Residency is a four-part weekly journal entry brought to you by one of our favorite artists every month.

This week, Woodsman delve into their past musical lives.

A brief look back…

Woodsman is a grower; everything we’ve attempted as a group stems from an unspoken ideology. The project started as two separate two-man bands that merged. Some have stayed, some have gone, but in the end, the vibe remains. Here’s how it breaks down.

Eston (percussion) and I were recording under various names for years and in 2007 began work on what would become a collection of seven tracks. While figuring out what to call the new project, the name Woodsman was decided upon and some CDRs were made and passed around amongst friends.

It was during this time that I met Mark (vocalist/guitar) while we were both attending Film School at the University of Colorado Denver. Mark and Dylan (percussion) had a project of their own called Derf which later changed names to Hand. Both of these bands, mind you, were purely for fun and there were slight but [most definitely] minor attempts at playing shows.

In early 2008 we all started getting together for jam sessions, goofin’ and sharing ideas. Toward the end of that year Eston and I were ready to play Woodsman shows and booked one at a small club. It wasn’t really a question in our minds so we hollered at Mark and Dylan and asked if they’d join us. They agreed and we became Woodsman, a four-piece band. At the time, some of us were living in a house in Denver called the “Pink Castle” and we had built a little recording set up in it. We started blasting out tracks here and there over the course of the next few months and by April 2009 had what we thought was a pretty solid EP and an introduction to this new and improved version of Woodsman. Those recordings were released as the Humdrum EP and our first tour followed shortly thereafter.

I once wrote a piece for IMPOSE that describes that first trip in a nutshell. Here’s an excerpt:

Fast forward a few years, I’m in my early twenties and playing in a band. We bounce on our first tour hitting warehouses, dive bars and house shows all over the middle west. We were lucky if ten people showed up to the shows and were even luckier if we found a comfortable place to sleep. Pulling into Joplin, Missouri, the stench of Nu-Metal canceled out any aromas we’d collected since our last showers. “Cesspool Castle” was the venue, and by venue I mean the head of the local NORML chapter’s cat shit stained basement. Instantly our reaction was whiskey, shit loads of whiskey and quick. After a jaunt to the LQ to grip some Beam we settled into the Castle. We were served brown rice and fish sticks for din din and treated to Volcano rips of the brownest dirt weed this side of Tijuana. The local opener jammed out some Clutch covers and it was finally our turn to rip. Come to think of it some of the footage from that show probably exits on Youtube, look it up. After the show we all realize that we were entirely too fucked up to drive away so we’re forced to spend the night. There were a few starving cats in the “apartment” along with a large collection of “Bizzare” magazine which features high gloss, high res pics of gaping wounds, fecal matter and other curiosities from around the globe. We all woke up huddled together on the porch with 3D hangovers, crept out unnoticed and immediately got tested for AIDS.

And Video Evidence:

When we arrived back in Denver, fully stoked on the possibilities of life in a band, we began work on what would become our first proper full-length. Dylan was living in a cabin outside of Evergreen, Colorado that summer and we took the opportunity to hole up for a few days, play live, and sketch out ideas. We brought the set-up from the Denver house up to the mountains and played for four days straight. In the end, we excerpted forty or so minutes of music that would be released as the Collages LP on Mexican Summer in later 2009.

Over the course of the previous four or five years we’ve been putting out records on labels like Lefse and most recently our own imprint Fire Talk. Touring like mad, sometimes in vans that leak CO2 into the vehicle the entire time, driving us into a state of mild psychosis. It’s been all good, though. Maybe the rest of the story will come later, maybe not, but I know for sure you’ll be able to catch whiffs of Woodsman for some time to come.

-Trevor Peterson

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