, thinking about phrasing and finding the right delivery. I really wanted to capture genuine sentiment and honesty with my interpretation of these songs. I didn’t want to sing them if I didn’t really feel them, I needed a meaningful connection to the song.”
Call it honesty or authenticity. Just as Springsteen famously draws on his real-life roots for his material, so too has Hayden – especially after the pandemic hit in 2020 and the Outliers were forced off the road for an extended period. Ward credits Greg Hall, then a newcomer to the band, as an inspiration. “He could have withdrawn and I would have understood. But he was really excited about what we were doing and said ‘when the world comes back, we want to be ready, so let’s get to work’. I started writing as aggressively as I had in the early days, all the while I’d moved back to my hometown, running into people, and seeing sites that felt like monuments to my memories. That’s what (2023’s) ‘South Shore’ record ended up being about.”
“We have a whole other record written that we’re going to record this year that’s a continuation of that experience, of leaving a small town, seeing the bigger world, and trying to figure out your place in both of those environments,” Hayden says. ‘Ultimately coming back home, figuring out where you fit in, and sorting through those emotions. It’s a journey I wasn’t expecting, but it’s been at the forefront of my mind and connected to a lot of the music we’ll be releasing the next couple years. Thinking about the path of life. These paths through life, the leaving and the coming home, the bigger and smaller picture, and our role in a world that’s so much bigger than ourselves. It’s where you find meaning, where you find value, where you find connection in the ups and downs that come along with that journey. I think it makes us human, it’s what builds us up and breaks us down, strengthens our resilience. Through the songs that capture that experience it’s where we find the inspiration to keep moving forward and continue climbing. And in this part of the world that shared experience is what makes us American & it’s that insight that gives us a unique perspective we’re able to examine, build into song, and share. These are the ties that bind.”