After nine albums, and a decade as a critically acclaimed artist – and a successful songwriter for others – Donovan Woods has seen his blend of folk, country, and pop resonate with audiences worldwide. He isn’t a household name, but he’s built a devoted following, some of whom cling to his every hushed word.
At the 2016 Canadian Folk Music Awards, Woods won the English Songwriter of the Year honour; in 2017, it was the SOCAN Folk/Roots Award; two years later, the JUNO Award for Contemporary Roots Album of the Year (for Both Ways). His songs have been recorded by country stars like Tim McGraw and Lady A singer Charles Kelley, and he’s co-written No. 1 Canadian country hits for The Reklaws and Chad Brownlee. He’s also co-written half the songs on his current album, Things Were Never Good If They’re Not Good Now, with such star-adjacent songsmiths as Amy Wadge (Ed Sheeran, Camila Cabello), David Hodges (Celine Dion, Avril Lavigne), and Chirs Braide (Sia, Beyoncé). As careers go, he’s doing alright.
Select the image to play the YouTube video of the Donovan Woods song “When Our Friends Come Over”
His songs, conversely, capture the kind of everyday personal struggles to which many can relate. Propelled by acoustic guitar, soft-spoken vocals, solo saxophones, string quartets, and spoken-word passages low in the mix (including an excerpt of one of his own therapy sessions), Woods doesn’t describe the romantic vicissitudes of youth – the lifeblood of popular music. Rather, he makes music as an adult, for other adults. The songs on Things Were Never Good… navigate the challenges of marriage; the sacrifices of accepting endless labour to support a family; the faded or abandoned dreams of younger days; the passing on of friends; even the inevitability of death. Lest that sound depressing, it’s often leavened with humour, and the small-detail mercies found in daily life.
“It’s not so much about where you are as it is about what you notice,” says Woods. “Those things [details] are just, kind of, window dressing to our lives, but I do think that’s where you can keep yourself sane. Ritual, and stuff like that. Going for a walk. The writing that I like best is stuff that has the feeling of being alive, which is not just emotion; it’s like, making a cup of tea while you want to kill yourself,” he laughs. “It’s the things that still have to go on while you’re feeling horrible… You’ve still got to clean the kitchen.
“Being an adult,” he continues, “you’re still reckoning with all the emotions that you had when you were 20… You still feel jealous, still feel ashamed of yourself, still worry if your partner loves you as much as they did. And not only that, you’re making a school lunch for your kids. Those details start to mean something different as you get older. I think that’s what makes good writing feel the way living a life feels in your head. You have to navigate these small things while going through these big things.”
Similarly, Woods songs embrace real-life contradictions. For example, “When Our Friends Come Over” (co-written and co-sung by Madi Diaz), is sung by both halves of a married couple, about how the presence of another, visiting couple for a home-cooked dinner renews their love. But in the bridge, “We wake up / and it’s all changed” the next day.
“I often do wonder about why I can’t write a song like that where I don’t take a turn in the bridge,” says Woods. “I wonder why I can’t just let it be beautiful… To my own detriment, probably, I have real allergy to lack of complexity.”
Complexity thrives in the density of Woods’s songwriting. He’s like Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Raymond Carver, who described himself as “inclined toward brevity and intensity,” as he compacted people’s entire lives into his short stories. In “Back for the Funeral,” Woods does it in five verses, where the telling details in each could easily be expanded into a whole other song.
Select the image to play the YouTube video of the Donovan Woods song “Back for the Funeral”
To wit: “Katie got divorced / Moved back in with her mom / Needed a fresh start / Dyed her hair blonde.” It begs the question, what’s the rest of her story? Why’d she get divorced? Or: “After the service we’ll all meet up at the bar / Where my dad used to drink / Now he just drinks in the yard.” What happened to your dad? How’d he get that way? Such concise minimalism makes a three-minute song seem more like a novel, or a movie.
“Back for the Funeral” was inspired when Woods returned to his hometown for two burials on the same day, as he and his old high school friends shuttled from one to the next, and ended up at the bar. “The overriding sentiment there was, we all felt terrible about how we were having the best time,” says Woods. “I was writing with Lori McKenna and Matt Nathanson… You say an idea to Lori, and she writes directly at it. The first line she writes, you just go, ‘Jesus, cool it!’” he laughs. “She’s able to get straight into something so intensely, it’s crazy. She writes like a knife… There’s something about that song that feels like a dog running: every line grasps the next piece of earth and shoves it back.”
Which is when the craft of his songwriting feels like it’s working well. “Every once in awhile, you get to a place like that when you’re writing,” says Woods. “Songwriting is like a high-wire act. The challenge is not trying to write good lines, it’s to not write a bad one. Though bad ones serve a purpose sometimes, to make the good ones look better… Songwriting is like keeping the balloon up. And you can feel it while you’re writing: ‘Oh, we have an opportunity to be good.’ Eighty percent of the time, you can’t quite do it, and you can’t figure out why.”
Woods explains his purpose in songwriting, almost accidentally, in the first few lines of his song “Well Read” – written, ironically, out of frustration with a bout of writer’s block:
I am trying to make something somebody might like
I am convincing a stranger I’m a nice guy…
I am whispering a secret like a guideline
Whispering secrets like guidelines, Woods harbours no illusions about how widely he might ever be embraced. “I understand that [what I do] is not what a lot of people want out of music,” he says. “The people who give me the most honest reviews are those I grew up with in Sarnia. I sent this album to my friend Jay, and he’s, like, ‘Pretty sleepy one!’” he laughs.
“Some people, when they hear an acoustic guitar, and a guy singing the way I sing, they go, ‘Oh, who gives a fuck about this?’” he laughs. “And there’s nothing you can do about that.”