‘Come on Jesse, we drove two hours to see you!’ said some people when they realized that Jesse Woods was done with his set at Origami Vinyl after just a few songs. ‘Ok, let’s keep going’, he answered, taking his guitar back and quietly playing four more songs.
I read somewhere that Jesse Woods is a ‘complicated man’ because he used to be a Texan football player and is now making quiet acoustic music. What? Elliott Smith changed his first name because he thought that Steven sounded too much like ‘football playin' blond haired Steve’, but this guy was really a football player? However, I didn't notice anything ‘complicated’ about him. How many athletes manage to have a music career, or even better an indie music career? I can’t find an example, but this guy has to be an exception. In interviews, he has admitted to worship Townes van Zandt, to be a huge Lyle Lovett and Robert Earl Keen fan and to basically be in love with the southern sound, bluegrass, blues or ‘anything that sounds rebellious from the proper way of American life’.
Up in the Origami loft, Jesse Woods played a few of his peaceful tuneful songs showing all these influences and beyond, as I could hear a little bit of the Everly Brothers on ‘Ugly Dress’, just before the interesting chorus repeating ‘I’ll be waiting in northern California for you’. All I can say is that I didn’t see any of the tough side of the football player, everything sounded so quiet and harmonious, the guitar was sparkling and the vocals, a little on the echoing side, were split between mystery and melancholy. His songs seemed to be about longing and heartbreak, a very common place that very few manage to sound fresh and interesting, but his series of unique and catchy dreamfolk low-fi songs made him hit Austin City Limits and South by Southwest in 2009.
I believe that the simplest and purest sounds and emotions are the hardest to describe, and this is what happened with Woods, because it was simple and, at the same time, difficult, and it was tricky to put your finger on what exactly made him so special,… after all these people had driven two hours to see him! Let’s just say that his music was more celestial than any of the influences previously cited, and for example, ‘Sparks’, from his latest release ‘Moon Rocks’, was a wide-eyed tune that literally wanted to ‘take you to the moon’,… and on the same EP he even does a cover of Neon Indian’s ‘Mind, Drips’…
He also played songs from his upcoming album ‘Get Your Burdens Lifted’, like the strangely beautiful ‘Danger in the Dancehall’, an eerie piece of music with a soothing melody that has already brought the attention of Rolling Stone magazine! It was described as a ‘song about insecurity in youth’, ‘a juxtaposition between fear and not really knowing what to fear’, contemplating the idea of having ‘this new found freedom and the whole world at your fingertips and no idea what to do with it’… He played it with the only use of his guitar of course, but if the version you can listen to below, with its spacious orchestration and dreamy landscape, demonstrates what the future album is gonna be, it is extremely promising.