Interview: Donovan Woods

Photo by Brittany Farhat

Since 2007, Canadian folk artist Donovan Woods has been crafting delicate portrayals of everyday life, capturing the essence of relationships, mundane chores, and the subtle intricacies that define our daily existence. With a career marked by Juno Award nominations and wins, Woods has built a devoted following in his home country. His latest album, Things Were Never Good If They’re Not Good Now, continues this tradition, offering an unflinching look at life through the eyes of someone who pays close attention to life’s little details and tells it like it is, without sugarcoating.

Despite his success in Canada, Woods’ U.S. popularity hasn’t quite caught up. He often finds himself opening solo slots on tours with artists like Drew Holcomb and Ruston Kelly. However, his ability to connect with audiences through his emotionally gritty and self-reflective songs and his self-deprecating between-song humor remains unparalleled.

In this conversation, we delve into Woods’ creative process, his latest album, and the experiences that have shaped his music.

You said that nobody seems nicer than when they’re bringing out a birthday cake, which is what you’re doing on the album cover. Are you saying that’s as nice as it’s going to get or is listening to the album nice as well?

DONOVAN: I would say the cover is probably as nice as it’s going to get, or at least it’s about the appearances we put up and the revelation of the truth of each other which is often a lot less nice than carrying a birthday cake and singing which is a really fun thing to do.

Do you write songs that you consider to be siblings? For instance, you’ve got a song called “I’m Just Trying to Get Home” and then a song called “Back for the Funeral” which is about going home. You’ve got a song called “Well Read” and then a song about a bookstore. Are those written as siblings of each other or is it just a random circumstance?

DONOVAN: I think it’s just happenstance. The “Well Read” one and the bookstore one, that’s the first time I’ve considered that. I consider that “Living Well” and “Well Read” have the same word but it didn’t occur to me until I looked at the track list and saw two titles with the word “Well”.

Those things happen on the record. You can take it as a sign that you’re on the right track if those little pennies start to drop, and you go, “Oh, this is a collection of songs as opposed to just a bunch of independent thoughts.”

In all likelihood, on that tour that I wrote both of those songs, I was reading a lot of books. I was very bored and I was reading a ton. There was really nothing more important to me at the moment than getting the book that I wanted to read next because I was on a bus. I think it’s probably that’s all it is. And the word “well” popping up so much is just the effort of that year was to try to make myself feel well. I just did not feel well. And I didn’t know what it was until I discovered what it was. It’s funny to think about those things because suddenly the language gives way to the things that you were sort of fixated on in those times when you wrote them, which is funny to think of.

There are also songs on the new album where you’ve sung, “Holy hell” and “Holy shit.”

DONOVAN: I never even thought about that. “Holy shit, the sun’s going to rise” is sort of like the dipshit version of “The Sun Also Rises,” like, “The sun will come up tomorrow, don’t worry about it.” It’s that feeling of “holy shit, the sun really is going to come up.” I didn’t feel like it was going to do that all the time. That’s funny, that’s “holy” and “holy,” I didn’t even think about that.

Will the next album have songs with lyrics like “Holy cow” and “Holy fuck”?

DONOVAN: Hopefully I got holy out of my system. (laughs)

I talked with Jakob Dylan a few years ago and there were a few songs that mentioned trains or train stations on the last Wallflowers album.

DONOVAN: There’s a reason trains are in so much music. It’s so deeply metaphorical. You can’t stop it very easily and you know its exact course. It’s plotted and it’s unchanged. That’s deeply, deeply metaphorical. It’s amazing there isn’t more songs about trains, and there’s already a fuck ton of them.

“Back to the Funeral” is about going back home centered around an occasion, in this case the death of a friend. How far do you live from the town where you grew up?

DONOVAN: I’m three hours away. I can drive there in three hours.

Is it someplace you return to often or is it like the song and you only return when there’s events?

DONOVAN: As I get older, I only return when something goes wrong. But, I try. My kids like it there a lot. My parents still live there, they live kind of in the outskirts of it now at this point. The place where I grew up, I don’t go that often, but I do go for funerals. The most recent time, I went for two funerals that happened to be on the same day. So, you know, when I do go there, it’s not always for the best, most celebratory reason. If I was in a celebratory mood, that is not where I would choose to go.

