It is safe to say that everyone in the world has an idea of what paradise is supposed to be: an idyllic place you go where all your frustrations are laid to rest and all of your desires are met. But where exactly is this paradise and what does it look like? What are my desires and how will they get met? Is paradise really what I am looking for, does it even exist?
All these questions were percolating in the minds of guitarist Oliver Wood, bassist Chris Wood and multi-instrumentalist Jano Rix as they sat down in Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Studio in Nashville to record the sixth Wood Brothers album Paradise. It is a riveting album of insistent rhythm and pointed lyrics that is the most well-rounded and infectious recording the band has made to date. But as Chris Wood explains it, the band didn’t have any preconceptions on what this album was going to be about. They simply sat down together with the muse, and slowly these thoughts of paradise, longing and desire continued to pop-up, just as they do with anyone else who has thought about what they want out of life. It led them down a path that they couldn’t stop exploring.
“You know it wasn’t premeditated,” mentioned Wood. “We just started to realize that this theme was in a lot of the songs and I think once we recognized that we embraced it. As the rest of the songs were being formed, we reached that theme and realized this is what it’s about, we get it now. And why is a good question. I don’t know, but I think it’s just something we think about a lot. Anybody who lives long enough time [chuckles] is going to start thinking about this stuff. Why do I want these things and what really does make me happy? Why do I desire things so much and is that a bad thing or is it just a part of life? You find all these questions and sometimes answers to these questions.”
One question that it continually brought up for Wood was why desire was usually regarded as something sinful and to be avoided. The way he saw it, desire was just a fact of life and could have both positive and negative consequences. How else could desire and the need for fulfillment lead people to both reach for the heavens and to plunge into the depths of hell?
“I think something I wanted to address was that desire gets a bad rap,” said Wood. “It’s usually linked to negative things: unhappiness, desiring something you don’t have, you always feel unfulfilled. Or it is connected to things that you desire that maybe you shouldn’t, desire things that are sinful in some way. But I kind of wanted to say, well, hey, maybe what these people were saying when you talk about Buddhism and desire and life or something, all they mean is that it is desire is part of of our life. It has good things about it, it makes us do things and they’re not all bad. You can’t get rid of it, [chuckles] so you better embrace it for what it is. That’s what that song “Without Desire” is about. The lyric is, “If I didn’t want anything, why would I rise, why would I sing?” That’s what gets us out of bed in the morning.”
But Wood admitted that all his musings on these existential ideas didn’t help him better understand them in the tangible world of tour schedules and nights out with the family. “I don’t know if I found clarification, but it’s interesting to put these sometimes vague feelings that you have about life and put them into words or put them into music, you know? That’s just what doing this is all about. It’s expression, self-expression.”
Since the band’s inception, that process of putting those vague feelings into words and music has usually been a solo experience for Chris and Oliver. Both brothers have always lived in different cities across the country and have patched together songs with different snippets of ideas they shared with each other. It has served them well over five albums, but it has merely been a fact of circumstance… until now.
“It wasn’t necessarily a conscious decision to change the songwriting process,” remarked Wood. “It’s just that for years we’ve lived in different cities and we’ve had to write long distance and send stuff back and forth. I mean just naturally what happens when you can’t sit in the room together is you work on things by yourself and then you bring these ideas to each other. Living now in Nashville, we had the chance to regularly get together for songwriting sessions. You might come in with fragments of ideas or something musical or some lyrics, but then then you came sit together and flesh it out, which is something we’ve never had the chance to do in the past. It just happened naturally.”
Wood believes the change had a significant impact on the band’s chemistry and that the songs feel more representative of the band as a whole.
“I think all of our personalities are in there, much more integrated than in the past,” beamed Wood. “Having not just Oliver and I living in the same city, but living in the same town as our drummer Jano, who is also an incredible keyboard player and singer and has so many great musical ideas. Some of the songs started from the three of us jamming and coming up with something interesting. You could feel something that inspires a song or inspires lyrics. I just feel like we’re more of a band than ever before and all of our personalities get expressed a lot more on the record.”
