BeatRoute Magazine [AB] print e-edition - [April 2018]

DONOVAN WOODS
on moving forward
On his upcoming fifth release, Both
Ways, singer-songwriter Donovan
Woods has expanded his sound to include
some more atmospheric elements in the
instrumentation, a move he admits comes
from trying to fill larger venues with
sound, while still getting the songs across.
“I’m always trying to move forward.
When you make an intimate folk record
and you end up in a larger theatre, there
are songs that you can’t really play, because
they don’t fill up the space. You end
up changing the arrangements, and you’re
not playing the stuff that’s on the record,
so I wanted to have songs that’d fill the
spaces I’m playing in.”
Woods has developed a more distinct
voice over the course of his career, moving
from an abstract lyrical approach in his
younger years to a more refined, straightforward
course more recently.
“I was a kid, I didn’t know what the I was
doing. People still tell me they like those
songs, but it’s like looking at a picture of
yourself and going, ‘Is that what I look like?’
and everyone else who knew you just goes,
‘Yeah, that’s what you look like.’ I think I’m
more clear now. When I was a kid I didn’t
think it was cool to make sense, like, ever. I
was so resistant to anything that sounded
like a straightforward lyric that I would just
erase anything that made sense.”
Along the way though, Woods found a
bit more of himself in the traditions of the
style. “I didn’t think it was cool to be a folk
storyteller, you know? I just wanted to be
misunderstood and mysterious, which at
the time feels like the cool thing to do, but
as you get older it just feels like a cop out,
because writing songs that are specifically
about something is really fucking hard.”
Woods has spent the last few years living
BY MIKE DUNN
between his Ontario and Nashville, where
he spent some time in the Music Row
writing rooms, with other writers bouncing
ideas back and forth and trying, as he puts
it, “to just write good songs.”
“I’m mostly working as an artist now, but
in the beginning, I was mostly with other
writers,” explains Woods.
“When I started out, you listen to the
other writer, and get a sense as an artist
of what they do, but then you just get in
there and just try to write the best song
possible, because what they do is them,
and it’ll come out. I thought it’d be two
separate jobs, that I would write for other
people, and then I’d have my own thing
that I’d protect, but as I’ve gone along it’s
become the same thing. I don’t approach
it any differently now. Any time I go into
a session with someone else, we’ll just
write a song, and maybe they’ll want it,
or maybe I’ll keep it. In any style, a good
melody is a good melody, a good song is a
good song.”
Donovan Woods plays the Starlite (Edmonton)
on April 26, and the Gateway at SAIT
(Calgary) on April 28.
ROOTS BEATROUTE • APRIL 2018 | 47