Story here from news.scotsman.com:
IS WOODY Pines a closet time-traveller, or has he perhaps signed some Faustian pact enabling him to stay forever young? Strictly speaking, that question should be phrased “are Woody Pines”, for the man and his band share the same name.
Problematical syntax apart, however, the question remains: how does a 30-year-old singer-songwriter living in North Carolina in 2010 manage to sound as if he had projected himself from a historic American Deep South of juke joints, Cajun queens and long dusty highways?
As I noted when I reviewed their current album, Counting Alligators, Pines’s nasal holler, squalling harmonica and Nashville resonator guitar, accompanied by fiddle, drums and whumping bass, combines strands of old-time country blues, jug band music and Dixieland to such potent effect that you’d swear they were at least six decades older than they really are, recording for 78rpm shellac rather than CD or iTunes.
It’s a sound which they bring to Scotland on Friday as part of their first UK tour. How did they cultivate it, I ask the band’s leader – whose Sunday name is Jonathan Woods, but who has long succumbed to the inevitable “Woody”.
He says: “It was kind of by default, really. Half of the album was recorded in our living room in Asheville, North Carolina. Most of the tracks were done live, which I think creates a nice energy. We’re a live band and we were really shooting for that sound.”