Peter Schuyff from The Woodwards has a lot of stories to tell. He’s worked with Versace and at Studio 54, sold paintings to Sylvester Stallone and had his portrait done by Andy Warhol. He lived as an artist in a hotel in New York during the 80s and 90s, before moving to Vancouver where he discovered he was a bit musical. Peter Schuyff and Stevie Guy from The Woodwards tell Helen Tytherleigh how it all started.
HerCampus: This is your first date for your UK tour. How does the UK compare to other countries? I gather you’ve toured in the States, Canada and The Netherlands as well?
Peter Schuyff: The difference is that here they understand my words. In Holland they understand but they don’t get it.
Stevie Guy: They don’t have the sense of humour or something, it’s like they’re a bit blank. Over here they get it straight away.
P: It’s the vernacular too, a lot of what I write is in vernacular and also in Holland sometimes I say things that are a bit off colour in the songs and they’re not very good with irony in the Netherlands. That has caused problems. There’s a lack of response. I think sometimes people are a bit afraid of me.
HC: What do you like best about UK gigs?
P: The first time I came here, at that stage of my career, it was just a thrill to play for strangers. It’s the same thing when I started up with the paintings, I remember how important it was to sell a painting to somebody other than my mother. It’s also been interesting because it’s been four times and it’s been growing each time, word has gotten out. The words are very important to me and the order in which I put the words is very important to me, so I like the idea that somebody might get that here.
HC: Where do you get your inspiration for your lyrics?
P: My life experience. I only started writing songs about 5 years ago and so all that life experience was all available to me to write songs. It’s not like I had been writing about my experiences while I was having them, it was sort of I’d collected all this stuff and then all of a sudden I started writing.
HC: I gather you were an artist beforehand, what made you decide to change to music?
P: Yep, still am. I left New York and went to Vancouver and had extra time on my hands. I had some friends there who made music and I started playing along, just fooling around playing, and realised that I was a bit musical.
HC: How does ‘Burn Everything’ EP differ from your debut album?
P: I learned a lot, I got a lot better at making music. The first album was produced by a very well known Dutch producer and I had no plans to make a record, I was just fooling around and then he heard the music and wanted to make a record and all of a sudden it became a serious deal. The second time it was much bigger, there’s guitar and at that time I was singing with three girls, my backing vocalists and then that changed and now I’m singing with Stevie, who’s replaced the three girls. One song is on all three CDs, but I figured they’re all so different when we do them [him and Stevie] or when I did them before.
S: There’s a new EP as well now, just with us two.
HC: So Stevie, how did you get involved?
S: There was a tour that Peter was doing and two of the backing singers couldn’t make it. I know his manager who hooked us up, so I tried out and got the audition.
P: I had always been looking, because when I was working with the three girls sometimes one person couldn’t make it or sometimes two and so I wanted to be able to do this set with every possible configuration. But what I wanted most of all was that I wanted to be ready to do a set with just one person and nobody had the nerve to step up and rehearse that with me except for Stevie.
S: It was a chorus before with the three girls, a like Leonard Cohen type, but now it’s just the subtleties emphasising what he’s singing and the words.
P: Stevie’s helping me tell the story. With the trio I was so conspicuously the face and now there’s two faces. The Woodwards is now both of us, but I do perform quite often on my own.
HC: Who or what are your biggest influences?
P: Walt Whitman – mostly writers, not so much musicians. There’s a band and a singer from Vancouver that I really admire: The Be Good Tanyas, they were three women and then the singer, she went off on her own, she’s also amazing: Frazey Ford. I don’t actually listen to a lot of music but I listen to her. Musically Al Green is very important to me, but it’s mostly authors.
HC: Who would you compare yourself to musically?
P: Who would I like to compare myself to?
S: That’s a whole different question!
P: I’d like Aidan Moffat from a band called Arap Strap. I think he’s a brilliant poet and the way he applies himself to music is something that I really admire and I see myself in him.
S: You get compared to Tom Waits.
P: Yeah, Tom Waits all the time and that’s kind of an obvious comparison and to Leonard Cohen, especially when the girls were singing with me. But that’s only a comparison I use when I want to save time and people are curious about what I do.
