The Wood Brothers will be performing their first three night stand in Nashville, TN, at 3rd and Lindsley on December 4,5,6 2015. They have earned every ounce of respect they garner. Their American Roots Rock style is catchy and well refined. Recently we caught up with Bassist, Chris Wood while on fall tour.
Blank: This is now a hometown show for you. What can we expect?
Wood: We haven’t yet (done a three night stand). We love the idea. It always sounds appealing. Last year we did two nights at 3rd and Lindsley. It was a lot of fun. We had special guest and both nights sold out. (Laughing) I guess we thought we could get away with three this time.
Blank: The new album Paradise was released on October 2nd to rave revues. Conceptually, it is more aggressive and full feeling than past releases without dismissing their roots. “American Heartache” is a prime example. It is loud and electric with all of the harmonies fans have come to love. It reminds me of Neil Young.
Wood: The previous album we made, The Muse, was produced by Buddy Miller. We recorded it at Southern Grounds Studios in Nashville, which has a beautiful, big tracking room that has a lot of reverberation. We recorded a lot of that record, more or less live, in that room together and we wanted people to hear that room, to feel the acoustics of that space. So a lot of those songs have a very reverberant, stripped down type of tone. I think after we made that record, our natural inclination as artists was to say, ‘well, we’ve done that.’ (Laughing) Our natural thing to do was try something different. One of the big things about writing “Paradise” was that we all live in Nashville. We’re able to actually rehearse now. We’re able to sit in a room together with a very rough idea and flesh it all out together. That was really new for this record. For that reason, the outcome was slightly more grooving, more rocking. As we started to write the material, we could feel the direction of it. We used Dan Auerbauch’s (The Black Keys, The Archs) Easy Eye Studio. I’d worked there before on a different record that buddy Miller produced and it felt like being in Sun Studios. You get a dryer, more compressed sound. I felt that it would be appropriate for the music we were writing.
Blank: Over your career, you have talked about your parents influence on both you and your brother. Where his dad would play acoustic folk music for them, his mother was a poet and constantly emphasized the importance of words.
Wood: Our mom actually taught creative writing classes and I was in them when I was a kid. There was always a push to read good books and push to write creatively in any way. Early on, definitely, she was very aware of the words. We lost our mom back in 2007, so it was only in the beginning. I think what Oliver and I both realized, when we started this band as middle aged people, is that we now appreciate how much influence that our parents had on us, our mother as a person and a writer and then our father because he was into folk singing. He wasn’t a musician by trade. He was into that late 50’s Cambridge folk scene, like Joan Baez. He sang a lot of that stuff around the house and played guitar as well. He was our first live music. We just took it for granted, but he had a great record collection and that stuff just gets inside of you. You don’t even know it’s happened. It wasn’t until we started The Wood Brothers that we both appreciated the fact of that influence on us.
Blank: In even the most perceivably exciting of careers, time spent in transit can make one question the “what if’s” of the life not lived. This is the subject of “Two Places.” In the past you have talked about the love of the idea of a physically demanding job.
Wood: Part of me feels that way because I love doing hard physical work.
Blank: Did you ever have a job doing physical work?
Wood: Uh, No, (Laughing) And I might change my mind if I did. But somehow, in my long stints at home, I get myself wrapped up in a very physically demanding project. I always had fantasies about being a farmer. I love gardening and outdoor work. I love the idea of a fantasy of being a ranger of some kind, something out in nature, out in the elements. I’m sure I’m partly reacting to the fact that I am a touring musician and I spend way too much time cooped up in airplanes and staring out a window.
Blank: The writing process is always changing. Much of it seems to come from opportunity and necessity. Can you talk about the way that you approach this subject?
Wood: It’s every way you can imagine. Somebody’s got to start something. It can be every way, no matter how abrupt. It’s just a matter of people reacting to it. Lyrically, sometimes Oliver will start something a very, very rough idea or something fully flushed out. Sometimes it’s just words. Sometimes it’s just music that inspires us, a rhythm or riff or feel.
Blank: In your 20+ years on the road, you must have experienced extraordinary things.
Wood: I had some interesting experiences going around Israel right before the first gulf war. Just feeling the tension, all the tension that is there….that’s a pretty heavy experience. What’s amazing about being a touring musician or anyone who travels is that you get a feel for all the different cultures, even within the United States. Seeing the way people talk and live and dress and express themselves gives you a sense of the underlying humanity of what we all have in common.
