Parklife recently caught up with Chris Wood of The Wood Brothers for a brief email interview! Mark Engleson shot some questions over to Chris prior to The Wood Brothers’ performance at 9:30 Club on Thursday, Dec. 4, and he was kind enough to send a speedy reply!
In August, The Wood Brothers released Puff of Smoke (Honey Jar/Thirty Tigers), their highly anticipated ninth album of original music. Bassist and vocalist Chris Wood, along with his brother Oliver (guitars) and percussionist and multi-instrumentalist Jano Rix created the 11 songs of Puff of Smoke as a celebration of “joy in the face of challenges,” delivering lyrical wisdom with the winking subtlety of John Prine and the musical hive mind of a seasoned group with two decades of shared experiences.
Mark asked Chris the following questions via email.
Mark Engleson: How are people responding to the new material from Puff of Smoke in the live setting. Which of the new songs is the band most excited about presenting live?
Chris Wood: We’ve been thrilled to see people singing along as we played new songs on the last tour. Seeing live music is so different than listening to a recording. Choices we make in the recording studio don’t always translate to the live performance so we often change the arrangement and the instrumentation to make things translate better live. Sometimes it means extending or opening up an arrangement for unexpected things to happen. Over time, the live versions take on their own personalities versus the record version. This is already happening with a few of the new songs — “Witness,” “Slow Rise,” “Money Song,” “Puff of Smoke,” and “You Choose Me,” for example. The more we change and adapt these songs for our live shows, the more fun we have playing them. Hopefully the audience is feeling that, as well.
Stream Puff of Smoke by The Wood Brothers on Spotify:
ME: What are the positives and negatives of working with family?
CW: The positive is you know each other really well. The negative is you know each other really well.
ME: How do your different backgrounds coming up in the music world complement each other?
CW: I think me and my brother have a healthy Venn diagram of influences. We share a defining influence as kids from our father singing and playing guitar around the house. After that, we had very different musical journeys for the first 15 years of our musical careers. I think we each bring unique influences into the mix, but have enough in common to communicate really well musically. And, we have enough NOT in common to challenge each other and keep things evolving.
****
The Wood Brothers bring their Puff of Smoke Tour to 9:30 Club on Thursday, Dec. 4.
The Wood Brothers
W/ The Wildmans
9:30 Club
Thursday, Dec. 4
Doors @ 7pm
$52.35
All ages
