Tag: jano rix

Oliver Wood Gets “Weird” On Second Solo Album, ‘Fat Cat Silhouette’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

As the frontman/guitarist of The Wood Brothers, Oliver Wood is well versed in the art of roots experimentalism, but even that genre-blurring trio can’t satisfy all of his curiosity. With his second solo album, Fat Cat Silhouette (out now), the singer-songwriter set out to reach a new creative plane of existence.

Featuring nine playful, untethered tracks exploring pure sonic adventurism, the set became a case study in songwriting for songwriting’s sake; it’s a joyful mix of folk, jazz and free form pop. Recorded analog to tape by Wood Brothers percussion polymath Jano Rix, it features guest appearances by Katie Pruitt and Los Lobos saxophonist Steve Berlin, and some of the most irreverent, open-minded musical journeys ever taken. Each day, Wood would wake up, grab a coffee and sit down in a comfy chair, looking out the window to write whatever crossed his mind. The result was musical mood-shift, just a refreshing as it is insightful.

Ahead of another Wood Brothers tour, BGS talked with the artist about clearing his creative mind and getting “weird.”

It seems like you were purposely expanding your horizons on this second solo record, right? Why did you want to open up the floodgates?

Oliver Wood: I don’t know, it just felt like time to do that and time to experiment. … The Wood Brothers, we put out an album last spring and when we were done, I guess I was just still writing tunes. But also, I’ve always just liked in the last few years to make it a point to collaborate with some people outside of the band. And then production-wise, I felt like we’ve just done this album with The Wood Brothers a certain way, and a lot of times we react as artists and as writers. You sort of react to what you did before, and you try to be different, even though there’s not necessarily an exact sound in mind. It’s like, “What can we do that’s weirder?”

I love that idea of being a little weird, because why not, right? But the funny thing is that as a band, The Wood Brothers does not exactly seem limiting in terms of creativity.

No not at all.

So was there just still more in you, that had to get out creatively, or what?

I think so, yeah. And I’m sure there’s a subconscious part of me that wants to figure out what is my musical identity. I know what it is within The Wood Brothers. That’s sort of our bread and butter, but when I do my own thing, I feel like I can do whatever I want. … Maybe nobody will even hear it, so why don’t I just do get as weird as I want to get?

In the album bio, you talk about practicing songwriting without self-judgment and I think that’s a cool idea. Can you explain what that is to you and how you go about getting there?

Yeah. I think that is, first of all, almost impossible. However, maybe putting myself in a frame of mind that I was under less pressure to make something that people would like helps get there. It’s all subconscious, but when we’re with The Wood Brothers, even though we’re not trying to please anybody but ourselves, we do have to make our living, so in the back of our heads it’s like, “Oh, this song will sound good at Red Rocks or the Ryman Auditorium.” In other words, “People are going to love this.” I can’t help but think that in the back of my mind probably. But as far as writing without judgment and what that looks like? I think it looks like trust. I think it looks trusting that oftentimes your first instincts are right.

You don’t have to fix something or change something. You can trust that your soul and realness is going to come out if you just let it, and you write something down or play something, rather than going over it and editing it. I feel like I did that a lot with lyrics on this record. I wrote some things and I was like, “That doesn’t make any sense.” I caught myself thinking that, and then I was like, “Screw it. I trust that that’s what my subconscious told me to write. And it’s real.” I don’t think you really have to try to do that. In fact, the more you try, the less authentic it might be.

What came out is these nine tracks that to me are really playful and enthusiastic. What do you like about where the sound went? You definitely took some leaps.

Well, I talked with [album producer and fellow Wood Brothers member] Jano a lot about maybe being a little bit less on the drum set side, a little more on the percussion side. He is my favorite drummer ever, but sometimes I get tired of drum sets. I mean I love classic rock ‘n’ roll and R&B drums, all that stuff. But sometimes when you think about it, it sounds like everything else. So it was like “What if we didn’t have that?” There was one point where it’s like, “Jano, why don’t you do that percussion part vocally?” With the song “Whom I Adore,” not only did he play the Sitar and the tambourine, but he also did this weird shaker part with his mouth. Sometimes when you avoid one thing, you have to innovate to replace it with something else. And that was kind of the idea.

