Northern Sessions Interview

WITH DAELAN WOOD AND NATHAN BECK
October 29, 2016, Edmonton, Alberta

Q: When did you start playing the guitar and writing and composing?

A: I've been playing the guitar since 2008. I had a very short foray with it in my early
20's but it only lasted a couple of years. I don't think I was bonded with the particular
instrument I had. I've since learned that being connected with your instruments has a profound effect on how we connect into music. And.......the time of life when you meet music and start playing. I may not have really been ready for the guitar way back then.

My dad was a pianist and he taught me piano for awhile when I was young. I loved it. But I was also interested in more abstract improvisational music, but being in a household where classical music was dominant, that didn't work very well. Phillip Glass type sounds weren't on.

Q: When did being a recording artist start? What started it?

A: Actually, it really started around 2010. We had a close friend from university days die suddenly and tragically, I wrote an instrumental piece for him, recorded it on a small portable mic, and published it on UTube in commemoration. At that point I heard a voice inside saying 'that you gotta get on and do what you really want to do, time is short'. And I had wanted to be involved with music and writing and performing for a very, very long time. I didn't seem to be able to find my way until we moved to Alberta in 2008, everything changed then.

In 2011, I started working on my first album Solitaire. That blew me away when it started and the whole album was virtually recorded in two weeks over Christmas holidays. I really didn't know what I was doing, and the learning curve to date has been all straight up. Somewhere I'm hoping it levels off a bit for awhile so I can relax more with what I am doing.

I think it's important to me that people get inspired from what I'm doing now - and hear that voice inside that says 'hey, I can do that, or this, or whatever' - that thing they have dreamt of doing but for whatever reason didn't get to it earlier on in their lives. Our culture lays a dearth of social programming and "should's and shouldn'ts" on us. And when in your life you are supposed to do things or not.

I really like something that Marketa Irglova said when her and Glen Hansard got up to accept their Oscar for the documentary Once, "Fair play to those who dare to dream, and don't give up on your dreams". I'm sticking with that.
 

Q: What's next, where do you think you are going with it all?

A: Well I can see it but I'm not sure of my own path through it. I love the Indie movement and how it has made flourishing as an artist more open and accessible, it wasn't like that back in the 60's and 70's. Back then it was pretty impossible to do what I have done to date independently.
 

But even in the Indie stream now, there is an accepted path your supposed to take in order to venture into the larger public realm...........and I'm not sure about that for myself. I think there is a unique path, and mostly, I think that if I write and perform work that connects to a number of archetypal things I have experienced or seen around me over my life that resonate for other people, even if it's not their direct experience, then that's Beauty, and every one of us need all manner of forms of Beauty to relate to as a human being with spirit. Life without beauty is a dead zone.
 

This album, Where To Now, is about just that. The points you arrive at in life where you have to re-think 'what next'.

Q: Who have been influential to you and your music?

A: Oh wow.........well, I've been around a little while. There are always a lot of things I listen to, but there are certain things that seem to stick in the core. But I have to say, I do find contemporary artists through friends, colleagues and acquaintances that I listen to that aren't yet big name artists.
 

There have been influences whom I really like what they do, but when I work out and put together my music, it just comes out different, so I think influences are more inspirational than emulative. I have to say, learning other artists music provides a huge opening into all manner of things......and that's important to me now creatively.
 

For sure artists like Ry Cooder, Ali Farka Toure, Mark Knopfler, were a big influence for me on my first and second albums, and I feel John Butler is a strong influence. Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin mostly their acoustic and rhythmic music, and the composition of how the songs progress, the instrumentation, it was contemporary rock of its time but it also had a quality of 14th or 15th century elements acoustically.
 

Of the contemporaries, Feist, Boniver, The Lumineres, Mandolin Orange, Barr Brothers, Charlie Parr, Coldplay, Bjork, Sigur Ros, St. Vincent, Cowboy Junkies, Kaki King, Michael Hedges, Radiohead, The Tragically Hip, Counting Crows, Birds of Chicago, The Cranberries ( there older music ), Basia Bulat, Hope Sandoval, James Vincent McMorrow, Cocteau Twins.
 

And then there are timeless influences from another age, Pink Floyd, Yes, Jefferson Airplane, CSNY, Cat Stevens, The Beatles, Bruce Coburn, Bob Dylan, Kate Bush, Super Tramp, Neil Young, Dire Straights, Brian Eno, Laurie Anderson, Joni Mitchell, America, Simple Minds.
 

One of my mentors a few years ago put me onto Nick Drake and his Pink Moon Album which has been a huge inspiration. That had a lot to do with my conceptual approach to Where To Now. I wanted the songs to be able to stand on their own acoustically when all the other instrumentation is stripped away.
 

More recently, I've been working on educating myself with some of the roots of roots music going back to the 40's, it's a big project to nibble away at, and it's all new to me.
 

Q: Tell us about the community projects your supporting?

A: Well I was sitting in City Council one day in November 2011 and there was a group of representatives from iHuman presenting their case to council for maintaining yearly city funding. A young fellow who is an alumni and now a counsellor at iHuman, got up to speak and told his story of being a street kid and how iHuman changed his life. It was an extremely moving story, and I decided then and there to contribute. So downloads from my first album Solitaire went to them. And I later helped them get their facility Extreme Makeover project started by bringing their cause into where I worked at the time and getting the company behind them.
 

I wanted the albums to work for themselves when I published them. So I committed donating whatever I got from downloads to an organization or cause. A year later I discovered YESS who rescue kids off the streets at night and provide them with safe shelter in dorms, and meals. So downloads from my second album Heaven's Arms went to YESS. With Were To Now I'm supporting the Canadian branch of Doctors Without Boarders, they're doing a lot of work with the refugee crisis.
 

As an unknown artist, it's not been much, in the hundreds, not hundreds of thousands, but I feel like the music is doing something besides being just entertaining. I rely right now solely on my small social networks to push the music and the community projects.
 

Q: Going forward.........?

A: I believe in serendipity, the unseen and unanticipated which comes out in creative focus a lot, staying with your dream, believing in yourself and your passion, cosmic influence, hard work, and absolutely occasional good luck. And people I meet along the way have been significant catalysts.
 

Where To Now represents a fundamental shift for me from instrumental music to being a singer/song writer. I moved there gingerly through releasing my first two singles. Now that I feel I have a respectable first body of work to share, I have started to get out and perform, really small venues with open Mics. There's a whole world of playing live that I'm having to learn. 
 

I had not previously openly celebrated releasing my first two albums, so I decided to do that with Where To Now and have an album release party. That was an amazingly special moment and I was very fortunate how that all came about and the artists that were with me. 

2017? I'm going to see if I can get on with a few small slots in a few summer music festivals, keep writing and look for opportunities to perform more. There's new music already in the works, so I look forward to playing that publicly.