HC: What are your aspirations for The Woodwards?
S: Take over the world!
P: And mega stardom, what a dumb question!
It’s interesting because I had none, 5 years ago I had no aspirations at all.
S: It’s when things start happening. We believe we’ve got a really good thing.
HC: Was it purely for yourself? Were you just making music for your own enjoyment?
P: Yes, at first. But it’s funny, it’s kind of the same as with the paintings, when I started making paintings and when I started selling paintings the whole process changed. I guess all of a sudden there’s a responsibility, there are stakes.
HC: How long have The Woodwards been going for?
P: About five years, but I thought of the name of The Woodwards before I really made music.
The Woodwards was a department store in Vancouver, that was squatted by the homeless, very successfully and very beautifully. Vancouver had a terrible homeless problem and it was like the department store that as a young art student, I bought everything, all my clothes, everything I bought there. And when I wanted a band name, I said as a joke I wanted a name with wood in it due to the euphemism. I was talking to a friend and he suggested Morning Wood but that was kind of obvious. Now Woodwards had closed maybe 20 years before I had that conversation and as we were standing there talking about this, a Woodwards shopping bag, an old paper shopping bag, that had to be more than 20 years old, came in the wind and landed at my feet. And there was my name. And I guess, apart from people in Western Canada, no one knows what that it. But it looks like it’s something.
HC: What would you like people to take from your music?
P: I would like people to go away being a bit inspired to take relish in their language. A lot of people don’t care how they string words together and one doesn’t need to be William Shakespeare but one can speak totally in vernacular but just take some relish in it. If you enjoy saying what you’re saying then it’s beautiful and it’s engaging.
HC: Do you have a lot planned for 2012?
P: I am have a book coming out. I’m writing a memoir and I’m writing it for a publisher in the Netherlands. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do and it’s like a million little stories from New York and they’re told in kind of the same way as I write the songs. And because the book, to a large degree, is about the eighties in New York, which was a vey successful time for me, I’m going to do a few exhibitions of paintings from that time. We’re also planning to do a stage show of the songs, but then maybe with some more stories between the songs.
HC: And when’s that being published?
P: Fall 2012. Well ahead of schedule. I’ve written 120,000 words already.
S: Lot of stories to tell.
HC: Do you have any particular stories you’d like to share right now?
P: Yeah, but I wouldn’t know where to start. There’s one story I can tell, I think it was my fortieth birthday and things were starting to sort of slide with the paintings, things weren’t quite going as well and I wasn’t very happy in New York. Just generally I wasn’t doing very well. So for my fortieth birthday we went to the Odeon for dinner. There were four of us: myself, my ex-wife, my best friend and his wife and the maîte d’ says “well we have a table for four but it’s actually four places at a table for six, do you mind sharing?” The place is very busy, a very trendy restaurant and we looked and thought they looked like two reasonable guys so we sat down. So we’re sitting there with these two guys and all night long, all these people, like important New York art people – Julian Schnabel – all these important people kept coming over to the table and going “Peter, hey, how you doing? What are you working on? When’s your next show?” etc… And after this happened a few times, I thought wow I think I’ve underestimated my position in the New York art world. A lot of these people wouldn’t give me the time of day otherwise. So this goes on all night and I went home feeling really happy. Then the next morning, first thing in the morning, my gallerist, my dealer calls me up and he says “Peter, what’s this I hear about you having dinner with John F. Kennedy junior last night?”
The book’ll be an entertainment, that’s for sure. A lot of bitterness, but not at the expense of any enthusiasm.
HC: And finally how would you describe your music in 3 words?
S: I’ll give you two: folk-noir. He hates it! I love it folk-noir.
P: Yeah I really don’t like it at all.
[after a few minutes] Dirty little urban songs, but that’s four words.
The Woodwards: http://www.thewoodwards.nl/
https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Woodwards/172183212814838
For Peter’s artwork visit: www.schuyff.com
***Check out the Her Campus Music Blog for a full review of The Woodwards recent gig in Leeds***