The Wood Brothers bring their spring tour with Shovels and Ropes to the Goodyear Theater in Akron on Monday, May 15.
In this recent phone interview, frontman Oliver Wood, who said he was “at home in Nashville writing songs and making music and being a family man and trying to not get old,” talks about what to expect from the show.
I think you played here just last fall when your tour came through Kent. Were you playing songs from the new album then?
We try to make people wait for the record to come out to do most of the new songs. I think we played two of the new songs on the last tour. We try to mix it up and rotate in the older material and mix it with the newer material. Our last album isn’t really that old, so some of those songs will still be in rotation. The goal for any tour is variety. We will start featuring the new songs on the upcoming tour because the whole album will be out in the next couple of weeks.
The Wood Brothers came together in 2004, but you and your brother played music in separate groups well before that. Do you ever wish you had started playing with your brother earlier?
I think we are real happy with the way things worked out. My brother and I had a chance to go our separate ways when we left home. We did that for more than 10 years. We had different careers and were able to grow up as people and musicians and establish our own identities separately. I think that was really healthy for us. You hear of other brother bands that have competition and fighting. We minimized that by figuring out who we were first. We didn’t live in the same part of the country or hang out with the same people for ten years. We really grew apart as brothers, and starting the Wood Brothers is what brought us back together.
What do you think you learned from playing with bluesman Tinsley Ellis?
I played with Tinsley, and that was my first touring gig. He was a great mentor to have. I started my own band, King Johnson, and that was another ten years of putting in the hours and learning to write songs and perform them and be on the road. All of that was very informative stuff. As you come up playing music, you pick up mentors on the way. All the bandmates from the past have been mentors to me as well. Tinsley is kind of where it started.
When did the songs start to come together for this album, which comes on the heels of 2019’s Live at the Fillmore, 2020’s Kingdom in My Mind and your solo album Always Smilin’.
On a creative level, we were all coming out of the pandemic. We all experienced a lot in terms of how we live and think and get along with people. I’m sure that plays a big part in some of the themes. There are a lot of songs about empathy and staying connected to people. There are also songs about staying connected to yourself and trusting your heart. As always, art imitates life and vice versa, but we were all taking in a lot of stuff for the past few years.
Talk about recording analog to 16-track tape. What inspired that decision?
We got excited in a more old school way about being present and using analog gear and not making an album that is manipulated by too many choices from technology. We went old school. We have our own space where we recorded.
Did you record it live?
Yes, very live. That’s the idea. It was to capture performances. Our previous album was done much differently. We captured improvisations. We chopped those things up. On this go-around, we wanted to perform them live in the studio and leave some of the warts on there. The most important thing was not having a computer screen involved. That made us feel more present. A lot times in modern recording, you’re just looking at the screen, and it’s incredibly distracting and has nothing to do with how something sounds.
Talk about “Rollin’ On,” a tune featuring horns by Matt Glassmeyer and Roy Agee.
Matt and Roy are guys we’ve used before. They’re Nashville guys we really love. When you perform a basic track in the studio, you ask what it calls for. That didn’t happen live. We added the horns later, but we only had 16 tracks on our tape machine. We had one track left for the horns. That meant that once they played their parts, we couldn’t really fix it.
On ”Mean Man World,” your brother sings about his responsibilities as a father. Talk about that track a bit.
I interpret that song as sort of a song and tribute and encouragement and empowerment and an appreciation for a daughter and a wife. It’s also a comment on just the patriarchy that is built into a lot of our lives and that we maybe take for granted sometimes. The feminine power is something we cannot do without.
“Line Those Pockets” is a universal call for mercy and understanding over materialism. It really resonates.
I think it’s one of those empathy songs. It started out as a simple, slightly tongue-in-cheek folk song. Then, Jano, our drummer had this drum beat and piano part that made it more interesting. It’s like our version of a pop song, which is out-of-the-box for us. It’s one of the weirder songs on the album. I love the way it came out. It came out a little less cheesy and silly.
“Worst Pain of All” features some really soulful vocals and has a bit of a Randy Newman feel to it. Is there something specific that inspired it?
That’s another one of those songs that’s just about trying to relate to each other and making an effort.
Will these new songs be difficult to play live?
Sometimes, it’s easy to do exactly what you did, and sometimes, we have to adapt the song. We won’t have a horn section with us, so we might want to compensate with some different kind of arrangement. Some songs take a little more work. We try to vary it every night, and sometimes we play two nights in the same city, and we will vary it drastically. We try to rotate things in and out. We would never want to do the same set twice in a row. We would get bored with that pretty fast.
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This article appears in Mar 22 – Apr 5, 2023.
