Features

Woods and Real Estate : A Scene of Their Own

Woods live

Meanwhile, on the other side of Manhattan, Woods was taking shape in Brooklyn. Though DeRoeck, Earl and Taveniere were friends in college, Woods didn’t begin until around 2004 and didn’t really get off the ground until a few years later.

“Music was just something to do for fun in college, but when we moved to Brooklyn, things changed,” Earl says dismissively of his Purchase years when he studied fine art and printmaking. Ironically, his visual art background is what makes Woods more than a band: everything from his thick-rimmed glasses to his band’s hand-drawn album art to his careful statements feels tied to some greater artistic vision.

“It’s the poor man’s art school,” DeRoeck says bluntly of Purchase. “All these kids take drugs and make music in the woods. Most of it sucks but some of it ends up being pretty good.”

Earl, Taveniere and DeRoeck moved to Bushwick after college and set up shop at the Rear House, a freestanding house surrounded by brick buildings that served as their communal crash pad, recording studio, rehearsal space and headquarters.

“It was really cheap for the neighborhood—just a couple hundred bucks each,” Taveniere reminisces. “[It was] pretty close quarters but we made music all the time in the living room.”

All three musicians dabbled in a number of different projects, including mildly successful hardcore and indie outfits. They also reconnected with tape-effects maestro G. Lucas Crane, a literary buff living another life as an experimental audiophile.

“At Purchase, I knew Lucas as this weird dude,” Earl chuckles. “In Brooklyn, he lived at [artist collective-cum-venue] Fort Awesome and became involved in the underground, experimental music scene.” (Crane also wired the influential Queens, N.Y. club Silent Barn.)

Despite their perseverance, the band members’ previous projects never attracted national attention. “We were a band for five years and worked hard—we toured the U.S. three or four times and it didn’t really go anywhere,” admits Earl. “I started fiddling around on guitar, recording on a four-track. That was basically how Woods started: me in a bedroom learning how to write songs.”

Along with DeRoeck and Taveniere, Earl started recording creepy, freak-folk pop nuggets that had the ability to unwind into kraut-rock jams. Fueled by his hardcore past and previous failures, Earl’s falsetto fell somewhere between angelic and demonic sounds. The overall formula worked.

“Woods picked up,” Earl says simply. “Maybe some things were easier because we sort of knew what to do—we got presented with different, bigger opportunities so we just took it and ran with it.”

At a time when many bands shied away from the jamband tag—and still used MySpace to promote their music—Woods listed “jamband” as one of their styles on MySpace.

“We thought it was fun to push that from the beginning because we did jam, we were a band, ” says Earl, who grew up listening to Phish and Medeski Martin and Wood alongside punk and is still an outspoken Dead fan. “We’re not your everyday jamband but we do come from a similar place [like] the Grateful Dead.”

Crane blossomed into an integral part of the band’s live show, adding keyboards and tape effects as well as singing through headphones that he had rewired as a microphone.

“He was always just our smart friend—he never played traditional instruments,” Taveniere says before pausing to rephrase. “I guess he still doesn’t play any traditional instruments.”

As Woods took shape, DeRoeck left the band. Though the exact reasons for his departure are unclear, various indicators point to a drug problem. (Now clean, he continues to perform under the name Little Gold.) In need of a roommate, the rest of Woods sublet space to Kevin Morby, a local musician barely out of his teens who ended up joining the band on bass. “He turned 21 on Woods tour,” Earl adds with a sense of familiar reverence.

Earl, a natural leader and source of intrigue for everyone interviewed for this feature, solidified his place as family patriarch by forming a record label, Woodsist, in 2006.

Woodsist went on to release early recordings by blogger buzz bands Kurt Vile, Wavves, Vivian Girls and numerous others. “I’d meet these bands in the middle of nowhere, and thought, ‘I’ve gotta put out a record for them,’” says Earl. “I started with tapes and that evolved to where I could actually press a record.”

His A & R role also led him to the Real Estate family.

Initially, Earl was interested in signing Mondanile’s Predator Vision project, but Mondanile pushed him to consider Real Estate instead. At first the members of Real Estate were unsure about the deal. “I’m self-conscious—I don’t know if anybody likes our music,” Courtney says naturally, shifting his eyes toward the ground. “I wondered if he just liked us because we were [featured on the website] Pitchfork.”

Given their shared stylistic roots, regular guy demeanors and ability to tour with jamband fervor while recording like indie audiophiles, the members of Woods and Real Estate quickly transitioned from labelmates to friends. A few key collaborative bills and numerous recording sessions helped blur the lines between individual bands to the point where often appear like members of a larger collective capable of breaking off into any number of teams.