I use this really dull, rubber-bridge guitar on a lot of the songs, so there’s some more atypical guitar sounds. And of course, Steve Berlin and the bari-sax was a really cool thing. There was one section where we were wishing we had a horn section and instead Jano and I just sang all the parts. That was for “Star In the Corner,” and we just sang them like idiots – like fake opera singers! It’s kind of silly, but it was like, “That’s cool. And we haven’t done that before.”

That to me was the way to go to be non-judgmental, to be like you called it, playful. Sometimes you feel like you can control something and make it just perfect. But the opposite of that is letting go and trusting that if you try something, it may or may not turn you on, but when it works, it’ll surprise you and delight you. And that’s so much more fun than trying to control something and never quite being happy.

Tell me about the track “Little Worries.” This contains the album title, Fat Cat Silhouette, which is so fun. How does that song speak to the project overall?

Some of the themes, I feel like bloomed from that song. I have a ritual where I’ll go downstairs in the morning and have a cup of coffee in this armchair, which is right by a window facing my front yard. And I usually go down there and I write and sometimes I just write in a notebook, just sort of freeform. Sometimes it’s working on a song, but it’s wide open and several of these songs kind of started that way.

The idea of the Fat Cat Silhouette was really just an actual thing. I’m sitting there in that chair with my cup of coffee and I have these semi-transparent sheer curtains, and there’s a cat sitting there looking out the window. Sometimes for me – and I’m pretty sure for a lot of other songwriters – you don’t know what you’re going to write about, but you may see something that gets you started. And so the beginning of that song is literally me describing sitting in the chair with my cup of coffee and there’s a fat cat silhouette in the window.

That sort of observation, oftentimes if you write it down, can lead to a story. The first song on the album, “Light and Sweet,” happened the same way, sitting in the same spot looking out the window and there’s a sparrow. I started the song and then I started fantasizing. He’s on the phone with his lawyer talking about his divorce with his soon to be ex-wife.

[Laughs] You don’t hear many songs about bird law.

Exactly! But with the “Little Worries” song, I think writing that song and writing in general every morning is a good way for me to deal with anxieties and overthinking things. And that kind of turned out to be what that song was about.

How about “Yo I Surrender.” This is another track about giving up control, but also I think the most fun on the record. I love how you said it has the worst guitar sound ever. Why does that work for you?

That’s one that Jano and me and [bassist] Ted [Pecchio] were warming up one day, and we just started playing that groove. We just had fun playing that groove and I saved it on my phone, and then Steve Berlin from Los Lobos was in town with his bari-sax, and we invited him to come into the studio, help us finish writing that song. So the four of us sort of arranged the music and parallel to that, I was starting to think about the lyrics. I was also reading some cool books that were giving me some cool vocabulary words that I was like, “I just want to use that word. I don’t even care if it fits. I don’t even care if it makes sense.” It was definitely one of those things where it was musically such a group effort, and then lyrically one of those things – let it be weird, let it be ambiguous. I think some of my favorite songs that I’ve heard over the years are always a little bit ambiguous.

Photo Credit: Alysse Gafkjen

LISTEN: The Wood Brothers, “Line Those Pockets”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: The Wood Brothers
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Line Those Pockets”
Album: Heart Is the Hero
Release Date: April 14, 2023
Label: Honey Jar/Thirty Tigers

In Their Words: “‘Line Those Pockets’ has a unique collaborative aspect. It started out as a campy kind of folk ballad, but then we heard this cool drum and keyboard part that Jano had worked up. So we married the lyrics to Jano’s piano part. It was ambiguous enough that Chris and I had different interpretations of the harmony. So everyone’s separate visions came together in the finished song. It emerged as a sound and song we’ve never made before. A weird pseudo Latin-reggae groove with a poppy hook. Absolutely new territory for The Wood Brothers, which is always something we’re trying to accomplish as we write for each new album.” — Oliver Wood, The Wood Brothers

Photo Credit: Shervin Lainez

How the Wood Brothers Made an Album out of a Print Shop Jam Session

Posted on by Editor

The Wood Brothers have been together as long as they were apart. For fifteen years or so Chris and Oliver Wood pursued separate careers — Oliver out of Atlanta as a blues/rock guitarist and singer, and Chris out of New York as the bass player with the uncanny jazz/jam success story Medeski, Martin & Wood. Then they sat in together and felt a pull energized by family ties and musical curiosity, and their folk duo was born, about fifteen years ago.

