Interiew with solo Artist and Composer Brian Woodbury
By Mick Michaels
Cosmick View: Hello, Brian! Welcome to The Cosmick View. Thank you for taking some time out of your day to chat with me, it's greatly appreciated. BW: Hello, Cosmick View! Thanks for asking.
CV: They say money makes the world go 'round. That's no truer than in the music
business. If money was not a concern, with regards to your career as a musical
artist, what would that look like...what would you do differently?
BW: At the moment, money doesn’t play
too much of a role in my musical choices, other than if I had the funds, I’d
hire an orchestra or a choir more often. But stylistically, I’m making the
music I’d like to make. I’ve had the fortune of being a professional musician,
earning my living from music at various times. For about fifteen years, I wrote
and produced songs for children’s TV, Disney shows, such as “Bear in the
Big Blue House” and “The Book of Pooh," I wrote the theme song for
Saturday morning shows “Pepper Ann” and “Teacher’s Pet.” The money
certainly played a role in my taking on that work. But I’d say the work itself
was pretty much as artistically fulfilling as any of my own self-directed
projects.
Over the years, my self-directed projects have oscillated between more pop-oriented and more esoteric. I find the more esoteric projects, in general, tend to get more response than the pop ones. So, go figure.
Right now, I’ve just completed Rhapsody & Filigree. It’s the 4th and final album of a 4-Album project called Anthems & Antithets, where each volume focuses on a different aspect of my songwriting: funny songs, personal songs, political songs, and arty songs, which is the focus of Rhapsody & Filigree. On this new album, I very much followed my whims, writing in combinations of styles and about subjects that are unlikely to be heard or found elsewhere. For instance, “Theseus Rex," a song retelling the Greek myth of Theseus, where Theseus is the bastard son of Jerry Garcia from the Grateful Dead, or “Where It Came From," a song about a mysterious sculpture found in the desert, or “Our Cattywampus World," a song about the formation of the moon in a cataclysmic collision between the proto-Earth and a stray planet.
Luckily, I’m in a situation where I can self-finance and crowdfund the recordings, and I have a network of colleagues and collaborators who like the work with me, and will indulge these whims.
So
I’m doing pretty much what I would like to be doing. If money was not a
concern, l’d hire more people to help me make the kind of music I’m making now
faster.
CV: Many artists expel a lot of energy trying to reinvent the wheel. Modern
music gurus feel everything in music has already been done. Others, however,
disagree. Does working towards reinventing the wheel in music a path even worth
traveling in your opinion?
BW: For me, I try to bring something
unique to every song I make. I try to write songs that no one has written
before. This is doubly true for my new album, Rhapsody & Filigree, which
was ostensibly more “experimental". That said, I’m working in a
largely familiar musical language. Harmonically, instrumentally, stylistically,
it’s all built on things people are familiar with. People often tell me my
music is unique, but I hear the antecedents very clearly when I’m writing and
recording. I do tend to want to turn some aspect of what I’m referencing upside
down. For instance, on the new album I wrote a song “The Day the Music
Never Died” about the historical moment when classical music became a
cultural institution, when a musical canon of the great composers of the past
was created. So I chose to write it in the style of a indie pop song ala They
Might Be Giants. Of course, the chords modulate more than a usual indie pop
song, and there are Beethoven and Chopin references, but it seemed a good
juxtaposition of style and content to marry indie pop with the subject matter.
In the song "Our Cattywampus World,” I used some field recordings - from a paint store, or a pet grooming place, ping pong balls bouncing, or my father’s old CPAP machine - as a background kind of bed that the song proper floats on top of.
On
another song, “The Honorable Mention,” I made a kind of slow, cool,
back-on-the-beat groove with electronic drums and loops, while the vocal, sung
very quietly and chill, is all an acceptance speech of a nominee at the Academy
Awards, so you have this mixture of extremely laidback and hyper.
CV: Many critics also feel music is not evolving; it’s maintaining a level
that seems to appease the lowest common denominator. Being an artist, do
you agree with such a sentiment? Is music stagnating?
