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The Republic
As Jason P. Woodbury was preparing to release a hazy, psychedelic daydream of a debut album titled “Something Happening/Always Happening” in 2022, he thought it best to keep his musical identity in a separate box than his other creative endeavors, using his initials, JPW, to create some space between the two.
The former Phoenix New Times music editor is a longtime journalist who’s written liner notes, contributed to Aquarium Drunkard, Pitchfork and MOJO (among others), hosted a weekly Transmissions podcast and Range and Basin on Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard and launched the online channel WASTOIDS with the Format’s Sam Means through Hello Merch.
“I think somewhere in my head, I had it in mind that JPW as a band name kind of created some distance between me, the artist/musician and my writing and podcasting work,” he says. “For some reason that felt good and necessary at the time. And now it doesn’t so much.”
Hence the decision to “embrace my given name,” as he puts it, on “Jason P. Woodbury & the Night Bird Singing Quartet,” his third release in four years, following last year’s “Amassed Like A Rat King,” which was credited to JPW & Dad Weed.
There were other reasons for the rebrand.
“The sort of boring answer is that JPW is just not that great when it comes to search engine optimization and stuff like that,” Woodbury says. “There’s also, I think, two other JPWs that release music. They kept getting tagged to my profile and people would think I shifted into rap or electronic music because that’s what those people make.”
There’s no risk of mistaking the music on “Jason P. Woodbury & the Night Bird Singing Quartet” for rap or electronic music.
In its dreamier moments – the otherworldly “Get to Meet Them” chief among them – the album feels like something of a natural extension of the enigmatic “Something Happening/Always Happening.”
Other highlights find the singer and the members of his Night Bird Singing Quartet (including Zach Toporek aka Dad Weed) exploring a sound that’s much closer in spirit to the golden age of power-pop with the melodic sensibilities it takes to pull that off.
Here’s what Woodbury, who’s married to Becky Bartkowski, senior director of content for this publication, has to say about the rebrand and how his new album was partly inspired by riding through the desert with his family as a UFO-obsessed young man from Coolidge.
‘A band recording with my name smashed on top of it’
Do you see this project then as a new thing or an extension of what you have been doing?
The last record was JPW & Dad Weed. That was just the two of us. And then with this one, it’s the band that came together to play both JPW and JPW & Dad Weed music live. So this is a new project in the sense that Rick (Heins), Rob (Kroehler), Andrew (Bates) and Zach are all over this record and it is absolutely a band recording with my name smashed on top.
So it feels like an extension but also a new project, if that makes much sense. I was thinking of it as a JPW record pretty much right up until we started making the art. That’s when it sort of started to make a little more sense, and I thought, “Hey, let’s do it. Let’s rebrand.”
Did you find yourself writing these songs with a band in mind more so than previous stuff you’ve done?
Totally. Yeah, big time. There’s a song on there called “Gila River” that’s an instrumental, and I don’t actually play anything on it. I wrote it and it’s based on my demo and pretty much a direct replication of stuff I did. But that’s the guys. That’s everybody minus me.
There’s lots of moments where my footprint, as far as what I’m doing on this record, is a little more minimal, just vocals and stuff like that in addition to, of course, writing the stuff. I just love playing with these guys so much. Everybody brings so much skill and energy and really interesting taste to the table.
How Jason P. Woodbury was ‘moved to tears’ by a surprise
How did you come to not play on that track?
There’s a funny story about that. We have a Dropbox where we share stuff, and I had a demo of the song uploaded. Zach, who produced the record and is a multi-instrumentalist, he plays a little of everything and sings, plays drums, recorded it, engineered it, all that. He got Andrew and Rick together without me as just a surprise. And they just recorded it.
He took the demo, learned it, played the guitars. He kind of came up with the bridge section. We were pretty much done with the record and we had a rule: No more songs. ‘Cause we had, like, two or three songs that kind of dropped in last minute. It was that thing of “We have to finish this record. We have to say we’re done with it. At some point, the songs that we’re writing can go on the next thing or whatever.”
So we had a rule in place, but he got the guys together and did a session. Then I was over and we were doing some vocals, putting some finishing touches on things. He goes, “Hey, let me show you something that I recently cooked up.” He pressed play, and it just blew me away, right? I was like, “This is nuts. This is my song, but interpreted by this incredible band.” It sounded so good, and I was so excited.
I said, “This has to go on the record.” And he was like, “I know.” So we broke our rule and put it on the record. A lot of this record, working with these guys gave me the opportunity to let go of certain things and trust them. And that was the case with that.
