Being present in the moment is something that can be quite difficult given the current state of, well, everything. It’s hard not to stress about the future whether it’s on a micro or macro level. This stress can be crushing, and ultimately serves as a thief of joy and creativity.
The Wood Brothers – Chris Wood, Oliver Wood and Jano Rix – understand this better than anyone. The life of a touring band combined with the realities of living in today’s world can be overwhelming. However, the band works on employing a simple mantra dubbed “BLT” — an acronym for Breathe, Listen Trust. This mantra, rooted in classic Zen and Eastern philosophies, has allowed the band to not only concoct genre-defying music for decades, but also allows them to recreate their music for a live audience in unique, innovative and outside the box ways. Puff of Smoke, which drops this summer, is the result of these men listening to each other, being in the moment and focusing on the now and not the potential noise and worry of the future.
Recently, we sat down with Chris Wood in advance of The Wood Brothers headlining show at The Stone Pony on Saturday May 24. Chris spoke to us about the creative process behind Puff of Smoke, mindfulness, being present, the positives and negatives of streaming and what lays on the horizon for the band.
In the press release about Puff of Smoke there was something that really struck me. There’s a quote from the band saying, “Puff of Smoke posits a happily contrarian outlook to the times we are in. Life can turn on a dime, and all we truly have is the moment at hand and that’s perfectly fine.” That’s such a fascinating statement and why this is the mantra and vibe of the record especially when so many people are down and out right now.
Chris Wood: I think the title, Puff of Smoke, can be interpreted in lots of ways, obviously. People instantly start thinking about smoking (laughs). I think to us it was more of a reference to impermanence. You see something that’s right there and it seems real and then it’s just gone. It could feel like your whole life — like I was just 20 years old, and all of a sudden I’m 50 years old and it just happened in a flash. Or my 401K was looking good and then the tariffs hit, and suddenly all that money’s gone in a puff of smoke. There’s that interpretation of impermanence.
I notice being a touring musician, and I’m not unique in this way, there’s definitely a thing when you’re trying to plan out your schedule, your tour, and you’re looking at the calendar. You’re seeing these blocks of “Oh, I’m supposed to be in this city,” and there’s just this crazy travel day, and you get all worked up about it [even though] it’s not even happening.
After going through that kind of thing so many times you start to realize that what you see on the calendar makes no difference. When that day finally arrives, you have no idea how it’s gonna go. There’s some days on the calendar that look like they’re gonna be amazing. It’s a day off and we’re in a nice place. Then for some reason something happens, and it’s the worst day of the tour. Then there’s another day on the calendar that is like a hell of a travel day, and there’s gonna be no sleep but for some reason we had a great day, and everyone was happy and in a good mood, and we wrote a new song.
So all this energy we put into stressing out about the future is kind of worthless. It’s good to be practical and try to make good decisions the best you can — but you really don’t know how things are going to turn out. All we have is now ultimately. If we can just enjoy ourselves even in the most stressful moments or boring moments. Like we’re doing the dishes and we hate it. But, is it possible to enjoy it and then play with it? I think it just comes down to that — can you be playful in any moment you’re in and find some joy in it?
The hardest thing about that is remembering to do it. It’s actually not. It’s not that hard to do, but it’s hard to remember that it’s an option.
So that’s why we constantly talk about it. We constantly try to practice it on our own. Just so that when we’re up on stage and things may or may not be going well, you can remember to actually enjoy it — even if things aren’t perfect or your instrument is broken, or the sound sucks.
Wow, if I ever needed to hear that bit of advice it was the day of this interview. Heading into the day of this interview I woke up and was stressed about everything that needed to be done. But this definitely changes my perspective. Speaking of perspective … mindfulness is something the band put an emphasis on with this record. With mindfulness and finding playfulness in every moment — how has this impacted you and your brothers as musicians?
It’s made a huge impact. We have this thing we call BLT which is an acronym that simplifies what could otherwise be a discussion that lasts for an hour. It’s a distilling of the most important things that get you to that place where you’re in the moment. BLT stands for breathe, listen, and trust. The idea is that the best times when we’re playing music is when we don’t feel like we’re playing. When we’re simply listening and receiving information and trusting that our bodies we can instantaneously make the appropriate reaction to it. It’s an instantaneous reaction to your environment.
You can’t be in that state if you’re not breathing. It’s just so basic. Breathing can be a short, distilled version of the state that your body needs to be in. You need to be relaxed. You need to be still. Your mind needs to be still so that you’re just paying attention to your environment, to the sounds. If you trust yourself you don’t have to think about the reaction — you’ll know what to do instantaneously.
