JPG: What’s the song where Jano does the mouth percussion?

OW: That’s “Whom I Adore.” That’s the one that has the tuba and the bari sax but it also has a big marching drum and there’s a fife player. Marcus Henderson, who’s my old bandmate from King Johnson, that was a rare time that we got together and wrote a song together.

Jano, not only does he do that, but if you’re a Wood Brothers fan, you know about Jano’s instrument that he calls a shuitar, which is the crafty guitar that he beats like a percussion instrument. It also has a pickup. So, he plugs it in to an amp through a wah-wah pedal; really stretch some things on that song just to put some fresh sounds into it.

JPG: The idea of experimentation, lyrically, were you trying to write differently, write melodies differently.

OW: Lyrically, I got into a real groove writing. I have this chair in my living room that I like to sit in, sort of a certain weird sideways way, legs over the arm of the chair. Every morning, I take my coffee, I sit by the window in this chair, and I write in a notebook. Sometimes, I just write almost like a journal and, sometimes, I try to write freeform and stream of consciousness, which is not easy for me. I just tell myself, the pen does not leave the paper until you’re at the end of the page and just write whatever comes to your mind. Sometimes, I just sit and work on a song.

The whole idea, for me, is to be able to write without judgment and write with curiosity and be playful and not write something and cross it out and erase it or not try to fix anything. Just move ahead and write. Allow my subconscious to show itself, which is hard to do, for me anyway, and apply that to songwriting. So, there are exercises and then there are actual things that, sometimes, these little exercises turn into songs.

Sometimes, I found it was cool to just look around me or look out the window and see what I saw and just start writing about it without any theme in mind, purely just an image and then let my imagination take over.

So, for instance, the first song on the album is called “Light and Sweet,” and it starts out, “There was a sparrow/Sitting all alone/Outside the window/Talking on the phone/To his lawyer/About a deal/With his ex-wife/Or soon to be.”

It actually did start with a sparrow sitting out the window and I write it down. Then, I start creating a little human-like story out of this sparrow. What do you call it? Personification or something like that. All that was a gateway to starting the song and letting my playful, curious side write the song instead of my judgmental, logical side trying to control what it’s about or coming up with a grand idea at the time of what the song is about. This is something I partly learned from reading about other big songwriters. I can’t remember if it was Paul Simon or somebody like that said he tries to follow the song instead of lead the song, meaning, he doesn’t try to paint himself in a corner by thinking he’s in control of it. In other words, you don’t know what it’s about. You have no reason to judge it. You can trust that it’s going to be about something because you have plenty to say, your subconscious has plenty to say, and have great ideas. You just have to trust it to do it for you. All you have to do is show up and follow it.

And that is really much easier said than done. It’s really hard because you can get really excited about and proud of yourself for writing a cool line, and then, you’re kind of out of the zone. You could judge negatively or you can judge positively and break the spell that you’re in. So, the goal is to flow with it.

JPG: That part about just putting something down on the paper reminds me of when I was taught years ago by one of the Beat writers. The idea was to write anything on a blank page, and if you run into a mental block then just put XXXXs there and move on because you can always go back to that later during an edit and refine it.

OW: Yes. I imagine lots of creative writers or music writers, it doesn’t matter what kind of writing you’re doing, you’re making something that’s not already there. That idea of trusting, first of all, your years of experience not only as a writer, but as a human taking lots of details and data and emotional depth and vocabulary and knowledge and all these things, and then opening the gate to let those things work. I think any kind of writer or artist has probably had that feeling where they just were curious and they started doing something and before they knew it, they had something that was surprising and interesting and cool and it came out, but sometimes, I don’t remember where’d you get that or how did that happen? I have no idea. I was not in control.

You hear that from a lot of artists. It’s like, “It just came out. It’s not necessarily something I consciously controlled.” I had times where I sat in that chair and actually the title of the album Fat Cat Silhouette and even the abstract photo that’s on the front of the album which I took of my fat cat sitting in front of the window, basically it’s silhouette. It’s just an image to get me going — “Cup of coffee/Fat cat silhouette/In my armchair” (lines from “Little Worries”) is actually literally written in there. And again, it was my launching pad to open things up. So, when you read about other songwriters, and sometimes they go on a walk or a drive or… Paul Simon would throw a baseball against the wall and catch it, just over and over.

