Quality Americana

The Wood Brothers kick off our Song of the Day feature this week with a wonderfully uplifting track that has entered the top thirty of the Americana Music Association singles chart. 

Rolling piano gets your head bouncing before the band kicks in with drums and acoustic guitar. The upright bass from Chris Wood appears as the brothers from Boulder, Colorado build toward the chorus.

“This is a gorgeous piece of work. You are all on point. Love it, love it, love it,” user Charles T. replied to the official release on Youtube. 

The Wood Brothers release their eighth studio album

The Heart is the Hero is the eighth studio album from the Wood Brothers. The brothers learned poetry from their mother and their father played music at home. The brothers went off to pursue different styles as Chris formed jazz fusion group Medeski Martin & Wood and Oliver joined up with blues and soul performer Tinsley Ellis. 

After finding independent success in the music industry, the Wood Brothers performed together for the first time in North Carolina in 2001 and quickly realized they had something special. Five years later they were releasing their first studio album for Blue Note Records. 

Heart is the Hero really shows off how well the brothers work together. Oliver’s voice is intense and honest, and the bass and harmonies from Chris Wood fit perfectly. They decided to go back to analog for their latest release.  

“Tape gives you limitations that force you to be creative and intentional. You don’t look at the music on a screen; you listen to it, and you learn to focus on the feeling of the performance,” Oliver Wood said in a press release about the recording process.

The mind wants to believe that tape brings a level of warmth to a recording as well. 

“We did it more for the psychology of the creative process, which was to create these limitations where you don’t get to edit things and you don’t get to do things a million times. We have this expensive tape spinning around and you have to actually have a performance that you like and be somewhat prepared to do that,” Oliver said in an interview with Vail Daily.

Is analog recording better than digital?

The sound quality of this album is excellent, but we can say from previous releases the decision to record on tape is only a welcome bonus. Scientific American did a study to determine if audio quality is measurable better on analog versus a digital device. 

“Sound quality depends on a lot of factors, and it is impossible to definitively state that either analog or digital is fundamentally better,” Scientific American reported. “But the fact remains that analog captures a physical process whereas digital uses mathematics to reduce the process to finite bits of information. What, if anything, is lost in that reduction is difficult to pinpoint. But the limitations of math in replicating reality may factor in to the difference in listening experiences reported by so many vinyl lovers.”

The Wood Brothers have a magic when they come together that is hard to explain, just like their old school recording technique on this release. The “Heart is the Hero” is a sing-a-long that will stick in your head. 

More information on the Wood Brothers can be found here.

Photo taken at Old Settlers Music Festival by staff photographer Keith Kallina.

Follow Quality Americana on X for your Song of the Day.