Chris jokes that over seven studio albums and uncountable miles on the road, they’ve been on “a slow rise to the middle” but that’s far too self-deprecating. Their last opus, 2018’s One Drop of Truth, was nominated for a Grammy, and not long after it was released the band headlined the Ryman Auditorium and Red Rocks Amphitheatre (their hometown shrine, as they grew up in Boulder, Colorado). In September, they released their fourth live album, culling songs from a two-night stand at the Fillmore in San Francisco, where their highly developed musical telepathy — between the brothers and with drummer/keyboard player Jano Rix — was on vibrant display in a warm sonic atmosphere.

Newly minted is Kingdom In My Mind, an 11-song collection inspired largely by the feel of a new studio. The band and their sound engineer Brook Sutton had to move out of the old church-like studio where they’d made One Drop of Truth, but they found a new place nearby on Nashville’s west side. The brothers spoke to BGS about how that new destination shaped the sound of their latest project.

BGS: I understand that shaking down your new recording space produced proved unexpectedly productive?

Oliver: In our downtime we’ve always had some sort of rehearsal space, whether it was Chris’s basement or something, where we would just improvise and come up with musical ideas. I think all of us enjoy the art of improvising and playing music without thought and without purpose. We’re not trying to write a song. We’re not trying to sound good even. We’re just trying to play something new. Chris and I will react off each other, or off Jano, and do that musical communication that can happen if you just listen. We’ve always done that. And we’ve always recorded it on a phone or on a laptop just to remember. Whereas this time we set up and did the same process but we had a professional studio and an engineer miking everything up so it was usable.

Chris: Yeah, we didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t know this was going to be the beginning of a record. We’d got a studio and put a lot of work into getting it up and running and sounding how we wanted it with baffles and things like that. But then it was, well, this is a huge room. Where do you set up? Where do you put the drums? Let’s put them over here. Let’s see what that sounds like. And we set up near each other and threw some mics up intuitively. I think we were struck immediately as soon as we heard playback. Even with that haphazard setup, it sounded great. Something about the room made us play a certain way. It felt magical and inspired. So immediately we looked at each other and said, “Maybe this is how we make this record.” So we did maybe five sessions where we set up and improvised in different parts of the studio. There’s a big A room, which you could almost fit an orchestra, and then a smaller, dryer room. So we had fun with all kinds of different variations.

Can you give us a visual and the background of the place and why it became home?

Chris: It’s an old print shop. So what we call the B room is smaller. It’s probably where people came in and got stuff photocopied.

Oliver: And then the back room — after it was a print shop and before we got it — was a dance studio with a dance floor and high ceilings. It was probably a warehouse at some point. This is not a fancy building. It’s cinder block.

So you had to look at this print shop/warehouse/dance studio and imagine a plan?

Chris: It was easy, and it had to do with the layout. It was very clear immediately. The control room goes here. From that room you have access to both tracking rooms. There’s even a lounge. There’s a room with a loading dock that can also be an isolation room. And it’s all in a circular layout. Everything about it was easy to imagine how we could be up and running quickly once we got our stuff in there.

Oliver: It was luck. And it was cheaper than we expected. But I’ll add to that process that Chris was talking about. The improvising we like so much, almost never can you use that stuff on an album. Normally you perform songs to make albums. So Chris got really good at editing these improvs. These are just jams, maybe in the key of A for 20 minutes. Maybe we switch chords every once in a while. Maybe we don’t. But Chris started chopping them up (in audio software). And we realized that we could arrange these improvisations.