You have this little thing that requires some motor skills, like taking a walk, you gotta make sure you’re staying in a straight line. That distracts your logical, judgmental, part of your mind, which often gets in the way, sometimes, has to focus on walking and when that’s happening is when your subconscious comes out and makes things happen and solves problems and comes up with ideas.

JPG: Since there was experimentation as far as approaching the music, was there any experimentation in approaching the lyrics?

OW: I’m always going to be a student of the process of songwriting, and I’ve had both young people come to me for advice, “Can you teach me songwriting?” and I’m always honored but I’m also thinking, “I don’t even have a handle on it. I don’t really know how it works other than just the basics.” I’m a student of people who write songs and mostly the icons that we know, and then lots of unknown people. There’s plenty of great songwriters nobody’s heard of. I’m really a student of the process and ways that you can get out of your own way.

So, the whole thing about walking or driving or bouncing a ball against the wall and catching that really fascinates me. The whole thing about trying to consciously stay curious and follow the song, follow the muse, don’t try to control it. Be playful. Be curious. I really was practicing that on this album.

The other thing was not to be judgmental and trust that what you wrote was what you were feeling and was/is honest. What we tend to do both with music and technology and with any kind of creative thing is we try to keep fixing it and making it better. Of course, with Pro Tools and computers you can do that as much as you want. My opinion is that you’re generally taking the soul out of it because what you’re thinking of as making something better, like refining something, oftentimes, is taking away the humanness and the magic that came out of you subconsciously. So, you’re taking your conscious mind and crafting something that was so beautiful and innocent and natural.

You can certainly do that with lyrics, too. You can really overthink it. “That needs to rhyme with that. What am I saying here? What am I trying to say?”

For better or worse, I really tried to stick with a lot of my original ideas with the lyrics. Some of them might not make sense to some. My biggest hope is that they’re ambiguous and they do make sense. They make you feel something. But it’s personal. The song could mean something to someone and something to someone else, and that’s my favorite kind of song. I love multiple interpretations. I love books versus movies because a book, you can put your own visuals to it, right?

A movie, they’re telling you not only all the information but they’re saying, “It looks like this.” But wouldn’t it be cool if you could make it look like you wanted? Sometimes, an adaptation of a book when it’s a movie can be disappointing because “That’s not how I pictured that guy.” I like the ambiguity where someone can make their own story out of a song. I will say there’s probably some lyrics in there that I could have crafted better, and I just said, “It’s good. I’m going to leave it. That’s how it came out and that’s what it is, and it is what it is.”

Something you said earlier, a quote, about there’s no pressure on me to impress anybody. I just trust my instincts and put this out there and move on to the next one.

JPG: A couple things lyrically where the little things have deeper meanings. On “Little Worries,” it’s the idea of don’t sweat the small stuff, things work themselves out, where the character, by the song’s end, realizes that and notices the cat having fun and…more so, because obviously, you’re very much a thinking person the song, on “Yo I Surrender,” the two things that really jumped out at me — the spiritual idea of surrender as well as the idea that was attributed to Socrates that “All I know is that I know nothing.” Were those intentionally in that song?

OW:  Very much so. I think both the Socratic and [surrender] certainly overlap and are testaments to humility but also freedom, just letting go. Even to this process of writing songs and music, I surrender to whatever power it is that gives us creativity and to my own subconscious and capability as opposed to being judgmental and beating myself up worrying about what other people think. Just trying to be myself. Trying to be ourselves is the way to go.

That’s what it felt like but you know what? There’s also these elements of when you’re writing music and you’re writing lyrics, sometimes, you’re writing lyrics and you have some music in your head. Like that was a song where we really wrote the music first and we wrote [“Yo I Surrender”] in the studio with Steve Berlin playing baritone sax and me and Ted [Pecchio], the bass player, and Jano on percussion and drums. We wrote the music with just a skeleton of the lyrics in mind. I sang a scratch vocal because I didn’t even know the lyrics yet. Sometimes, the music and the timing, and the space of the music draws out a phrase; something about, “I don’t know anything,” just that statement and where it fits in the music and how good it feels to sing it found its way in there.

