This past autumn JUNO Award winning songwriter Donovan Woods completed the last of a busy year of touring, wrapping with U.S dates supporting The Gaslight Anthem, and releasing his first new music of the year, the single “I’m Around”. Delving deep into the complexities of human relationships and our confounding condition, is where Woods excels, and “I’m Around” showed Woods to be in peak form.
With the track Woods hinted that more new material was on the way, and today Donovan returns with “How Good”, a delicate song that sees the artist at his introspective best. Co-written with Steve Robson (James Blunt, Miley Cyrus, Maisie Peters), the tender, piano-driven song was intended as a lullaby for Woods and his wife during a patchy time.
Discussing the single, Woods noted that it was “essentially written for my wife and I, in a year when we sorely needed it. It describes a way of looking at the world that’s probably a little naive. My work puts added stress on us and I’m not the easiest person to be around to begin with, but everything can change in an instant, we all know this.”
On “How Good”, Woods pleads ‘What if we’ve only just begun / What if the only thing we don’t know yet / Is how good it’s gonna get.’ Woods says “we most often think about it in terms of bad news. What if things get good? Can we even handle that?” This contemplation of how change, good or bad, shows a songwriter at his contemplative best.
Woods’ featured vocals on Dabin & Nurko’s “When This Is Over” veered into anthemic dance pop, and yet he still sounded right at home. On “IOWA”, Woods found a kindred spirit in Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter Aoife O’Donovan for a pastoral meditation on dreaming of a place you know doesn’t exist.
Each of these collaborations has highlighted a budding truth about Woods: As respected as he is as a solo artist, he’s evolving and upending our expectations of how his music sounds. His songs have grown more dimensional, emboldened by new sonic landscapes, reminding us that classic songwriting transcends genre.
Comments are closed.