And the beautiful thing — which usually gets lost — is your first impression of things. Like when you’re inspired. You play something, and you’ll never do it again. But we actually captured those moments and were able to use them on the album. And so the things that all of us love about albums are these anomalies, little mistakes or weird things that bleed together — things that if you were thinking about a song you’d never have played. To us, that had a freshness that Chris was able to chop up, and we were able to write lyrics over these new collage-y things.

Chris: Like Sly Stone said, there’s a rhythm when you don’t know what you’re doing. And we really take that to heart. I think that’s why a lot of musicians who have been doing this a long time really cherish first takes. Because before all the musicians really know the song, they’ll play things that they’d never play once they really know the song. For a lot of us, I mean for me certainly, it’s always a red flag when we do a take and I feel like I really nailed (it). It’s almost a guarantee that that’s not the take. Not the good one. The good one was the one before, when I was searching and didn’t quite know what was happening next.

Oliver: Discomfort is good.

Chris: A little bit, yeah. You don’t want to know too much.

Right out of the box on “Alabaster” there’s this over-driven sound like a Rhodes piano and I wonder if maybe that was just an accident that worked?

Oliver: Absolutely. That was recorded the first day we set up. Jano was playing drums and keyboard at the same time. He had this keyboard rig with a crappy little amplifier and it just sounded like that. And again, we weren’t thinking about a song at all. We were all in one room in a circle, and it just happened to be cool.

Chris: We were thinking sounds more than anything. Oliver had this great Stella guitar that he recently got set up. I’m sure Jano played that sound on purpose because he liked it. It was very intuitive and in the moment. So he didn’t have to worry if it was fitting a song or not. He just liked the sound. That’s kind of what we were going for.

You both come from improvised music backgrounds, one jazz and one blues-based. When I heard these tracks, I felt like the Medeski, Martin & Wood approach and the Wood Brothers approach have never been closer. Also, Jano plays with even more freedom. This feels like a jazz record in many ways.

Chris: I absolutely agree. This is the most meshed those worlds have ever been. It was definitely a long-term goal to get to this point. Little by little, not only integrating the MMW background with the songwriting, but also, just as you said, Jano is such a talent and can do so many things. Great drummer. Amazing keyboard player, percussionist. Great singer and producer. So to integrate all of his talents into what we were doing as a duo took some time, you know?

I think that’s why it works. When you improvise, all your knowledge, all the music that’s inside you, can come out. It’s not restricted by a song that’s been written already. Jano’s drumming and all of our playing is featured more because we were improvising to create the source material for the songs and were able to keep that. In the past I loved all the songs, but there’s a lot more that we can do. Improvising is a way to showcase that.

Oliver: It does inform how you play live too. We learned that you don’t always have to be right on the money. It’s fun to pretend like you’re in a punk band for a minute or something and kind of let loose and try something different.

Here it is about 15 years into this journey. Maybe it’s been an even bigger force in your lives than you thought. What have you learned, as musicians and family?

Oliver: I bet we take it for granted doing it all the time and being busy with it, but certainly in the last 15 years I feel like Chris and I were slightly estranged in that we were living in different places and playing with different people. We had sort of lost touch. So initially, yeah, the music brought us back together and we were able to combine our shared interests and experiences. That was awesome, and it was how we reconnected as brothers. And it’s nice to have a family business, especially a creative one, where we get to do that together and make a living too.

Chris: Yeah, people usually frame the beginning of this band as if it must have been a casual side project. But I never thought about it that way. It was exciting from the beginning. And for both of us, in different ways, coming full circle. We grew up with our dad playing music live around the house, you know, folk songs. Playing and singing. And that was, we realized, a huge influence.

I always liked singing when I was younger and ended up in Medeski, Martin & Wood, an instrumental band, for 20 years. I hadn’t been singing, so it was scary, but it was something I was really excited about getting into again. And just the way we write songs and composing with my brother is really fun and different. Whereas MMW was, as you said, a lot of improvisation, I also like writing. It was nice to get into that too.