I’ve been thinking about the word “surrender” a lot. Anyway, those things were inspired by the way the music felt and you read about that all the time. People like Paul Simon again. Paul McCartney will write some amazing melody and then find words; let the melody bring the words out. Sometimes, you’ll hear about singers, Mick Jagger or Jeff Tweedy, any of these guys will go with a piece of music and sing gibberish over it and see what their subconscious brings out in the moment. Record the gibberish and then listen back and say, “Did I just say ‘surrender’ right there? Sounds like it but who cares? Let’s use that.” It’s one of those things where the music draws the words out, and the music mixed with whatever is going on in your subconscious, sometimes, makes a cool stew.

JPG: Mentioning Paul McCartney and writing melodies, I immediately recall that scene in the Get Back documentary where he’s writing “Get Back,” and the words and music are just flowing out of him.

OW: Unbelievable. I had fun watching that. You’re watching him come up with lyrics and, of course, they’re so iconic at this point that we know them. I was yelling at the TV “California grass!” I knew [that line] was eventually going to end up there, and it was so cool to watch that process. How comfortable he was with it. He didn’t care what he said. He just was trying stuff, and all those guys, John Lennon too. Those guys were so good and they just knew to trust that something would come out. They didn’t seem worried about it at all.

JPG: So amazing to watch that.

OW: It’s especially amazing because…I think about this, too. It’s been said by several people — you only have one chance to make your first album, meaning you’re only that innocent and uninfluenced once. And then, once you put something out and have some notoriety, even just a little, you’re not the same creative person. It’s hard to be the same creative person because now you feel like, “People are gonna hear this and they’re gonna expect it to be as good as that last thing” or “They’re going to expect it to sound like this or like that.”

So, it takes bravery and balls just to ignore those messages in your head and make something new like you’re a kid again, like you’re making your first thing again.

That’s another thing I thought about a lot during this record is how can I be innocent when I make this? Part of it is just not giving a shit, which is hard to do on purpose. You can send yourself positive messages like, “I’m just gonna trust that whatever comes out. is honest and I’m not going to question it and try to fix it so other people will like it.”

JPG: When you are sitting down, looking out the window, are you specifically writing material for what is meant to be your solo album or a Wood Brothers album or do you let the muse take you wherever?

OW: That’s a good question. So far, I haven’t really differentiated between them as two entities — Wood Brothers and solo. I just think there are cycles that you write in and after we finished the Wood Brothers album, I continued writing songs.

Plenty of the songs on my new album are collaborations with other writers. At least a handful of them are. That’s stuff that I do even during Wood Brothers sessions. I’m home for a few days and such is in town or Seth Walker’s in town or whoever. We get together. We write a song, put it on the back burner. Since it’s such a collaboration with this other person, it doesn’t put it necessarily in Wood Brothers territory.

I think it’s all about timing. So, if I’m working on a song and the Wood Brothers need songs, that song’s gonna go to the Wood Brothers. I’ve yet to withhold things. Sometimes, it’s the level of collaboration outside of the band, which I love to do, because we really are close-knit writers within the Wood Brothers. We don’t use outside people for writing that much.  Occasionally, we have. For me, I like writing with other people just to grow and to connect with other creative people. I find that it makes me better and those songs by then default either they’ll go on someone else’s album who I collaborated with or on my album or both.

The song “Grab Ahold” on this new record is a song that I wrote with my friend Seth Walker, but we did that years ago. He put the song out on his album at the time, which I was producing. I always loved that song so much and was so attached to it. I said, “Someday, I’m gonna record that song. So, that was actually the one old song that was a collaboration, early Wood Brothers days, but it was, again, with somebody else.

Both of these solo albums that I’ve done since COVID are really timing things. There are things where I was on a roll and I just wrote a bunch of songs. Then, I got five, six songs in and I’m like, “You know what? Let’s do a few more and we’ll make an album.” It’s never a grand plan to start from scratch and make an album. It’s more like a buildup of songs, and the songs could be during the time.

Currently, I’m writing songs on my own but also with Chris and Jano for the next Wood Brothers album. It’s likely there will be leftover ideas or I might get inspired right after we’re done and I might get back with some of my favorite outside writers and the process will go again.  

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