We know from lots of trial and error that when we play music together the best way that I can groove with the drums is by not listening to myself but listening to Jano [Rix] playing the drums. Then I just trust that I’ll know the right notes and the right feel. The best way that we can harmonize with each other is not to listen to my voice, but to listen to Jano and Oliver’s voices. That will inform me instantaneously how to get the tuning right. It’s all about paying attention to your environment; but you gotta trust yourself to act dynamically in that moment from a place of stillness which is kind of the paradox.
Where did it spring from? Is this something that’s always been a part of your process?
None of this is new or revolutionary, obviously. You can trace all this thinking back to Eastern philosophy and Zen, or any kind of spiritual practice. My interest in it was always about making it as absolutely as practical as possible. Sure, when we play music we always get in our own way. Everyone knows that that’s an issue. But how do you practice not getting in your own way? How can you short circuit that, and get to the zone, or the flow state, or whatever you want to call it? How do you get there? I think a real, easy, intuitive image or example is just when you think about dancing. When you hear a band start a great groove, what do you do first? Do you dance first or do you let the groove hit your body?
You let the groove hit your body.
The groove of the drummer informs your body how to move. The beat dances you. You don’t dance the beat. That’s the idea — you have to be a receiver of information in order to act appropriately. When we are overthinking or we’re nervous or we’re stressed out, we’re so busy thinking and creating noise in our head that we can’t receive information in our senses which is absolutely necessary to act in. It’s just hard to remember to do it. That’s what we always come back to. On our last record we had not one, but two songs with the lyrics was, “Remember to Remember,” because it’s such a mantra for us.
That leads me into my next question. Puff of Smoke was an improvisational type of recording, right? You didn’t sit around and write everything — so did the BLT philosophy really come into play with this album? And did you find you were more in tune with each other given that you have this mantra as well as a long history of performing together?
It all gets back to trust. Every time we learn to trust the process even more. Every record we make just feels more fun. We go through the process and trust it and enjoy it while it’s happening. When you’re writing a song you’ve got to trust that when you get in those moments where you feel like you’re over-laboring, you’re forcing it, you’re overthinking it … if you start to recognize that feeling … you just put it away for a while. You go on a walk or do something different. It’s just learning how to create space. If you do that every time you’re working on a composition it feels like you’re improvising.
I think that’s ultimately the goal. And another word for improvising is playful. You’re just having fun trying stuff. If you lose that feeling where it’s not fun anymore — stop. Just stop and then wait and come back later. Do something else. I think that’s a valuable thing. You want to work quickly and make your decisions. [You want to be] excited and be like, “Oh I know what this needs!” But, if you don’t know what it needs, don’t force it … wait till you know what it needs. So that’s something that we do all through the writing process.
What’s interesting about the process is that, even though the songs are written, we have no idea how it’s gonna turn out in terms of what instruments we’re gonna play. All those details come together when you actually, physically are in the room together playing the song. So all kinds of decisions get made very, very quickly in an improvisatory, playful way. It’s a lot of “What guitar should I use?” “Do you guys like this guitar?” “What about this guitar?” We just trust our gut, and we’re like, “Oh, something about that [guitar] … I don’t know why, go with that one.” There’s also, “Should I play electric, base or upright bass?” “What drum kit should Jano play, or should he not even play drums?”
The band has a pretty diverse sonic palette, too. Throughout the album you can hear music from all walks of life and all different parts of the country. How does that get brought into the creative process? Is it done when you’re in these improvisational moments recording or does someone come in with an idea of “Hey we should add horns to this song.”
The first thing we do is get a performance as a trio. For example, the song “Witness,” it was written but we didn’t exactly know what instruments we were gonna play in the studio. We were all in the same room together, very close together, sort of in a circle. Jano was playing a conga drum, I’m playing upright bass, and Oliver is playing this little sort of acoustic arch top guitar. We’ve played the whole song that way — conga drum, upright bass and this acoustic guitar. That became the basic track where we captured a good performance that we liked and everything felt good.
When you get into that playful mode again you just react to what we just did. You say, “Those conga drums are really cool but let’s fatten it up a little bit.” You’re just constantly reacting to what you did to decide what to do next. It’s not all planned ahead of time. It’s an ongoing, improvisatory playful experience where you’re just reacting. So it wasn’t until we did that then I started hearing horns. There’s these natural breaks in the lyrics and it just needed something. You don’t really know where these ideas come from, but they pop into your head and you trust them. If you don’t, then nothing happens. It doesn’t always work. Your instinct sometimes tells you what not to do.
When you add these different sounds outside of the trio, like, when you guys are playing live, this is, we’re gonna be publishing this before your stone pony gig in Asbury Park. Do you also have to reinvent it playing live Or because you don’t have these other elements there. So is that That’s the right creativity that you change.
