Kingdom in My Mind

The Wood Brothers have always made the most of the tension between tuneful, uncluttered blues and pop song structures and the knotty, groove-driven meshing of their playing styles. During the making of *Kingdom in My Mind*, their seventh proper album together, guitarist Oliver Wood, brother and bassist Chris Wood (as in Medeski, Martin &), and percussive multi-instrumentalist Jano Rix went all in on musical experimentation and wound up clearing unexpected space for reflection in their songwriting. The process began as they tested the acoustics in their newly completed Nashville studio; freewheeling jams freed them up to explore and yielded promising passages that they carefully stitched into whole compositions. Then the Woods pursued an equal sense of completion as they outfitted the tunes with lyrics. “Little Blue” is a spindly funk meditation on global life cycles; “Don’t Think About My Death,” powered by African blues polyrhythms, offers a wryly mundane perspective on mortality; and the sinuous, unhurried “Alabaster” unfurls the story of a woman’s escape from a constricting and abusive past.

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Kingdom in My Mind, the Wood Brothers' recent studio album, is an act of musical showmanship.