Chris Wood on the Wood Brothers Origins, Heart is the Hero, and More

Last updated on August 5th, 2024 at 09:47 am

To be truly creative, even briefly, is challenging no matter the artist or medium. While processes and philosophies vary widely, finding inspiration and executing on a unique vision can be difficult even for brilliant artists with battle-tested approaches.

So it’s special to find those rare artists that exude creativity at every turn, especially across a long career. Few 21^st century groups exemplify this like the Wood Brothers. For nearly two decades, the trio has honed their unique brand of Americana while subtly subverting and expanding it. From their now-classic early records Ways Not to Lose (2006) and Loaded (2008) through 2023’s excellent Heart is the Hero, the band has consistently threaded the needle of continuous evolution while never sounding like anybody but themselves.

In some ways this can be explained by the exceptionally gifted band members, but there’s also clear musical and creative chemistry that propels them forward and sets them apart.

Heart is the Hero feels like a culmination of all of this, weaving together many familiar elements: stellar Americana songcraft, inventive and sometimes propulsive rhythms, and Oliver Wood’s timeless bluesy voice. Yet the playing and writing both feel particularly sharp and fresh, exuding authenticity like only they do.

In our conversation with bassist Chris Wood, he brought up how recording Heart is the Hero in analog impacted the album. Wood, who has also lived another musical life as part of the inventive jazz trio Medeski, Martin, and Wood, is no stranger to shifting creative processes. Each step in his musical journey has been forward-thinking. Sometimes this has meant incorporating influences from left-field (MMW counts Sun Ra and field recordings among their inspirations), and sometimes this has meant approaching something just a little bit differently than expected. This all results in music that is both soulful and experimental, a thrill to explore and experience, but also a balm for the soul.

The Wood Brothers return to the Twin Cities on Monday July 15^th with a show at the Recreation Outdoor Center in Saint Louis Park. It’s one of the first large concerts at the venue, which should be a great fit for the band. They always bring it, and this night should be no different.

The following interview with Chris Wood of the Wood brothers has been edited for length and consistency.

Music In Minnesota: I’m interested in the formation of the Wood Brothers. I know you and Oliver had somewhat diverging paths prior to the beginning, at least being in different musical worlds. What inspired you guys, musically or otherwise, to pursue what you did?

Chris Wood: I think the first spark was Oliver’s band King Johnson, who was touring a lot around the southeast at the time, ended up on a double bill with Medeski, Martin and Wood in Winston-Salem. Oliver sat in with us, and that’s when the lightbulb sort of went off. Oliver fit in so naturally, I felt such a connection with him, it was a little bit uncanny.

We recognized the musical instincts that we shared when he was on stage with us, and I think the other guys felt it too. I think from that point forward we felt like we should do something together, even if we didn’t know what it would be. Even though what we were doing was different, it actually shared quite a bit of the same influences. We were just living in different scenes, living in different cities. We were executing these influences in very different ways, but the source was the same. Especially the source of our dad, who was kind of the first live music we saw. He was a folky guitarist and singer who almost did it for a living. He was at Harvard in the late 50’s and sang with Joan Baez, and had a band with John Hartford.

That tradition was in the house. We would hear him play and sing growing up, which was an early influence that I don’t think we appreciated until The Wood Brothers really got together and looked back. So musically, we actually had a lot in common, even if at the time when we were younger adults it seemed like we were in different worlds.

The other thing that happened was MMW started touring less and that left this opportunity. So, Oliver and I got together, and we started re-arranging some of his old material, and writing some new stuff, and then Blue Note signed us and it just kind of went from there. But it was definitely starting over in some ways. For me, touring with MMW as an established band with a crew and a bus (laughs) and the next thing you know, you’re touring around in between those tours with my brother in a minivan playing tiny places. So it was kind of this slow build, or as we call it, our slow rise to the middle (laughs), starting back in 2006.

MIM: You have lived these multiple musical lives. Most musicians don’t have one enduring project, let alone multiple. What do you feel like you took, musically or otherwise, from Medeski, Martin and Wood, that informed or helped you build The Wood Brothers?

CW: It definitely gave me a different perspective, or at least some different tools to bring in to a band that writes and sings songs that have a roots element to them. The way I pictured it early on, MMW was obviously heavily influenced by jazz and Charles Mingus. My brother in the same way had become sort of a blues expert. He’d taken a deep dive into all of it…Chicago, Delta, all of it. My fantasy was what if Charles Mingus and Robert Johnson started a group, what would that sound like? So it was that kind of attitude, we want to write songs that hit the heart and be classic. But what kind of interesting musical variations can we bring into it, how can we arrange it different, approach it different?

I think that was the perspective I was trying to bring from Medeski, Martin, and Wood. Either way though it’s just music, you try and give the music what it needs. But I felt like there were some different tools in the toolkit that I could bring in for that kind of context, which was really fun to do and still is.

MIM: I’m curious about Heart is the Hero, how you guys made that record, and how you guys stay fresh creatively after 20 years.

CW: Everybody in this band has enough influences and has gone on deep dives of all kinds of music. There’s so much raw material to work with. Our mother was a published poet, so looking back, playing with words and their meanings, that combined with all of the musical influences. It just feels pleasantly, at least for us, like we could do this forever. We love creating things and making things. So there’s no shortage of ideas to write new songs, and different fun ways to arrange songs, and different kinds of instrumentation, whether it’s very fleshed out or very simple and raw and stripped down. But playing with all of those different textures, the words and the ironies that you can use with music and meanings, it’s kind of endless.

I think for this latest record, I kind of call it our “pandemic record” because during the real beginning of the pandemic, when I kept hearing about a lot of bands creating their COVID-pods and getting together having really creative times and making a lot of music, for a bunch of reasons we didn’t get to do that. So I think a lot of the material on the latest record gestated in that period and then by the time we were actually ready to record we were able to have the material ready, but then have fun recording it directly to 2-inch tape. We never turned on a computer screen. It sounds like an exercise in nostalgia but it was actually really profound because it made us all realize how distracting the screens and technology are from our intuitive abilities.

I think because computers can do anything, it’s really easy to get caught up in this tiny minutiae and fixing things and becoming a bit OCD when it comes to perfecting the music. It can end up sucking the personality out of it. So we would do performances to 2-inch tape, and then you listen back and you’re either feeling it or you’re not feeling it. And because you can’t fix anything, it’s more about the overall feeling. There might be a little imperfection here or there but does this get the point across? That became the thing that guided us.

My least favorite part of making a record is when you start getting into the details that no listener is ever gonna care about. It took that out of the process. Decisions were made quickly and from the gut, and that was refreshing.