The Woods - Cowcatcher

Listen to Cowcatcher by The Woods.

The Woods - A Bear's Head In A Lion's Mouth

Listen to A Bear's Head In A Lion's Mouth by The Woods.

The Woods - God Ring

Listen to God Ring by The Woods.

The Woods - Taking Turns And Keeping Score

Listen to Taking Turns And Keeping Score by The Woods.

The Woods - Drink Black Ink

Listen to Drink Black Ink by The Woods.

Timeline of The Woods/The Clearing:

The Woods
March 2007:
- James (guitar) and Luke (drums/production) look to form a band, and ask me to play bass for some reason. I had never played bass before, but I decided "the heck with it!" and began my quest to wield that axe like a champion.

March to September or so, 2007:
- We begin jamming in Luke's recording studio.
- We record everything we play. For the first few months it sounds like anemic kittens sighing on guitar strings two rooms over. Really wimpy.
- Jams of failure, with brief flashes of catchiness and technical skill, although this is almost always accidental.
- As time goes on, the audio quality of our recordings improves.
- Sometime during the summer I acquire a better bass, a huge amp, and an overdrive pedal. I start to sound like Mt. Everest punching the Sun in the face with a tank.

September 2007 to March 2008:
- Jams are still full of failure, but we start to bust out some really good, heavy rock-ish songs on a much more consistent basis.

March 2008:
- Luke moves to the west coast, effectively ending The Woods after one year and over 400 songs recorded, although many of these are re-takes and aimless jams. Which brings us to...

The Clearing
March 2008 - March 2009:
- James and I doing the same exact thing, but without drums. Until...

The Clearing (v. 2)
March 2009 - likely March 2010, if history is any indication?:
- We finally found a new drummer named Kenny, who has played with us a few times thus far. We've already come up with a couple decent tunes. Any additional progress will be posted at The Clearing website. Thanks for listening.

The Clearing session art

My current band is called The Clearing. Clare asked me, "Did you cut all the trees down?" Yes we did, if by "trees" you mean any sort of percussion or audio fidelity.

Here's all the cover art I've done so far for The Clearing practice sessions. You can hear Woods and Clearing songs here.

The Woods session art pt. two

My old band was called The Woods. We recorded all of our practice sessions. The image above is all the "cover art" I made for the sessions. All the images are from pictures I've taken. Some are straight, others are digitally messed-with.

I previously posted a bunch of Woods album art. I recently decided that a lot of them were super lame so I either punched them up a little, or made new ones entirely. I usually don't put a whole lot of thought into these. I just look for a picture that has something interesting going on that can be cropped into a little square. Either that or I take a random picture and Photoshop the daylights out of it until it looks cool. Sometimes I try to match the picture to the mood of the music, but more often than not I just stick the picture on there and hope it happens naturally. I'm pretty happy with this batch.

The Woods, RIP

My band, The Woods, ended yesterday, a year to the day after we started. It consisted of James on guitar, Luke on drums, and me on bass. I'm not sure how to describe the music other than it usually rocked. Luke is moving to the other side of the country, so that's that.

The first image is a collage I made out of paper illustrations from various sources. I just tacked some text on it for this post, but maybe we'll use it for album art if we ever narrow our songs down to a listenable few and put them on a CD.

The second image is a collage of the "album art" I made for each of our recording sessions. Luke is a music producer, and he recorded all our sessions in his home studio. We typically got together once a week and jammy-jammed (but I swear we weren't a jam band). It was very unstructured, and we never really "practiced", although there are many songs that we ran through numerous times. I'd always hoped we'd get it together and really nail some songs down, but in the end that's not really what we were about.

We ended our run with around 400 songs recorded, all live in the studio. All guitar, bass, and drums. We never played out anywhere. It was definitely one of the best things I've done with myself in the past year. I went in having never played the bass before, and came out knowing what a bass is and how to hold it. Although I wish we had written more complete songs, I'm really happy that we created the ridiculously bloated and noisy body of work that we did.

In the wake of our rock 'n roll death (bandicide?), James and I are looking for a drummer to start a new band. I'd also like to try adding a second guitarist to see what that would sound like. If you/your friend/your gramps play(s) drums, or guitar, or any other instrument (but not bass!), give me a holler.