Do you have childhood friends that still live there?

DONOVAN: I have a lot of friends who still live there. It’s a really good place to raise kids. It’s affordable and it’s a really livable city. I have the conflicted version of my hometown, I don’t particularly like it. You watch the culture of the city and the same sort of ignorance and short-sightedness that you grew up with everybody’s parents having, you watch that sort of sink into your friends in an interesting way and it’s a little bit depressing, but it makes a lot of sense. There’s really nothing to get mad at, but I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to participate in that.

We weren’t a church going family. I have parents who don’t really believe in God and they’re more liberal minded. It’s also a function of my sister coming out as gay when she was 14. I was 12. We started the widening of our scope early on. My parents had no choice but to liberalize themselves and be an advocate for their daughter, which helps everybody.

I don’t think I would have ended up being much more ignorant if I was still there, but I understand that you want to protect your way of life when you live there. It’s a petrochemical town, it’s not unlike Cleveland. It’s the same type of bearing where everybody works in the petrochemical plants and the idea of carbon tax and cutting emissions is directly tied to their livelihood and they don’t want to make less money so they don’t believe in any of that stuff.

When you write a song like “Back for the Funeral,” do you get a sense that it’s going to hit people a little harder?

DONOVAN: A lot of people, when they’re writing a song that is emotional like that, they go, “Let’s really get them. Let’s twist the knife.” I’m resistant to the idea that the point of it is to devastate or the point of it is to hit their emotions the hardest. I’m trying to speak the idea as plainly as possible and when you try to do that it generally ends up being pretty devastating. Getting to the last line of that song, “How fucked up is that that somebody’s going to die for us to call each other back?,” there’s no more plain way to say that. I’m not ringing it out for optimal emotional wealth. I’m just saying, isn’t that fucked up that we only see each other when somebody dies? That’s not good.

I’m really allergic to language that’s not conversational. There are some songwriters that I love who are able to do that but I can’t let it in my songs. It makes me itchy. If there’s something that wouldn’t come out of my mouth every day or on a daily basis, I don’t want it in there. It’s to my detriment too, in songwriting I’m often rejecting real poetry because it doesn’t feel like I think it’s full of shit. I don’t think it’s a good instinct. I think poetry is beautiful. I love poetry but, for some reason, when I’m doing it I can’t allow it.

There are some songwriters who write things where you get lost in the words, they are beautiful, but you don’t have any idea what they are trying to say. What I appreciate about you is that your lyrics are very conversational. How much of what you write about is observational, how much is ripped from the headlines of your life? Are you able to separate writing about things that are happening to you and things that you’re observing around you?

DONOVAN: I’m trying to not invent things. I’m trying to communicate the feeling. A song like “Back for the Funeral,” everybody knows that kind of feeling of suddenly being in their hometown and being with their high school friends at that same fucking bar that you’ve been at and what that kind of feels like. You get it at Christmas, you get it at the times when you get it. Finding the way to communicate that feeling, it’s not always just autobiographical fact that’s going to get you to that mood. Building set pieces and building characters and conversations that serves that mood is more important to me than telling the absolute truth of things that have happened to me. There are people in my life who are a placeholder for all the people in that song. I’ve lost a bunch of friends to suicide, so those things aren’t far from the truth. The people at the funeral, I don’t want those details to be just a plan description of those people. I know their brothers and sisters. I don’t want to be taking advantage of someone’s very sad story to make myself look like a great songwriter, so I try to toe the line of fact and fiction in a way that puts the mood at the top of the pyramid as opposed to putting fact up there.

When writing lyrics, do you start with just a word? Do you start with a sentence? Do you start with a melody? Do you start with a title?

DONOVAN: It’s always a little bit different but if there is a commonality, it’s that language is the thing that starts it, it’s never really melody for me. A sentence or a phrase or just a description of something will evoke a mood and then the job is taking that mood and expanding it, telling a story that’s going to get you to that mood. I’m really trying to explain feelings and the story is just serving that feeling but it generally starts with language.

