Leslie Woods defies labels but makes great music
by Joe Tarr
Leslie Woods is cold. She's ordered a mug of hot water from the Downtown Grill & Brewery and has plunked a bag of herbal tea into it to warm up on a chilly January afternoon.
She hates winter. "I love where I live in the summer, with all the gardens," she says. "But there's nothing fun about being on a farm in the winter. We heat with wood. I raise birds, and I have to go out and break up their water in the winter when it freezes."
Raising birds also requires her to occasionally stand vigil with a shotgun near her barn. You see, every once in a while a skunk will find a way to get at her birds, which make an easy, tasty meal. Eliminating said skunk—and dealing with the stinky corpse afterward—is part of keeping birds and living on the five-acre farm in Corryton.
All of which might make you think the 38-year-old Woods epitomizes the alt-country chick, a tough East Tennessee woman with a guitar and some sad country or bluegrass songs.
But it's impossible to pigeonhole Woods. For most of her life she's been a city girl, not a farm hand. She grew up in Fort Sanders, where she was a child of that neighborhood's once vibrant music scene. She was known for her glamorous punk outfits, sometimes astonishing the club kids by showing up in Marlene Dietrich-style dresses and heavy makeup. "The first thing I ever stole was a pair of false eyelashes," she says. "That was like in the fifth grade."
It wasn't until her 30s that she learned to play guitar and started writing music. Like her style, the sound is difficult to classify. "You could force me into the Americana thing, without the shoes and the hair and the make-up."
In some ways it feels like old-time music filtered through the Velvet Underground.
Woods and her band, Dark Mountain Orchid, will release their second album, The Luxury of Sin, this Friday. It's a spectacular release, one that more fully realizes Woods' ambitions.
The recording for her debut album, Velvet Sky, wasn't quite what she'd hoped for. Brought into a studio with professionals, she let them run the show.
"I got run over. I didn't speak up because I thought I didn't know anything. Some of the songs on there didn't come out like I was hearing them," she says.
"I'm like a really bad art director. I'll say, 'I don't like that.' 'Well, what do you like?' I don't know. There are times when I know the band really hates me. It's a struggle to get what I hear in my head out of this band. I can't verbalize it," Woods says. "I hear everything extremely slow."
The band—including Bob Deck on guitar, Jeff Woods on acoustic bass, Tom Backus on drums, Sean O'Connell on mandolin, banjo, accordion—has become more in tune with the music in Woods' brain. And Woods is in awe that they're able to translate her vision to sound.
"I don't know how I got hooked up with these guys, but they're just amazing," she says. "They just went in [the studio] and knocked it out. A lot of the songs they knocked out on the first take."
A few notable guests appear on The Luxury of Sin: R.B. Morris, Tim Lee, Sara Griscom, and Dixie Dirt, which back her on the final track.
The music is somber and dark, but not lugubrious. There's catharsis in the lament. The songs are filled with heartache, murder, unrequited love.
"I think it's the subjects I choose, or that choose me. It's odd because I generally like more aggressive music," she says. "When I started writing all this stuff, I knew it was a lonely road I was going down."
Her approach to songwriting is mostly inspirational. "Individual songs I give 10 minutes, and if they don't fall out, I dump them." Woods says. "I never rework it. The band does. They rework their own parts. But once I write the words and melody, I'm done."
The band opened for Sparklehorse at the Orange Peel in Asheville, a gig Woods was thrilled to get. She'd like to tour more, but doesn't have much hope that will happen. The music is too somber and slow to work in many venues.
"We have a hard time finding places to play. We're so quiet, we can't really play rock clubs. We're not bluegrass. Most listening rooms like the Orange Peel are too big for us," she says. "And we have a hard time getting airplay. Bands like Low, Red House Painters, and Sparklehorse aren't getting airplay, but they have a following. How are they getting out there?"
People try to classify her music nonetheless. Velvet Sky has been put in the folk, country, bluegrass and rock sections of record stores.
"That's one of the reasons I finally got the band to adopt a name," she says of Dark Mountain Orchid. "I don't want to be perceived as a tiny folk chick with a guitar."
February 5, 2003 * Vol. 14, No. 6
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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