Trying to prove he’s on the write track
Singer/songwriter Woods can’t tour, but he’s kept busy creating songs
By the time you read this, Toronto-based singer and songwriter Donovan Woods will have performed and streamed a solo set at Roy Thomson Hall — without an audience. His take: “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience, I hope to God!” he says, laughing, over the phone.
“It was a real odd feeling. There’s no silence quite like the silence at the end of a livestream song: when you look at Roy Thomson Hall and it has something like 3,000 empty seats? The silence is profound. It’s like you being in a weird dream where you played a concert and nobody showed up.
“If anything, it made me think, ‘Oh, we’ve got to get back to playing concerts.’ ”
Like everyone else affected by the pandemic, the Juno Award winner would like to get back to a lot of things everyone is missing. Having just released the aptly christened “Without People,” his seventh album, Woods was hoping to be showcasing his latest wares on the road in what he considered to be fulfilling an ultimate ambition.
“It’s my lifelong dream to have a tour bus, but I think it’s going to be years until we get back to that place in terms of touring,” he says.
“Even if it is possible to tour at the end of next year, we’re probably going to want another release to come out before that tour happens.”
And that’s been the upside of being stuck at home: the opportunities for creativity.
“I’m always turning down (writing gigs) with other artists because when I’m on the road, or back here with family after being away for a while, it’s hard to find time to do it.
“But because of Zoom, I’ve been able to accept things that I haven’t been able to accept” in the past.
For example, Woods co-wrote a song with Steve Robson, the man who wrote the Rascal Flatts smash “What Hurts the Most,” and has also placed material on One Direction and P!nk albums.
“I’ve been trying to write with him for ages; he’s a really melodic writer,” Woods says. “I’m lucky enough that I have that B-lane where I can retreat and write with other people. I can shift back and forth.”
Woods, who regularly travels to Nashville to write, has actually struck the songwriter’s equivalent of gold — landing a cut on a country star’s album — twice.
Two Abe Stoklasa co-writes, “Portland, Maine” and “Leaving Nashville,” were respectively covered by superstar Tim McGraw on his “Sundown Heaven Town” album in 2014 and by Lady A singer Charles Kelley on his 2016 solo effort, “The Driver.”
In prior years, landing a McGraw cut would have been a considerable financial windfall for Woods. In the streaming era, however, when songs are rented rather than bought, Woods is just happy to get the attention of Music Row artists and executives.
“Monetarily I got nothing,” Woods confirms. “Because mechanical sales (royalties) don’t exist because physical sales don’t really exist anymore.
“However, Nashville is taking me seriously in that I might be able to write things that felt like my own voice that a country person might record. It just gave me some credibility and proof that my brand of folk, whatever it is, is not so far from Track 11 on a country album.”
Here at home, Woods — who says he gets more airplay on U.S. commercial radio than he does in Canada — has channelled his soft-spoken folky brooding into another gem with his latest, the 13-song collection “Without People.”
The album features many of Woods’ collaborative songwriting pals, including prominent Music City tunesmiths Tucker Beathard (“Rock On”) on “Clean Slate”; Ashley Monroe (“The Truth,” “Heart Like Mine”) on “High Season” and some local guy you may have heard of named Ed Robertson on “Man Made Lake” and “God Forbid.”
Woods first became appreciative of the songwriting talents of the Barenaked Ladies’ Robertson after hearing “Light Up My Room” from the band’s1988 album, “Stunt.”
“It’s just an incredibly lucid dreamy kind of song that I loved when it first came out,” Woods recalls.
He started a conversation with Robertson about the expression that provides the song’s title.
“Even though I don’t believe in any higher power, I still can’t get the phrase ‘God forbid’ out of my language and (wonder) why that might be,” Woods says. “We ended up talking for six hours just about that and then the song fell out from that conversation.
“I want to marinate my songs like that all the time and that’s not always the case. A lot of people have this notion that songs are written really quickly and that they come in this brash moment, and I actually haven’t found that. To me, the best things are when you talk for five hours and then it all falls out.”
Woods feels that on “Without People” he dives a little deeper than usual into not normally covered nuances of romance, which he feels he has a knack for.
“As I get older, I think: how much longer can I write about relationships?” he says. “I try to write about different things: I try to write about parenthood and I try to do it under the guise of relationship songs, but when I write about interpersonal feelings, or just the tension between people who are in love, that’s when that language disappears in my brain.
“And when I am writing about domesticity or a fight that happens in a kitchen, the words just roll out.
“So on this album, I thought, ‘If that’s what my brain wants to do, I’d better be as honest as possible.’ In fact, I’ve got to be unassailably good at it, so I try to dig as much as I could into my own reality, at the cost of people being upset with me in my real life.”
Songs like “Last Time I Saw You” and “Seeing Other People” are delivered with Woods’ typically understated vocal delivery, which often resonates just above a whisper.
“I find yelling undignified,”
Woods chuckles. “I’m a big guy and I don’t want to appear to be scary. I think I have something against yelling. There is one song on this album where I sing kind of loud and even now, when I hear it, I think, ‘Well … I don’t know about that.’ ”
“Without People” includes a duet on “High Season” with Nashville singer Katie Pruitt, and in the past he’s teamed up with other women like Canada’s Tenille Townes and Rose Cousins because Woods adores the female voice.
“I just love women singing folk songs,” he says. “I think of Emmylou Harris and Lucinda Williams, and I think it’s great — about halfway through the record — to be reminded that there is real singing in the world and it’s not all whispery, a guy whispering his high school journals, you know?”
In the meantime, as Woods gets deeper into his career, his one bucket-list wish is to write something that Canadians would generally recognize and be proud of.
“To write a song like Blue Rodeo’s ‘Lost Together,’ a song that everybody knows,” Woods says. “It’s hard to get a folky song on the radio.
“I still have a dream of writing a song that becomes part of the cultural fabric and exists as a part of Canada that everybody knows. And I worry that that’s slipping away. But I’d love to be able to solidify myself with a song like that.”
“I think I have something against yelling. There is one song on this album where I sing kind of loud and even now, when I hear it, I think, ‘Well … I don’t know about that.’ ” DONOVAN WOODS