BW: It’s hard for me to say, because I
can only listen to so much music. I tend to work on music all the time, so my
listening hours aren’t that long. The most popular of pop music does still tend
to innovate and evolve soundwise fairly quickly. A lot of it is not exciting to
me, but some is…there’s so much more music today than ever before. There’s a
huge substrata of not-super-popular pop music, and I think that evolves more
slowly, which is a fine thing. There’s no reason to treat anything over six
months old as obsolete. For me, I tend to make music not of the moment, so that
I hope it has a longer shelf life. But I’m not gearing my work to short-attention-span
listeners like most very popular current pop music is. There is a value in
timelessness, something being of quality that will bring you something when you
first hear it, and hold up under repeated listenings.
CV: If you were given the opportunity to change places with any another
artist, who would that be and why?
BW: I don’t really think that way.
CV: If you could make one change to the current music industry, what would
that be and why? How do you see that change greatly impacting artists as a
whole?
BW: I think it is actually already
happening somewhat, but the expansion of information available about recorded
music, so that all writers, players, contributors and any information
pertaining to a song or a piece of music could be accessible every time and
every place you listen to it. Maybe it might help people hear music as
something more than a background mood enhancers.
CV: Do genre and sub genre classifications pigeon-hole artists to some
degree in your opinion; thus, leaving them with limited potential audience
awareness? Should an artist be concerned or is that something more for the
label executives to worry about?
BW: I think genre at this point is a
stylistic choice. There’s a slow evolution from culture (where each separate culture has its own distinct musical
tradition, such as European music and pre-Columbian South American music); to genre, where the different musics
exist in the same society, but played and listened to by different social
groups; to style, where each becomes
a different flavor that can be adopted by any musician; to feel, where the origin of the music
is basically forgotten.
I’m
not a purist with this in any way. I’m a dilettante, trying to do my best. I
try to find the feeling in the genre rather than merely caricature it. But,
ultimately, I don’t mind if someone finds it artificial. Artifice is the name
of the game. I don’t think sincerity is undercut by artifice and finesse. I’ve
never believed in authenticity as an artistic ideal.
CV: Do you feel that in this day and age,
an artist can freely cross musical genre/style lines without the fear of being
labeled a "sell out" or "bandwagon jumper" in your opinion?
BW: I’ve always thought
that it was silly not to cross genre/style lines, since I first heard the
Beatles White Album, when it came out. I remember arguing with a friend in 7th
grade that our band should be able to play any genre.
Genre
is often the first thing I think about when writing a song - what genre will it
be in? On my new album, each song kind of treads its own path: going down
the sequence there's prog, then pre-war style swing jazz, then singer
songwriter, a Beefheart homage, Rock in Opposition, Afro-Carribean, musical
theater, etc.
CV: More on a personal note, how much has music changed your life? What does
being an artist mean to you? What have been the highlights?
BW: I’ve been a music person as long as
I can remember, even as a little kid before I learned to play an instrument. My
ears always go to the music in any room, on any TV show or movie. It’s hard to
not focus on it. I focus equally on music and lyrics. But I also hear music in
day-to-day sounds.
I’ve considered myself a music artist since I was in high school, though I had no right to. I guess it’s a certain ego thing, but also I think the way I hear and make music is interesting and different from others, and I believe there’s value in that. I guess it’s a kind of entitlement, but I have the compulsion to keep making music, even if it’s just in my little studio. A professor from college Robert Erickson said, “How do you become a composer? Never stop writing music.” So I’ve followed that advice.
High
points are when people recognize something rewarding in the music I make. And
especially, collaborating with people whose unique musical sensibilities I
admire, such as Van Dyke Parks.
CV: What can fans expect to see coming from you in the near future?
BW: I’m in the process of making music
videos for all the songs on the Rhapsody & Filigree album and I
will continue making music videos for the rest of the songs on the Anthems
& Antithets 4-album set. So far there are about 25 videos. I’m also
making short informational videos about individual songs for the new album, how
they were made, etc.
I also am setting up a series of concerted listening events in intimate venues around the US, and possibly the UK and Europe, with excellent stereo sound systems, where I simply the recording of the album in an attentive environment.
CV: Thanks again Brian for taking the time to share with our readers. We
wish you all the best and continued success.
BW: I thank you kindly.
Check
out Brian at:
Official: www.BrianWoodbury.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BrianWoodburyMusic/
Bandcamp: https://brianwoodbury.bandcamp.com/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/brianwoodburymusic
To purchase:
US & North America: https://brianwoodbury.bandcamp.com/album/rhapsody-filigree
UK & Europe: http://www.rermegacorp.com/
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