When I heard it, I was moved to tears by the fact that this was a song that I had kind of forgotten about or didn’t think fit on the record. And here it was so faithfully brought to life by my friends and collaborators. That was just a huge, huge honor and really exciting. It was like a little present to me.
How childhood memories shaped the writing of this album
Could you talk about the role your childhood memories played in the writing?
It’s not all about that, but it’s a lot about that. For whatever reason, I found myself thinking a lot about my youth. My first record, “Something Happening/Always Happening,” kind of focused a lot on growing up in Coolidge.
This one sort of focuses a little bit more on my parents divorced when I was a kid and my mom lived in Chandler and my dad lived in Coolidge. We lived in Coolidge predominantly with my dad, but we’d go up to the Valley every weekend to see my mom. And that drive down the 87, I spent so much of my youth on that road, listening to the radio in my mom’s car.
As we started working on this, I felt like a lot of the sonic touchstones I sort of remembered from listening to the Zone as a kid were kind of trickling in. And with the sonic stuff came family memories.
A lot of it’s about road trips with my grandparents. My grandfather passed away last year after a kind of long illness. So he was on my mind.
I was thinking about him and my grandma and how those road trips really, I don’t want to say they formed my imagination, but so much of my youth was spent on these road trips, be they between Coolidge and Chandler with my mom and my brother Brad, or through the Four Corners states with my grandparents and my brother and cousin. I just found myself reflecting a lot on those.
I turned 41 last year, but I turned 40 while we were making this record and found myself thinking about my youth in a different way. So it just kind of seeped into the writing, kind of pushed along by some of those sonic touchstones of ’90s alt-pop.
I don’t know what you’d call the format of KZON. Was it adult contemporary? Whatever that was in the ’90s. But it sort of all kind of dovetailed and that’s just some place that I tend to go when I’m working on music is into those memories.
I can see where you would. It’s fertile ground for imagination to wander.
I mean, just driving through the desert, it’s this vast expanse of land. Your mind wanders. You’re a kid looking out the window, listening to the Gin Blossoms on the radio or whatever. It just somehow became this really evocative space for me and I found these songs sort of pouring out of and into that space in a certain way, although there’s other stuff on the record, too, lots of other ideas.
It’s weird how one narrative about what the record’s about never fully seems to suffice because there’s all these other things that pour into it, some of it not quite as autobiographical. And yet this record also has some of the most autobiographical stuff I’ve ever written.
Jason P. Woodbury on waiting for the UFOs
Your press materials mention Phoenix UFO lore and a fascination with extraterrestrials. Let’s talk about that.
Let’s talk about that. What to say? That song, “Get to Meet Them,” the them in the reference is aliens or whatever.
And I guess, over the last couple of years, we’ve seen a pretty strange shift in the way people talk about UFOs or aliens or UAP or however you want to say it. In some ways, I feel like it’s more mainstream than ever, right? You’ve got the New York Times writing stories about our own government’s investigation into all this stuff.
I don’t have, like, a set of beliefs when it comes to UFOs or what they are or what any of this stuff is. But it’s fascinated me for my whole life.
As a kid, I think you can’t help but sort of be fascinated by that stuff. And there’s this weird confluence of religion and science fiction and UFOs and watching “Men in Black” and driving. … I remember on one of these road trips, a different road trip with my dad and stepmom and siblings on that side, going to the Roswell UFO Museum and just sort of being dazzled by that.
Then, of course, the Phoenix Lights is this crazy thing that happened in our own backyard. When you’re a kid and you’re watching the news and Fife Symington brings out an alien and he’s like, “We’ve apprehended the guys” or whatever, and he has a guy in an alien suit, I don’t know, the way all that pours into the imagination is a little mysterious to me, but it was just this thing I’m really fascinated by.
And I think stuff like that just functions nicely as a metaphor for the unknown. So that’s sort of what I’m getting at there, this idea of the unknown and of there being mysteries in the world that we can’t put our finger on and say what it is or isn’t. I think all of that sort of felt like it added some nice color to the material.
There’s really only one song about aliens on the record, but, you know, it counts. They’re hiding in the others. Maybe we could say all the instrumentals are also maybe about aliens. Who knows?
The spiritual side of ‘& The Night Bird Singing Quartet’
Speaking of mysteries of the world, there’s also a spiritual component to the record. The press materials quote you as saying, “They are all praise songs of sorts.”
On one hand, I’m just trying to be poetic and over the top for the sake of the bio. But it’s true. I grew up in a very strongly rooted Christian faith. And it’s weird because I don’t necessarily know that I would define myself along those lines anymore. But music offers, for me at least, this space that feels almost intrinsically spiritual.
