Sometimes throwing yourself into hard work is the best medicine when life throws you lemons.
This is the attitude singer/songwriter Royal Wood has taken on over the last year. Wood plays Communitea Café on Sept. 10-11 with Peter Katz.
Wood released his album The Burning Bright, a heart-felt nod to the breakup of his marriage to fellow singer Sarah Slean. Wood didn’t stop with the artistic outpouring.
Next came I Wish You Well, made with Wood’s guitar player Dean Drouillard, with the material Wood had furiously cached while holing himself up in Ireland to work and get away from it all. The next (and latest) piece of output to complete Wood’s artistic trinity is a CD/DVD live performance that was captured on Aug. 21 at London, Ontario’s Grand Theatre.
“It was amazing, it truly was. I love my band so much and it just worked, everything worked out, all the effort and all the rehearsals and bringing in the extra lights and the extra sound,” Wood said. “It was such a theatrical event because I was trying to find something special obviously for a DVD. I don’t think I’ve ever put that much effort before into any show – not even close.
“You don’t get to do that when you first start; you have to earn the right to make something like that and it’s been 10 years coming. I love my guys too, my entire band. For my own posterity’s sake I’m glad I captured what those guys do – it meant a lot.”
For the Peterborough native it was a journey of a thousand miles beginning with a single step towards a live recording and DVD.
“I always felt it wasn’t the right room or it wasn’t the right band yet, I just didn’t feel like I had the full repertoire that I wanted to showcase,” Wood said. “You don’t want to rush it, because once you do it, it’s done and you don’t put out another live DVD two years later.
“You need to do it when you’re ready. I just didn’t feel truly the show was there in many ways and finally with The Burning Bright and the way the band was sounding across the country on this tour, I knew this is it.:
Then the Grand Theatre offer came in, which seemed strange at the time for Wood because he had just done two sold-out concerts there in February.
“I was like, ‘are guys sure you want to bring me back to this theatre five months later on the heels of the same record?’” Wood said. “The promoters are obviously the ones who want to do it ... but everything just ended up working out because then the companion album was going to come out and we thought, Why don’t we release it at this London show and now we’ll film it? It just worked out, all the pieces fell into place and we got amazing press for it and it was packed and it’s going to look good, I’m happy.”
I Wish You Well was basically made at the same time as Wood’s The Burning Bright. He first went to L.A. and did a batch of songs with one producer there, and then went to work in Hamilton with another producer where even more new material was recorded.
“When I had all of them I stepped back and thought this is actually the perfect record,” Wood said. “The Burning Bright, all of this works, it tells a story from start to finish. I’ll take some of the songs from L.A. which ended up being the majority of them, about nine songs, and I took three or four from the Hamilton session and I’ll make The Burning Bright. But at the same time, I thought Dean (Drouillard, Wood’s guitar player since 2006) who did the Hamilton stuff as producer and I had a very specific vision when we did these songs and he and I have always co-produced my records from The Waiting onwards,” Wood said.
“He and I have worked together for years and I just felt like it was his time for his statement to have some focus, and attention and the credit that he deserves, so I Wish You Well ended up being this companion idea where I could really tip my hat to Dean.”
When Wood escaped to Ireland, he did a big disconnect from modernity. “No phone, no TV, no Internet and I just lived in this little cottage in the middle of nowhere.
“Oh my God, it was life changing,” Wood said. “I definitely did not return the same man I left, that’s for certain and all these songs started coming, so many songs that I started to realize I could go off in two different directions, hence going back to L.A. to make a bunch and doing others with Dean. I didn’t have an end result, I just kept following my gut and it’s worked out.”
Was this enormous amount of artistic output driven by the personal issues?
“I’d be lying otherwise. I think everything in life has an affect on you as an artist, because it should come from a genuine place and come from what’s going on in your life,” Wood said. “I certainly learned after making We Were Born to Glory I was never going to curtail myself or try to manufacture a record because that’s what I felt I did for half of that record – I was trying to make a pop hit or something and I’d never done that before and it felt horrible when I was done.
“When I got around to doing this I said, ‘I’m going to be an artist like I always was before and I’m just gonna make stuff, and put everything into making art again and it’s been very therapeutic.”
