M. Ward’s seventh studio album, “A Wasteland Companion,” has a number of various musical cameos, including Zooey Deschanel, Louis Armstrong and Steve Shelley. From covers to featured guests, “A Wasteland Companion” is not a lonely album, and also isn’t entirely a wasteland.

Deschanel, a member of the band She & Him (in which she is “she” and M. Ward is “him”) is a guest vocalist on two tracks: “Me and My Shadow” and “Sweetheart.” “Me and My Shadow” starts out warmly acoustic, and quickly turns into a clunky, electrifying devotion to reverb and far-away vocals. The lyrics liken a mockingbird to a wandering musician, which fits perfectly with Deschanel’s cooing background vocals.

“Sweetheart” is another Daniel Johnston cover (M. Ward has previously covered plenty of other Johnston songs such as “To Go Home” and “Story of an Artist”) that takes us bouncing “down lover’s lane” with hand-clapping excitement, muffled drumming, lots of cymbal and Deschanel’s deep but lovely voice singing the refrain.

After “Sweetheart” comes another jaunty cover, “I Get Ideas.” The adorably bashful lyrics refer to that silly, uncertain bit of time between liking someone and not knowing how they feel about you: “And when you touch me / with a fire in every finger / I get ideas, I get ideas. / And after we have kissed goodnight / and still you linger / I kinda think that you get ideas too.”

This cover was originally a 1927 tango with lyrics by Argentinean composer Julio Cesar Sanders. M. Ward joins the ranks of other musicians who have covered and made this song famous, like Tony Martin, Louis Armstrong and Peggy Lee. M. Ward has yet another guest singer on this song, Rachel Cox of folk-rock band Oakley Hall, who gives just enough female vocal presence to be the “sweetheart” Ward refers to, but not so much that there’s still the sense of giddy coyness between a boy and a girl.

“Watch the Show” features guest drummer Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth, who was instrumental in mentoring M. Ward and helping to establish his musical career. The song, about a miserable middle-aged man who has been working for 30 years at the same TV station, doesn’t quite make the evening news as M. Ward whines unconvincingly.

What the album truly lacks is cohesion. Although the stand-out songs are great on their own, the ones that are just okay make for an unappealing disjointedness. M. Ward remarked about the recording of the album that “for the past ten years people have been telling me about studios all over the world that I never had the time to go and see for myself and experience. So this was the record where I took that opportunity.” The twelve songs on “A Wasteland Companion” were recorded in ten different studios, which could have been a factor in the disconnected feel, despite M. Ward’s positivity toward the multiple recording studios.

It’s clear that M. Ward is still a great songsmith, but without the help of so many other musicians on “A Wasteland Companion,” the album would have been a far greater disappointment.