Pulling back, MMW was a band that took real jazz to the jam band audience. And I feel like there are bands that hover between the world of the jam audience, which loves freedom and surprise, and the songwriter audience, which focuses more on the lyrical emotion. And maybe those bands never quite get totally accepted by either camp. How have you all mapped that?

Oliver: That’s well put, and I think we ride that fence, and enjoy it for the most part. It’s a nice balance. Personally I like to hear somewhere in the middle. I like to hear a good song, but I also like to hear some musical interplay. I think a balance of those things is really cool.

Chris: Yeah, one of the things that can be amazing about music is when there’s some mystery. You don’t quite understand what’s happening up there but it still is engaging. And how do you do that? There’s no formula. Nobody knows. Which is why we never get tired of this job. You know, you can’t figure it out. You stumble upon it sometimes, but it’s not always obvious how you get to that magical balance between the two.

Oliver: It’s always a fun challenge for us to take a good simple song but set it apart and give it its own sound. So use a weirder guitar. Use a broken thing. But make it something you haven’t done before and you haven’t heard somebody else do before. That’s kind of what we’re always doing.

We talk about this all the time. Sometimes we’ll write a song and use just cowboy chords and write it like a country song. Then [we’ll] mess up the music completely and make it our own thing somehow. So it’s a combination of all this classic stuff we love. And then, how can we make a new classic?

Craig Havighurst is host of The String from WMOT Roots Radio in Nashville and a longtime journalist covering roots music.

Photos: Alysse Gafkjen

The Wood Brothers Build Slowly to Share ‘One Drop of Truth’

Posted on by Editor

The Wood Brothers write songs for front parlors, back porches, Saturday night rave-ups, and Sunday morning comedowns. Theirs is a sound anchored by the rudiments of American roots music — acoustic instruments, Southern strut, Bible Belt bounce — with deeper grooves and a willingness to break from tradition. One Drop of Truth, the trio’s latest record, finds the guys exploring that sound even further. Some might say that band members Chris Wood, Oliver Wood, and Jano Rix have become the cool uncles of the Americana family — younger and less rigid than the old-timers, while also wiser and more worldly than the newcomers.

BGS: You’re family men now. Did you record One Drop on Truth in Nashville because it would allow you to stay close to home?

Oliver Wood: We cut our previous two records in town, too. We had previously done records in other destination cities, and I’ll admit there’s something to be said for holing up somewhere exotic and getting a lot of work done, versus coming home every night. But the beautiful thing about this album was how we spread it out over the course of nine months. It was such a different experience.

Tell me about that process. Isn’t that a particularly long timeline for you?

What’s been typical for us is to let some songs gestate, work on them for a year, then book a studio for two weeks and just go in there and knock it out with a producer. That’s the normal way to do it, I guess. The process we chose this time was to work on a couple songs at a time and record them in between tours. We almost treated them like demos: Rather than booking a fancy studio and doing the whole album in one shot, we went to more modest studios — places we really felt comfortable in, places where we could experiment. Since we only did one or two songs at a time, each song got more attention. It took the stressful part out of the process and added the freedom of being creative. If something didn’t work out, we’d re-record it the next time. We could sit with stuff for awhile. We produced things ourselves, which is something we did on the Paradise album, too, and we wanted to take that to the next level.

Did you approach the songwriting differently, as well?

It was very collaborative. When we’re working on new music, all three of us make a point to … well, I hate to use the word “jam,” but that’s what we do. We improvise. We’ll get together in a space and just play random grooves and riffs, without talking. We record it and improvise off one another in a very free sort of way. A lot of our basic musical ideas come from that process. And we’ll take those things and file them under them “things to work on later.” In the meantime, Chris and I have books full of lyrics, and we take them home and work on them.

Some bands will radically rethink their live show with each new album. They’ll change their clothing, their stage setup, their light show. Do the Wood Brothers concern themselves with that, as well, or do you focus on the music?