I cite the Sufi mystic Hazrat Inayat Khan in the bio too, where he says something along the lines of “Someday music will be a means for a universal form of religion.” And to me, that’s sort of what it is. Music is a space where it feels inherently spiritual to me, and it feels like I can explore spiritual ideas free of dogma or free of any real need to tell anybody what it is I mean or what it is I think.
Certainly, I’m not interested in preaching or anything along those lines with my material. It’s more a space that I can carve out for myself. So songs like “Get to Meet Them” and “Is It the Light,” specifically, are these things where I’m kind of exploring notions of, I don’t know, damnation, transcendence, all of it at once.
And for me, having the outlet of music as a way to explore that territory and keep all the mystery intact, because music feels inherently mysterious to me, is really powerful. So it’s weirdly a mystic kind of record, I think, in some ways. I’m trying to touch the ineffable. And failing. But trying.
Why water flows through the lyrics on Jason P. Woodbury album
When you were talking about the role your childhood memories played in the record, you said you can’t say it’s only about this. It’s about all these other things. We’ve touched on some other things. What other elements do you think shaped these songs?
I think water flows through the record in a weird way, which sounds like a strange thing for a desert rock record to be about water. But water is obviously this precious thing that is rare in the desert and hard to come by.
I’m a native Arizonan and I live here and I love it here despite certain things that I don’t love about this place, be they certain political elements or cultural whatever. But I think to live here and to be a thoughtful person is also to be concerned about the lack of resources and the potential for climate change to even further complicate the ecological sustainability of this place.
So I think water is a big part of it. I think family is a big part of it. I think mystery is a big part of it. And then it was important to me as I was approaching that kind of material that feels kind of heady and maybe a little bit, I don’t know, complex, to make sure that there’s also some humor in it.
So a song like “What Else is New” is basically me kind of goofing on myself a little bit and sort of letting the air out of the balloon that I’m blowing up with the record, you know? “Thunder Deepens” has a little of that too.
But yeah, I think the water thing is a big part of it. Water sort of flows into the songs in a strange way, specifically the last song, “The Season Has Arrived.” And “Gila River.”
The Gila River used to flow through the native reservation near Coolidge, the same one that we drove through. And it’s dammed off by the Coolidge Dam. But there were times in my youth where really heavy rainfall would get it flowing again. And those always felt just absolutely magical to me, those moments where you’d see water flowing through the desert like that.
I think it was maybe 1993, there were these really big floods, and the 87, a stretch of it got washed out. So we’d have to take these alternate routes to get between my mom’s and my dad’s. And just seeing water like that in the desert made me think a lot about life, about the necessity of water for life. So that’s in there.
And you can’t talk about native reservations without thinking about the history of colonialism too, and the displacement of native people. So I think that stuff’s in there. I’m not making statements about it so much as trying to just sort of make sure that that’s part of the narrative too, if that makes sense.
How The Night Bird Singing Quartet came to be called that
Is there a story behind the Night Bird Singing Quartet?
Becky was out of town and I just was home with the dogs or whatever. And I woke up one night to this absolutely bonkers-sounding bird in our backyard, in the middle of the night, just letting loose with this bizarre bird call type thing. It woke me up and I don’t know, something about it stuck with me, this notion of a birdsong in the middle of the night and music in the middle of the night.
Beyond that, tying back into the personal side of things, a nickname I had as a kid that some family still calls me is Jaybird or Bird. So all of that kind of flowed into it too. And the Night Bird Singing Quartet to me sounded jazzy and cool. So I was like, “We’re gonna name the band that on this record.” Then “Birdsong” being about the role music plays in my life, its importance in my life, its centrality in my life.
We didn’t even really put stuff about my childhood nickname being Jaybird or Bird into the bio. It almost occurred to me later, like, “Oh well, that’s partially what you’re talking about here. You’re talking about this understanding of yourself and how music has always been a tool to define who I am to myself, chiefly.” So all that kind of kind of got in the mix and it just had a nice ring to it.
Jason P. Woodbury & the Night Bird Singing Quartet
When: 6 p.m. Saturday, March 14.
Where: The Dirty Drummer, 2303 N. 44th St., Phoenix.
Admission: $10.
Details: 602-840-2726, thedirtydrummer.com.
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Ed has covered pop music for The Republic since 2007, reviewing festivals and concerts, interviewing legends, covering the local scene and more. He did the same in Pittsburgh for more than a decade. Follow him on X and Instagram @edmasley and on Facebook as Ed Masley. Email him at [email protected].
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