The Made In The Midwest concert series, presented by Des Moines Performing Arts, is about halfway through its first season. Friday night, they’ll be presenting Ames-based Matt Woods, who’ll be bringing his solo acoustic blues sound to the Temple Theatre stage. I recently asked Woods how he felt about being the only blues performer on the series lineup.
“It's nice to be a part of it,” said Woods. “It seems like (at) a lot of the bigger events around Central Iowa, unless it's a blues-focused event like the Winter Blues Fest, the roots music aspect seems to be something that's left out of things. So it's nice to be included, whether it was me or somebody else that does something similar.”
There’s a good chance you’ve heard Matt Woods’ music on Studio One in the past, especially if you’re a fan of Blue Avenue with Bob Dorr. Blue Avenue has featured live recordings of Woods in the past, both solo and with the Matt Woods Band, at events like Winter Blues Fest and the Bowlful Of Blues Festival in Newton. Woods has also won the Iowa Blues Challenge multiple times, and he’s released several albums, solo and with both the Matt Woods Band and The Thunderbolts.
Woods says he’s felt “driven” to play the blues almost since he began playing guitar. “I was kind of just learning to play guitar and picking out a couple of cowboy chords here and there, and I heard a recording by Son House,” said Woods. “That kind of struck me like lightning and really sent me on my way. It just happened at the right time in my life where I needed to fill a hole or whatever, and I just kept with it.”
Although he loves all kinds of American roots music, Woods is most comfortable playing Delta blues in the style of his early inspiration Son House. He also regularly plays early Chicago-style blues. Woods maintains a pretty busy performing schedule, but says he’s seeing some changes in the Iowa blues scene.
“There's a lot of great musicians in the state, but everybody's getting older and I'm not seeing a lot of young people filling in behind them,” said Woods. “My concerns are, from a practical standpoint, are there going to be places to play? Am I going to be able to make money doing it? Are there going to be people in the room, you know? I think back to what things were like 20 years ago, and it's a lot different now.”
“I think the music will be fine,” said Woods. “I mean, this is something that's been going on for, you know, hundreds of years. I'm sure it will continue on, but whether or not there's gonna be people that are interested in it, I don't know.”
The Matt Woods Band has released new music this year in the form of a series of singles they recorded at Sonic Factory Studios in Des Moines. All the new singles are blues and roots standards, and the entire collection of nine songs took between four and five hours to record.
“A couple years ago I won the Iowa Blues Challenge, and one of the prizes was four hours of studio time at Sonic Factory,” said Woods. “We just figured we’d go in and record some of our favorite songs that we play live, and they happen to all be songs written by other people. I'm just in a phase of life where there's not a lot of opportunity for songwriting. Or maybe I'm not putting enough focus on it or whatever.”
The new batch of songs shows the Matt Woods Band digging deep. Of the nine songs, the most familiar is probably “Crawlin’ Kingsnake,” made famous by John Lee Hooker and also recently covered by The Black Keys. There’s also a version of an obscure Tom Waits song, “2:19,” which John Hammond covered on his album of Tom Waits covers, Wicked Grin.
“That Jon Hammond album is, in my opinion, one of the finest pieces of music ever made,” said Woods. (He's not wrong.) “We've been playing that song for a while live and it's a big favorite of people that are in the room, almost to the point where if we don't do it, the regulars that come to see us kind of get a little upset. I was able to afford the licensing on it somehow, which was always very concerning, and so we just went ahead and recorded it. It’s a lot different than what we normally do, and I get to stretch out a little bit and things get kind of weird and it's fun for us to do."
Listening to the singles, it’s hard to imagine Woods and the band knocking them all out in four hours, but it’s a testament to how well they work together.
“The band I'm playing with, we play together all the time,” said Woods. “So Jon Locker set up some mics and we played it like we would play a live show or whatever. I wouldn't recommend it to somebody that's not tight in what they're doing, but we didn't really feel the need to do much else. “I'm a simple, straightforward kind of guy and that's the way I like my music too.”
All of Matt Woods’ music, both solo and with his various bands, can be found at his website and on major streaming services.