We have no need or desire to replicate the album. It’s a completely different medium. We make a song and an arrangement for people to listen over some speakers. But playing live … Why do that? Let’s let’s have fun making it better for a live stage performance — which might mean, yeah, changing the instrumentation. It might mean opening up a solo section. We’ve done all kinds of crazy things. It might mean like, “Hey, that song is in 3/4 time, what if we did it in 4/4 time?” I think it’s fun because the songs are still recognizable to the audience. The audience is like “Oh, they really gave this a different twist,” or “They changed the field, or “They sped it up a lot,” or “They made it more intense energetically,” or “They broke it down to completely acoustic where it was on the record a very electric song.” That is really fun for us to do, and that’s part of the creative process. All the way from writing, recording all the way to the live show, it never really stops. We’re always having fun with that kind of thing.
This might be asking like who your favorite kid is, but which do you prefer — getting in the studio and creating, or recreating songs for the live experience?
As long as we’re creating, I’m happy. As long as we’re making things, even if it means recreating and changing something a song that was already written. I love the process of thinking or reacting to a recording that we did. Trying to picture [the song] in a live context like, “Oh, what if we changed it and made it different?” That’s part of it’s just as creative and fun, and in some ways as writing a song and recording a song. But, there really is nothing like giving birth to a brand new song. I think that element of surprise is high for us. The fact that we waited the first time we finally got a tape in the studio of a new song, we’re always surprised that it turned out that way. It’
After this run, you’re gonna tour with Saint Paul and The Broken Bones. They’re a phenomenal band, but a bit different from The Wood Brothers. Can you talk about why you’re linking up and touring with them.
We have a lot of variety. We don’t really fit in any one box. I’m starting a tour [the day of the interview] where we’re gonna be doing some shows with The String Cheese Incident — a completely different band [from us]. It’s that variety that we love. The last show we did was with the Tedeschi Trucks Band. What is fun for us is that our music somehow crosses over into some of the jam band scene, it crosses over into soul like Tedeschi Trucks and Saint Paul. We’ve been called all sorts of names over the years, but you know one that sort of my favorite one might be like soulful folk.
Americana is very vague. I don’t think anybody really knows what you’re talking about when you say Americana. It’s almost like a jam band. It’s like what you call a band that you can’t categorize them definitively.
Jam is the most nebulous term. You can look at the lineup of a quote unquote jam festival and you see reggae or electronic music or folk or bluegrass.
It’s more of a community than a specific genre.
When it comes to this blending of genres and lack of classification for bands, how much of an impact do you think streaming has on it?
I definitely think it’s impacted it. Hmmm… I don’t know, man. Every year we’ll usually play Fillmore West in San Francisco, and you look at all the classic posters and you see the craziest lineups. There’s Taj Mahal opening for Led Zeppelin with Santana. They’ll have a great New Orleans artist like Clifton Chenier opening for The Who. So I don’t think that’s a new thing having sort of stylistic mashups on a bill. But maybe Bill Graham was more adventurous in that regard than others.
I do think what streaming does do is, because there’s so just millions of songs to listen to every year, it makes people just dabble. When I was a young jazz nerd, I would listen to interviews with great jazz musicians. They would talk about how when they were a kid, maybe in the ’40s or ’50s, they got one LP album. They literally learned music from that one record. That’s it. They’ve learned every note on that record. It taught them how to play music. Nobody does that anymore. Nobody takes deep dives like that. Everyone’s dabbling, hardly getting through a song, or maybe just getting to the chorus. Or it’s background music, because of playlists. It’s endless information. It almost intimidates me to go exploring on Spotify or something. I need a recommendation. I need a friend to say, you gotta check this out and then I’ll go to that. But to go dabble and explore and let the algorithm lead me places; it’s a bit overwhelming.
Let’s close this out on a positive note. What are some things you’re excited for The Wood Brothers and yourself, creatively speaking, in 2025.
1. I’m always excited to play live with those guys — especially because of all the stuff we talked about playing live music. In a weird way it’s almost like a spiritual practice. It’s just like golf because [a question of] “Can I get in the zone and play that perfect game?” And the whole thing about it is that in order to do it, I can’t be the one doing it. So it’s just endlessly interesting, dynamic to be in that space, so I’d never get sick of that. I’m always excited to do it, even though it’s work. It’s practice, and you have to prepare.
2. I’m excited already to write new songs. We have new songs cooking for another album. So, that is always a fun process to me. So every time I’m together with the guys doing that, or if I’m home working on my farm, I’m just going through that stuff.
3. Videos have been really fun. We just made our first self-made completely in-house, on-my-phone music video for “Witness” that’s available now. We’re gonna do more of that and that’s what I’m excited to do. I like directing, or the idea of coming up and making a little film. It’s really fun and exciting for me. I love editing. I’m kind of an editing nerd, so I love just spontaneously creating a whole bunch of content.
4. We’ve never played with Saint Paul before. So I’m excited to connect with those guys. So it’s fun connecting with new musicians and I love musicians. I love hanging out with them. I love being inspired by great players.