Sharp in its delivery and loose in its vibe, the album is everything the band has been heralded for in its career as one of the coolest bands in roots music. This is in no doubt due to the amazing musical viewpoints and experience each member brings to the table. Chris is the Wood in psychedelic jazz masters Medeski, Martin & Wood, Oliver fronted the multi-faceted blues band King Johnson and Rix has lended his talents to artists ranging from the Zac Brown Band to Stephen Marley. They have crafted a sound that is a stirring amalgamation of roots music, which makes sense when you take into account what Wood’s vision for the band was from the beginning.
“When we first started The Wood Brothers, I sort of had this thing in the same way fantasy baseball players treat their dream team” recalled Wood. “I thought, ‘Well what if Charles Mingus and Robert Johnson started a band, what would that be like?’ Oliver is definitely coming from a strong blues background and we have a lot of the same influences. But Charles Mingus is a hero of mine, but also very blues-based bass player, even though he was a very sophisticated jazz composer as well. So that was kind of an interesting seed to think about what we wanted to do with this band. As it has developed, all of our influences from roots music to roots rock and roll have all come into play.”
What is so striking about The Wood Brothers is how unquestionably talented they are with both lyrics and music. Most artists lean towards a certain stronger skill set but The Wood Brothers’ insightful songwriting and adventurous playing are of equal quality, a feat Wood said the band has strived to accomplish. Even with the bands fine blend of musicianship, Wood takes a certain joy in the way the three of them can mold their songs into any arrangement they wish on stage.
“I think a really good song can be played in any kind of context and still get across, so that is important,” noted Wood. “What’s been fun for us is some of the songs that are lot more rocking, we’ve been able to play in a very stripped-down way and they still work. Songs like ‘Singing to Strangers’ and ‘American Heartache,’ we play with Jano on the ‘shit-tar’ and Oliver playing the acoustic guitar and it still works which is important to us. It can’t be just about the music. But I also find that this attitude in Nashville where people get so focused on the songwriting process, I feel that they forget sometimes how important the music is too. That’s the beauty of songs: it’s lyrics combined with the melody and the harmony and the rhythm. There’s so many choices that you make to get a song across.”
Wood shared that the band is excited to get up on stage this winter and spring and finally share the new songs with crowds of adoring fans on both coasts of the country. The stage is where the The Wood Brothers shine and their arresting shows have whole crowds feverishly singing along or intently listening and hanging on every line. The spiritual aspect of live shows is not lost on Wood and he relishes the connections he makes with audiences as they are united through music. “That word connection has sort of become our personal buzzword for what a lot of people talk about when they talk about spirituality. It’s like that is our word that sums it up for us. When you play a concert you get that feeling that makes you feel good,” said Wood.
Listening to Paradise, you can see this desire to connect to something drives most of the narratives on the album and you can see how the stage might be that lightening rod of sorts for the band to connect to the greater world. While Wood said he didn’t get any clarification on what paradise means to him, you can sense that there is a solid idea of what paradise looks and feels like to the band members, even if they can’t understand it. On the album opener “Singin’ to Strangers” Oliver croons, “he’d do most anything, to get that feeling in his heart/ so he sings to himself/ but he never feels right until he’s/ singin’ to strangers every night.” It seems The Wood Brothers have found their paradise.
“It’s that feeling of connection. It’s basically other human beings recognizing the human-ness and other humans around them [chuckles]. All of a sudden you walk away feeling ok about yourself. Everything is ok and we’re all going through this shit together and we all struggle and we all rejoice and it’s recognizing what there is in common. You get that feeling playing live music and it is hard to get it any other way, at least that version of it. But making music with your friends in a room, you can get that feeling too. You get that feeling a lot of different ways in your life. If we were able to survive just making records I think we’d love it because we’d see our families a lot more [laughs], but I definitely would miss playing live, absolutely. I love performing.”