I don’t mind starting with the title but the title has to be language that’s super compelling to me. Sometimes you do hear those things. Songwriter friends of mine will trade back and forth those phrases. “What about this as a title?” or “What about this language?” I wouldn’t know how to classify what it is that I’m looking for but when I hear it, I know exactly that it’s the language. For instance, the other day, Brian Fallon, who’s a friend of mine from The Gaslight Anthem, sent me a title that he has which was “The House in Charlotte” and my brain just starts whirling. I don’t know what it is about the domesticity of the way that language is used. It suggests somebody with more than one house. There’s just a lot to it. It’s capacious and there’s a story in it already. I’m just looking for language like that that’s pithy and it feels right.

Are you always listening when you’re out and about? Always trying to catch a word or phrase that you might be able to use?

DONOVAN: That’s the type of thing that you’re looking for, things that come out of people’s mouths and what story does that begin to tell? The most interesting stuff is when there’s a placeholder. The most common one for men is, “It’s all good” or “Is what it is.” These things are the placeholders for the actual emotion that you’re feeling. I’m really interested in that masculine bullshit talk that comes off as casual and dismissive when in fact it’s masking the feelings. It’s masking the feeling of, “I’m quite disappointed in that, but I’m not going to get into it because I don’t want to burden anybody with my vulnerability.” When I encounter those types of things, my brain always just starts spinning.

Was “116 West Main, Durham, NC” a title first or did the song come after you had written the lyrics? Of course, I threw the address into Google Maps to see where it was and it’s a bookstore.

DONOVAN: The first verse of that song came out while I was walking, and I was just singing a little melody of it. I can’t imagine that it’s the same melody that ended up in the song, but I had these lyrics of, “It’s a good thing when the days keep rolling over like they do.” I was really just trying to get through a tour. There was a lot of work, and I had a day in Durham where I felt really good and I wrote that while I was walking. I happened to be walking to that bookstore. The voice memo saves your location. The voice memo was saved as that address and I couldn’t think of anything else that I wanted to call that song, like “Walk to the Bookstore.” There was just no other title that could possibly work so I just left it.

Is most of your touring as a one-man show?

DONOVAN: In America, it’s generally one person. I have a band in Canada. It’s a four piece and me, so it’s quite a lot bigger in Canada. I’m doing some headline shows in America in the Fall and I get to have the band at that. We just haven’t really had the money to pay for it yet in America. We’re just getting there now.

Playing solo as an opener on a bigger tour must be interesting. I’ve always had the impression that solo artists wind up hanging out with the headliners, stay at the same hotels, eat meals together, etc. But, I’ve seen a number of solo openers recently who drive themselves, don’t have a crew at all and throw their guitar and equipment into their cars and then start heading to the next city before the headliner has even finished their set. I imagine it can be lonely to be in that position.

DONOVAN: Oh goodness, yeah. I’ve been in some lucky situations. The most recent opening tours I’ve done, they’ve given me a spot on the bus. The last one I did was with Drew Holcomb. We played in Ohio, at the Bluestone. That was not a good night for me, maybe the worst show of the tour, honestly. Being on the bus is fun. An operation like Drew’s, everybody was really kind, and in fact, Drew cultivates an environment. They play Roses and Thorns one night a week where everyone talks about a thing that they’re having trouble with that week and a thing that they feel good about that week. Everybody cries and hugs, it’s wonderful. It’s a wonderful work environment. And other times you get on a band’s bus and you go, “All these people hate each other. This is gonna be a tough trip.” So it can be really lonely. You can be in a situation where as soon as the bus parks, you get off it and get the fuck out of the environment until it’s soundcheck, go do something and not have to be around anybody.

On the Ruston Kelly tour, we were chasing the bus in a van. We had to start driving right after our set, or we wouldn’t make it to the next night because they drive overnight. We would drive for three hours after the set and then stay in a hotel and then drive for three or four more the next day to make it in time for soundcheck. That’s a tough gig but you get very used to it. And that’s the job.

