Americana band The Wood Brothers plays Arrowwood Farms in Accord tomorrow night. The group was founded by actual brothers Oliver and Chris Wood. They started playing together nearly two decades ago, after years of touring separately with other bands. I spoke to them ahead of the performance.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
SAM DINGMAN: As I understand it, there was this moment where Oliver, a band that you had played in for many years, called King Johnson, and Chris, your jazz trio, Medeski, Martin and Wood, played a show together. And it was a moment of reunion for you both, not just as musicians, but sort of as brothers. Is that fair to say?
OLIVER WOOD: Yeah. Well, so our band opened for, you know, I was able to pull strings through Chris's management and get our band to open for Medeski, Martin and Wood, and that happened to be the first convenient and realistic time for Chris and I to ever play together. After years of just not playing together. We played together as teenagers, you know. So they asked me to sit in and play with them. I don't think Chris or I expected it to be so much joy in that...it just connected us.
CHRIS WOOD: I remember the feeling, and I remember how natural it felt, just a familiar brother. Like it was the genetic part of the playing.
OLIVER WOOD: It's like a little bit like being psychic, like you just, I suddenly speak the exact same language as somebody else. What happened after that is like Chris and I would, you know, we didn't immediately put the Wood Brothers together, we just started, like when we'd see each other, we would make it a point to play and just improvise. I think in some ways Chris and I were excited too, because we both had been playing in in bands that had a really big, full sound, and it was kind of cool to strip it down to just a duo, and and try to sort of imply a bigger sound than two people could make.
SAM DINGMAN: This is making me think about the song "Atlas," which Oliver, I know you had played previously with King Johnson. The differences between the King Johnson version and the Wood Brothers version are very pronounced, one of them being Chris, if I may, you're doing all these really interesting slides on the bass. And it has this very like jumpy, energetic feel, which sounds much bigger than just two people!
OLIVER WOOD: Yeah!
CHRIS WOOD: I mean, as a bass player, when you're playing in a band with drums, you often don't finish a phrase, because you know the drummer might have a fill there into the next section. But with the absence of a drummer, then there's this space that you can choose to fill.
SAM DINGMAN: There's another thing I heard you say once, Chris. You said that you have this saying that you repeat to yourself sometimes - and I apologize if I get it wrong, but I think it was, "Can I enjoy myself right now?"
CHRIS WOOD: Yeah! That is something that I found to be a powerful, simple question. Enjoying something is very different than being aware of it. You can be aware of a tree, and if you're simply aware of it, you're just going to see leaves and bark, and your brain is going to just say, yep, that's leaves and bark and branches, and you label it, and you kind of just put it aside.
But if you're enjoying it, you're probably noticing all the negative space in between the branches and the leaves, and you're really enjoying its uniqueness. It's the best way I found to pay attention, you know, because you can't enjoy something without paying attention to it.
SAM DINGMAN: It sort of strikes me that you guys wrote a whole song about it on the new record, to some extent.
CHRIS WOOD: We've written many songs about it! It's not that hard to do it. It's not that hard to consciously enjoy something outside of yourself in your environment, right? The hardest thing is to remember to do it.
SAM DINGMAN: Staying with this idea, though, of awareness, I'm struck by the.. I don't know if "contrast" is the right word, but it seems like you're getting at the idea somewhat differently in the song "Witness." Because I experienced that song as being more about not taking on any of the identities of the things and people around you, but just being aware that they're all there.
OLIVER WOOD: We all have all these parts of ourselves that are imperfect, and some of them are, you know, feel sinful or like they're they're looked down upon, but we all have these parts that we have shame about, and so you know that's kind of one of the another sort of mindful concept is that, yeah, I am not my feelings. I am not my crazy anxiety or my thoughts, you know, I'm just a witness, I'm just watching it happen.
CHRIS WOOD: You can describe it like you disappear or you become everything, it's sort of the exact same thing, it's just language kind of fails you at that point. But that's when you start to trust your environment and let it inform you. You realize it, it's doing it, it's telling you what to play. That's another mantra of mine on stage. Sometimes, if I am feeling a little bit tense or uptight or self-conscious, I'm just like, "I can't do it." I literally can't do it. The me that thinks I'm me can't play the way I'd like to play.
SAM DINGMAN: It's in you, you just kind of have to get out of the way of it somehow.
OLIVER WOOD: Exactly, you got to get out of the way,
CHRIS WOOD: But! how do you do that, right? That's the trick question: can you enjoy yourself right now?
