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The history of Brooklyn psychedelic folk-pop outfit Woods reads like a how-to guide on doing everything yourself.
The band's formation in Bushwick a decade ago coincided with the establishment of Rear House, the home studio where the group rehearsed and recorded. Guitarist Jarvis Taveniere has engineered Woods' extensive catalog, and vocalist-guitarist Jeremy Earl has released each record—nearly one a year since the group's inception—on his own Woodsist label. They've even started an annual festival in Big Sur, Calif., that shares the label's name and features bands whose careers the label helped launch.
In the band's early days, though, Tavaniere admits it wasn't much different from other New York transplants in the same fruitless hustle. Eventually, the band made a decision to ignore the pursuit of its own success and instead look inward.
"We took ourselves too seriously and weren't getting results," he says. "And then, when we started just making things we loved and not worrying about the outside world, that was when people started to care."
That insular ethos has remained essential to Woods, guiding the band through nine LPs and a handful of singles whose influences range from '60s pop and bucolic folk to the psychedelic reggae of new record City Sun Eater in the River of Light. The Taveniere-Earl songwriting partnership is the kind of symbiotic harmony most musicians spend lifetimes searching for, with Earl as the prolific creative and Taveniere as the preternatural technician, inclined more toward editing or enhancement, with his development as an engineer happening in parallel to the band's expanding ambition.
A few things have changed, though. The record label Earl had initially founded as a platform for his own band has grown large enough—launching the careers of ancillary members or friends of the band like Kevin Morby and Rafi Bookstaber—that it now requires his full attention. So Earl moved to upstate New York, where he can run Woodsist whenever he's not writing music. With Earl running Woodsist and Tavaniere producing records for other bands full-time, the creative process now requires months of planning and out-of-town retreats to write for the project that was once just part of their daily routines.
But while it might take more effort for the band to get together these days, the distance and distractions have hardly slowed Woods' evolution, with City Sun Eater in the River of Light incorporating tropicalia and African jazz influences that are a far cry from the band's lo-fi folk roots. Taveniere says it's all part of a natural progression.
"We like all kinds of stuff," he says. "All of our records are all over the place. I don't think anything is off boundaries. People think of us as a folk band, and I'm OK with that, but there's so much more that we listen to. I don't wanna die only playing one kind of music. I want to incorporate more."
SEE IT: Woods plays Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave., with Cian Nugent and the Lavender Flu, on Friday, July 22. 9 pm. $13 advance, $15 day of show. 21+.
Willamette Week