I was at the Bluestone recently and saw Band of Horses. Ally Evenson opened as a solo artist. I was on the floor, just about 20 feet from the stage, and I could barely hear her. I’ve never been so embarrassed by an audience as I was that night. There were so many people talking during her set but she kept soldering on. It was disappointing.

DONOVAN: When you’re the opener, you’re so tied to the shape of the room. Sometimes you get in a room and there’s a bar under an overhang. When a bar is set back underneath an overhang people feel like they’re in a separate room. It’s tough. There’s like things that you can’t overcome. I have spent so much time as a solo performer in Canada. That’s how I came up. I really pride myself on being able to quiet any crowd. If I were to have a skill, I think that is the skill I have. I can do it.

There’s probably two places on the Drew Holcomb tour where I wasn’t able to do it. One was Houston, but I still got them for a good amount of time in Houston. It was just sort of vacillating back and forth. I’d catch them and then I would sort of lose the attention and swing it back. At the Bluestone, I never got them. I just ran through the songs. I was like, “It’s just one of those nights that you go on the bus and you go, ‘we’ll do it tomorrow.’” You can be15 years in and you can be as confident as you like and you still run into those nights.

Your songs are so quiet and beautiful and your between song banter is very self-deprecating and funny, it’s like you’re two different people. You won me over when I saw you open for Ruston Kelly.

DONOVAN: That’s the challenge. It’s always a challenge every night. On that tour, I remember thinking after the first couple of nights, “Ruston’s ethos is one of recovery and it’s pretty heavy at times.” I wondered, “Are these people going to be up for the amount of self-deprecation I’m going to do?” There’s a tall poppy syndrome in Canada that if you get on stage in Canada and don’t make fun of yourself to a certain degree, you look like an asshole. There’s a seriousness in America that people want their musicians to be serious artists and they want the in-between of songs to be as important as the songs. I’m interested by that, but I’m not really that good at it. I’m not that serious of a person, unfortunately.

You and Ruston have both written songs that have become big hits for country artists. Your song “Portland, Maine” was recorded by Tim McGraw. When you’re writing for others, is it Donovan Woods writing those songs or do you write from a different perspective?

DONOVAN: It’s funny. I always thought the dream is that you’ll be able to write these massive country songs that are popular. The truth is that particularly in that genre, in country, anything that’s not real is so glaringly obvious and everybody knows it immediately. The funny truth is that I grew up probably more rural than most of those people who live in Nashville and write country music. I’m probably more bona fide from the sticks than most of those people. Most of those guys are from Atlanta for fuck sake, the suburbs of Atlanta. I think that they believe in it in a way that I’m not really able to do.

The songs that I do have on country people’s records, they end up being track 11 and track 12 and they’re songs that they would like to have on the record to showcase some breadth. I can’t write those hit songs and it’s obvious when I do it that that’s not the thing. I’ll sit in a room where something like that is happening and I often just get out of the way. I would love to be able to do that. The longer you get at it, you realize you have your skill set and you can only be yourself in those rooms because the rest of it doesn’t feel authentic. I would imagine that Ruston feels the same way about that.

Your catalog is full of really heart-warming, beautiful gentle songs. Do you have a secret side to you that people haven’t heard? Do you write punk rock or heavy metal songs just to give something else a try, even if no one will ever hear them?

DONOVAN: I pretty much only listen to hip hop in my spare time. I don’t listen to folk music really at all in any way. I will sometimes listen to country radio. I love listening to country radio, it’s like listening to nothing. It’s like the greatest gift to have on in the car. I love it. But the things that I’m most excited by is Vince Staples and people like that. I have been known to try to make a beat, but I would never rap over anything like that.

Is “I’m Around” a bonus track or is part of the official track listing?

DONOVAN: It feels like a bonus track to me. It’s on the vinyl, but I put it on there because people get mad if you leave those songs off. I do feel like the record is the 11 songs before it.

Reading through YouTube comments on the video, it’s like 98% of the people who commented talk about how they relate to the song and wish they could continue to have a relationship with someone even after the official relationship has ended.