We do think about the presentation. We’ll try using different lights for a new tour, or we’ll bring a big black curtain around the country with us. It doesn’t necessarily match up with an album cycle, though. What we enjoy, constantly, is integrating new songs into a show, whether it’s a new cover tune or an old Wood Brothers song that we’ve completely reworked. That last bit is something we’ve really enjoyed lately. We’ll take an old song that was originally a mellow acoustic song and we’ll turn it into a rocker, or vice versa. We love transforming those things. We try to keep that process going, regardless of which album we’re promoting.

That’s a big part of the roots music tradition, right? Re-examining old songs and presenting them to new audiences?

Absolutely. We’re huge music fans and music nerds. There are so many songs I’ve always wanted to do, and it can be a personal indulgence sometimes, playing some of these songs and making them your own. Ultimately, the whole thing is a privilege, just to share music with your bandmates and your audience. To play a cover song everybody knows and loves, that’s really gratifying. We’re all loving the song together. It can be one of ours or someone else’s. It’s all about us connecting with people, and them connecting with us.

You’ve been connecting in some large rooms lately. You’re playing venues like the Ryman on this tour.

The way I think of it is, we’ve had a very gradual rise to the middle, which I appreciate. It’s held my interest over the years. I can’t imagine a meteoric rise to the top. I prefer the non-meteoric rise to the middle, because it’s so gradual that you might not even notice. We’ve been playing these markets for years, and the climb toward bigger rooms has happened really slowly. Playing the Ryman this spring is a huge jump for us, and a real special occasion for any band that’s never played there before. That might be the biggest headlining show for us.

I imagine that you’ve run into some challenges in those bigger venues, too. They’re not always designed with acoustic bands in mind.

We’re learning what works and what doesn’t. We’ve did some crazy opening slots for larger acts — everyone from k.d. lang to Brandi Carlile to the Tedeschi Trucks tour this past summer. Several years back, we opened for Zac Brown at venues like Bridgestone Arena, and it didn’t always work, to be honest. It doesn’t make sense to have us play at Bridgestone.

But we did learn a lot from doing those shows. We learned that if you’re doing something subtle — the stuff we enjoy doing for a captive audience inside a theater — it isn’t always going to work for a basketball arena. At the Ryman, on the other hand, some of that stuff will definitely work. We started playing at listening rooms, and we still like that subtle stuff. Like I said, we’re still learning. It’s an epic quest.

As a three-piece band, the recording studio allows you to make a much more lush, layered sound than the one you can create in concert. Where do you draw that line between the honest — but limited — sound of a live trio and the infinite sounds you can make with overdubs? And does that line change with each album?

It changes with each song and with each album. What some people were drawn to at the beginning of the Wood Brothers’ career was how spare we sounded. We were pretty much a duo on our first album, and we mostly played live in the studio. That album was meant to represent what the two of us sounded like. As we began playing bigger venues, we grew sonically and added a member. Having Jano in the mix allows us to experiment on a song-by-song basis, where we can add keys, horns, or strings.

The venue can dictate a lot of things, too. Subconsciously, the venues you’re playing do affect the way you write. Sometimes, when we’re working on a new song, I can’t help but picture us playing it at a festival. I’ll wonder how it’ll work in that context. There are certain songs where you think, “This will rock in a bigger room,” and there are other songs where you think, “This is a nice song for a theater, where everyone is facing the stage and remaining silent.” You can’t help but think about that. Your environment colors the way you write.

To get back to your question, though, our general aesthetic is to not add too much, in general, but we’ve learned that the studios can be very different than the live shows. Oftentimes, when we prepare a song for its live debut, it changes from its studio version. It doesn’t need to be the exact same.

The band has worked with different labels over the past decade. You were with Blue Note for years. You worked with Zac Brown’s label, Southern Ground, as well. What’s your current situation?

We have our own label, but we also work with Thirty Tigers for marketing and distribution. We really like the independence part of it. It’s nice to own your own music. We have the luxury of creating our own budget for an album. It’s not that expensive these days, especially if you’re not paying a producer. For us, the best part of it is, we just make an album. No one is watching us or checking in. We can get the purest, uninfluenced stuff. Whether people like it or not, who knows? But we like it. And we’re not beholden to anyone, on the creative side or financially.

Photo credit: Alysse Gafkjen