The Core: Oliver Wood
photo credit: Joshua Black
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The Wood Brothers singer/guitarist turns a set of casual studio hangs into his first full-length solo album, Always Smilin’
Mutual Admiration Societies
OLIVER WOOD: Luckily, a couple of years before the pandemic, The Wood Brothers acquired a really cool studio/ workspace in Nashville, very close to where I live. I started to take advantage of what little free time I had— between touring with The Wood Brothers and having a family at home—and started occasionally inviting some people to come by and co-write with me. I was just trying to get creative outside of The Wood Brothers—to collaborate with people that I normally don’t get to collaborate with.
Phil Cook was one of the first people I worked with. We have a mutual friend who connected us, and we had coffee one day while he was in town. We have this mutual admiration, but, more importantly, we have a nice human connection and a true musical connection. So we talked for a little while about trying to get together and, when he came through town, I got to spend the day with him in the studio. We just had this great chemistry, and we wrote a song called “Soul of This Town.” And then, when other people would come through town, I would say, “Come to the studio and we’ll do something.” That ranged from just improvised jams to full-fledged writing sessions.
Eventually, I had this little collection, but I didn’t really have an album in mind. I just wanted to get creative and connect with different people. But once the lockdown happened, I started finishing up all these songs, and I even released a couple of them as singles, just to get them out into the world—“Soul of This Town” was one of the singles I put out before I even knew I was making an album. Then, I got inspired to keep working and writing more songs. And, before I knew it, I had enough for an album. I would never have had time to make this album if it had it not been for the quarantine.
Purely Musical Experiences
OW: There is a co-write system in Nashville. But that’s its own thing, and I don’t really feel like I’m a part of that at all. My collaborations are more old-school—me and my buddies getting together, whether it’s my bandmates or whether it’s some close friends who are musicians. It’s super informal—I have some friends who are great songwriters, who I really admire. We have this mutual respect.
I also had some nice experiences that were purely musical and that came out of a Wood Brothers tradition that we discovered when we moved into our studio: We now have the luxury of being able to capture our jams and improvisations in studio quality. We are able to document these moments of inspiration as they happen, rather than writing a song and then performing it to record it. We’re actually tracking our earliest inspirations and then finding ways to use those original recordings. And that’s another thing that I carried over onto my album.
When certain friends would come to town, I would say, “Man, let’s just mic everything up and maybe we’ll record a song later.” And we’d just spend the next couple of hours jamming. I’d holler out some keys and we’d just react to each other. Then, I collected some cool improv sessions, I wrote some songs on top of them and I used all that material.
“Kindness” was done that way. Nick Falk, Ric Robertson, Aaron Lipp, Ted Pecchio and I all sat in a circle and just played live in a room together, like The Wood Brothers do. We would just move to different keys—and different grooves— and enjoy it later. “Came From Nothing” with Tyler Greenwell and Ted Pecchio, and “Unbearable Heart,” which is a solo guitar jam that I organized into a fixed form, both came about that way, too.
Later on, I also wrote a few more songs [after I realized I had an album]. Sometimes you just need a deadline and a goal for things to start pouring out very fast. Obviously, pretty much anybody who has made a record during the pandemic probably has been influenced by what’s been going on recently. Not only was there the pandemic, but there was also the isolation—the positives and negatives that came from that. And, of course, there was also the social upheaval and liberation that was going on during the pandemic.
So I feel like those things seeped into my songs subconsciously—“Get the Blues,” with Susan Tedeschi, feels inspired by this feeling of, “What the heck is going on here?” It’s an angry prayer—not only about the virus but also about being so disconnected from each other in general. That’s a theme of the record and so is not trying to control things so much.
New Old Ideas
OW: Always Smilin’ also offered me an opportunity to work with Chris Long, who was a mentor to me. We had a band together long before The Wood Brothers called King Johnson. We’ve done reunion shows, but it gets more and more difficult—one of the guys passed away a few years ago and another guy lives in Europe. In fact, none of us live anywhere near each other—Florida, Indiana, Tennessee.
Chris and I put that band together; he was one of the first guys who encouraged me to sing songs and write songs and we wrote a lot of songs together. He and I still get together to this day and try to toss ideas around, and we had fun doing that on the song “Face of Reason.”
“Fine Line,” the first single from the record, is also an old King Johnson song that Chris Long originally sang and wrote the lyrics to. But, I’ve always loved that song and I’ve always wanted to do it at some point. As with some of the early Wood Brothers songs, that one actually predates The Wood Brothers. King Johnson didn’t have a huge following—we were sort of a regional band. And I always wanted to get some of those songs to a bigger audience.
Inspiration, Move Me Brightly
OW: Once I got used to the shock of the pandemic, I enjoyed slowing down. I loved being with my family 100% of the time instead of 50-60% of the time, which is usually the case when I’m on tour. I had to teach myself how to deal with the lack of structure—I got into meditating every day. I would also do some free writing and journaling every day and got interested in the concept that we’re not in control—we don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow. You can’t stop a pandemic or a tornado from happening. That realization can create a lot of fear, but it can also teach you to adapt and be more adaptable—to expect change.
You have to be ready to roll with things, and I enjoyed applying that concept to writing music, too. If you’re inspired, then you’re not in control—it’s like you are in a dream or there is a higher power, or whatever you want to call it, that you need to follow.
During the pandemic, The Wood Brothers took a major hiatus. We had just put out a record before things started shutting down, and we couldn’t tour. We recorded a few remote things after that but, though Chris was still in the Nashville area, he was heavily quarantining during the height of the pandemic.
Since then, he has moved to Vancouver so now we’re back to having a more long[1]distance creative situation. But, of course, we have lots of touring on the horizon. And, during the last year or so, I was still in close proximity with Jano Rix from The Wood Brothers—he and I did a lot of work together in the studio, and he helped me quite a bit with my record.
I did do a couple of solo tours, with Ted Pecchio on bass and Jano Rix playing drums and keys, where I did some stuff from my solo record. I also used those shows to look back on my heritage and do a couple of Wood Brothers tunes, a couple of King Johnson tunes and a couple of covers that The Wood Brothers normally wouldn’t do. Now, we are in the middle of another Wood Brothers tour, and we are having a major reunion. We are still focusing on our last record [the early 2020 release Kingdom in My Mind]. We did our first full-on [crowd] show in West Virginia. You could just feel it—that connection that everybody’s been craving, musicians and listeners alike. You can tell it is something that we won’t take for granted anytime soon. All of us bands are eager to get back to work and we are hoping that it’ll all flow smoothly at this point. We have a full Wood Brothers schedule for the rest of the year—and into the spring of 2022. Plus, having our studio as a resource is amazing because, when we get inspired, we can go in and record, just for the heck of it. We basically already started our next album.