DONOVAN: I think it’s aspirational. I’ve never acted that magnanimous in a breakup. It’s certainly a song where I was trying to will myself into somebody that was better than me. I think people relate to it because it would be really nice to be able to take the high road like that, it seems really loving, but I don’t think very many people can.

How did William Prince and Madi Diaz end up on the record?

DONOVAN: Madi’s a friend of mine and we wrote that song together. I think when a man and a woman sing a duet, it’s nice and that’s a song about relationships. I just wanted her to be on it. It was hard to get her to do it. We had these sessions scheduled and schedules got all fucked up. It took a long time. We had one day to get it done before we had to get it to mixing and she just sang it at home but I couldn’t ask for more.

And then William and I, we just know each other. My original thought on that song was that it should be a bunch of men singing in unison who sound tired. We did that and it sounded dumb. I love the idea but in practice, it was just so blunt. It was too blunt. And I know William’s voice, it’s got a depth, there’s something kind of ethereal about it, and it just comes out of him.

The most amazing thing about meeting those people who wrote these songs that you love is that when they open their mouth and sing, their head just makes that sound that you like. No special magic. When they sing, it sounds like the thing that you want to hear, which is a fucking trip to see in real life.

I remember being in the same room with Sheryl Crow and Sheryl Crow singing with no microphone and then going, “This sounds so much like Sheryl Crow.” She seems really nice. You can see her around Nashville these days.

You spend a lot of time in Nashville, do you have a place there?

DONOVAN: I did before the pandemic. I have enough friends there now that I can usually stay with somebody, but I’ll often get an Airbnb. I had an apartment before the pandemic, but I gave it up because I wasn’t going to be able to cross the border for two years, so we just gave it up for that amount of time. But I have enough friends there that I can stay with folks now, which is really nice.

Nashville really is the songwriting community that they purport it to be. There’s a lot of places where they talk about how music is a family, that’s certainly not the case in Canada, everybody hates each other, basically. But in Nashville, it really is a community of songwriters in a way that does actually feel special. It’s not bullshit. It’s one of the very few things that is not bullshit in the music industry.

Are there things about Nashville that, when you’re home in Canada, you miss? Like, certain foods or restaurants or coffee shops?

DONOVAN: It’s pretty natural to me now. I’ve spent so much time there that I feel very weird strangely at home. And I normally have a feeling in the United States, I just feel slightly foreign when I’m there. I feel it in one-on-one interactions. Canadians are saddled with this sort of British propriety, like acting proper. I don’t realize how much of an uptight person I am until I’m in, particularly, the American South where people don’t give a fuck about norms and they don’t give a shit about how you’re supposed to act in a restaurant. The perfect example to me is in Nashville, they park either way on the side of the road. And in Canada, we will only park in the direction that traffic is traveling on that side of the road. And if you park the other way, when I see it, I’m just like, “What the fuck is going on?” I feel unsafe. In Nashville, they just park any way and I don’t like it. And I realized how uptight I am. Those feelings in America makes me realize what an uptight Canadian I am. I long for that sort of shame-based propriety of Canada, which in the UK, you get it times 10. And part of me loves it, loves the way they act on the subway, everybody acts so buttoned up and tense and, fuck, do I like it.

But Nashville to me now, I have my places that I go there and I feel so at home there at this point, it’s great. It’s really nice. If I were to live in the US, that’s certainly where I would pick, but I don’t think I can live in the US because I’m too proper.

You’re going to do some touring later this year?

DONOVAN: Yeah, start in the fall. Well, a couple of festival things here, and then I do all of Canada in the fall except for the East coast of Canada. We do Toronto all the way over to Vancouver and then some American dates down to Washington DC, so a bit of the East Coast of the US and then early next year we’ll come back.

Is there a particular city in the US that you think has already worked in your favor?

DONOVAN: Chicago. The tickets for the show there were half gone pretty quickly. It’s really encouraging. I understand that my music is not a big tent, it’s people who are willing to commit a Friday night to feeling catharsis about old emotional hang-ups. I understand it’s a slow build. Personally, I believe there really are diminished returns with a room that holds 500 people that has 500 people in yeah. It doesn’t get much better than that. I mean it gets richer than that, just not better.