When it came time to write songs for a new album, AJ & the Woods singer Alison Tomin and guitarist Joshua Alan Collins had plenty of real-life experiences that they could reference. Both have experienced significant emotional turmoil during the past few years.
“I went through a very miserable divorce,” says Collins over beers at Suds Maguire’s Bar & Grill, a watering hole near his Berea home. Tomin, who lives in Twinsburg, has joined him for the interview. “I now have full custody of my 9-year-old daughter, and I lost my grandmother who raised me. That all transpired while we put this record together. That’s why it’s named ‘for her’ because it’s about the important women in your life.”
Tomin says the songs could also be for a woman’s younger self or for a female family member.
“We wanted to reflect on [women and family] with the songs and the album art,” she says, adding that the album art features a photo of Collins’s daughter taken with a 1907 camera. The gatefold includes a collage of photos of family members.
For her part, Tomin channeled her feelings of frustration coming out of COVID into the songs.
“After COVID, I was trying to build the band back up and get national attention,” she says. “I asked myself, ‘Should I keep doing this? Or should I just move to the woods and not deal with people?’ The song ‘Send Me on My Way’ is about that. I wrote the lyrics, and Josh wrote the melody for the mandolin. The songs aren’t on the album in the order we wrote them, but if you think about it, there is anger, sadness and then hopefulness. The overall theme of the record is resilience. Not everything is sad. There are happy songs and angry songs and songs that will make you dance.”
The tunes all have a moody, Fleetwood Mac-meets-Appalachian vibe to them. Album opener “Hope” balances electric guitars, mandolin and soaring vocals, and the title track has a haunted feel to it as Tomin sings about being dragged down to hell and back. The twangy “Send Me on My Way” features a veritable choir and evokes the folk hymn “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?”
The group recorded the album locally with producer Mike Brown at Lava Room Recording.
“We really like working with him,” says Tomin. “He’s super-professional and really good at pulling out something from you if you are not sure of what to do. If you really want something, he’ll make it work. He just wants to make the best songs for our records.”
“And he lets you create in the studio,” says Collins, who handled some production for the record as well.
The group has already released a music video for each of the songs.
“We wanted to do the videos more as a publicity campaign,” says Tomin. “When we started doing that, our monthly listeners on Spotify were just in the double digits. Now, we’re at almost 8,000. That fluctuates, but our streaming numbers are up. Many of the music videos were filmed on our phones. I edited them, and Josh has the artistic eye.”
Both Baldwin Wallace College graduates, Tomin and Collins first met through a mutual friend back in 2014. When they wound up at the same open mic night at the Eastland Inn in Berea, they realized it might be fun to jam together. At the time, they were both looking for writing partners, and it just kind of worked.
They did their first show at one of [local singer-songwriter] Brent Kirby’s 10X3 showcases. It was ’80s night, so they played two originals and a cover of the Phil Collins track “In the Air Tonight.” Eventually, they’d formally christen their band AJ & the Woods. After releasing an EP in 2017, the group put out its first full-length, Stay Steady, in 2022.
For Her officially drops on June 5, and a free album release concert takes place the following day at Lake Affect Studios. You can RSVP at ajandthewoods.com. Local acts Lea Marra & the River Boys and Maura Rogers & the Bellows open.
“We’ll play the whole album plus three covers we’ve been working on,” says Tomin. “We always do [Johnny Cash’s] ‘Folsom Prison Blues,’ and we’re working on two others we just started playing. They’re wildcards.”
The group will also perform on June 27 at the City of South Euclid Food Truck Park, on July 24 and 25 at Frosty’s in Put-In-Bay, on Aug. 7 at 8th Day Brewing Company and on Aug. 22 at Gibbs Butcher and Brews in Olmsted Falls.
“We kept our summer schedule light, so we could be available to open for national acts,” says Tomin. “We’re also applying to play at local and regional festivals.”
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