There’s a massive line outside Boston’s Royale club stretching down the road, curving to follow the strange 90-degree bend Tremont St takes as it snakes southward toward the I-90 overpass. The venue doors have been open for roughly 45 minutes at this point, but there’s still a lengthy queue, many people dressed up as one does for a special occasion, even despite some truly oppressive heat starting a sweep over New England. Selling out Royale – upstairs balconies and all – is no small feat, but that’s the draw of this Will Wood and the Tapeworms show, marking the tenth anniversary of Wood’s first album, Everything Is A Lot, with a notable declarative statement sprawled across the backsplash at the club: Mr. Wood is Dead. As taglines go though, it’s surprisingly brief, considering his song titles routinely boast numerous sub-titles, alternate titles, puns, references, numerical substitutions, and acronyms. It’s surprising he ever opted to drop the ‘Tapeworms’ bit from his official band name, though he did mark that transition with a skit on his old DSP profiles in 2020 prior to the release of The Normal Album.
The Boston date is the band’s last for a short while, with the Tapeworms picking up again in mid-July for a trek across the southern US, and then Wood himself takes off for a run of theater shows in August and September. For this leg he’s brought along the Ruen Brothers from the UK, who bring a fascinating blend of tunes that infuse just a bit of Talking Heads into the tradition of great Americana crooners, especially their standout closer ‘All My Shades of Blue’. It’s a lane in which one might not expect to find brothers Henry and Rupert, themselves admitting to boasting an extremely English pair of names, but they’re unquestionably capable as songsmiths.
There’s a huge cheer audible from the foyer maybe fifteen minutes before Wood and the Tapeworms are set to take the stage – they’ve lit up all the LCD screens around the venue, at first showing off some various, colorful, almost mosaic-like artworks similar to what Wood’s piano is lined with; but they switch it soon to a title card from an obscure cartoon called Yoink of the Yukon – so obscure in fact that a Google search for what it is brings up the Will Wood subreddit among the top results, asking the very same question. Despite this, the on-and-off flashing of the slide prompts everyone to boo until it’s restored, whereupon they promptly cheer. A longer absence prompts a raucous cheer of “Bring! It! Back!” The crowd, composed primarily of young people, is brimming with energy – they’re overjoyed when Wood finally descends to the stage, and it’s easy to understand why.
Wood, himself only in his early thirties, may keep a tight seal on many personal details, but his music has been uncompromising in its investigations of personhood, gender identity, mental illness, and struggles with substances. Wordy, heart-on-sleeve, frantic poetry, the music has grown alongside him while laying bare his inner workings. Everything Is A Lot and SELF-iSH often veered into the delightfully unhinged, packed with gnarled screams and big, stomping brass contributions – The Normal Album presented a refinement of those techniques, while retaining the thoroughness and humor through which Wood has consistently interrogated the many folds of the human condition. But it was 2022’s “In case I make it,” that really shook things up stylistically: a quieter record more oriented around acoustic guitars, and one that makes the occurrence of these Tapeworms shows feel all the more incredible, as the album seemed for a time to mark and end to Wood’s musical output.
But of course, Mr. Wood is not dead, and the band has four distinct works to pull from in concocting their set for the night, and they begin with the ‘-ish’ of SELF-iSH, just Wood’s piano and truly astounding vocal capabilities asking fundamental questions, ones that don’t go away so much as they change form through the years. “If I change myself, can I still stay me?” branches off to become, “Does aspirin kill you with the pain?” with time, two facets of the indescribably-shaped question that can be traced back to Theseus, Heraclitus, and a bunch of other guys immortalized as marble busts in museums. “I’m no survivor, I only happened to survive” – and these things come with the territory either way.
It’s the perfect lead-in for the rest of the band to crash onto the scene, turning the clock back a bit for ‘6up 5oh Cop-Out (Pro/Con)’, the song that introduced Wood to so many back in 2015, a consummately-theatrical piece that plays like part of a soundtrack to a musical that doesn’t exist, a quality so many of his songs possess. It’s a night of swinging, rambunctious tunes punctuated by delicate interludes; the intersection of styles with roots ranging from Latin to Eastern European and beyond; and gravelly vocal departures that rival or surpass most metal bands while finding time to ask the question: “What if Ben Folds were possessed by a nonzero number of demons?”
Though likely a skill honed with time, Wood seems just as comfortable just talking to the audience at length as he is behind the piano. What he says between songs is just as worth hearing as the music itself, and at one point his train of thought shifts to the subject of anger. “Anger as an emotion exists solely for its own resolution”, and while he’s quick to point out he’s hardly a perfect practitioner of healthier thinking on the subject, “we cannot survive,” he states, the way we are currently living: buried under layers of identity, brand, presentation, reputation. He caps it by addressing “the most… irredeemable, worst piece of shit in the room”, and to that conceptual rake he declares: “I see you, and I love you.” It’s his own sort of impromptu “I love you, Sheriff Truman” moment.
While mid-song Wood is almost always situated behind the keys, his standing bandmates with guitar, bass, and saxophone take ample advantage of their mobility. The crowd and performers each feed off the other’s energy, and it makes for one of the most animated shows in recent memory, a far cry from the relatively-immobile affairs one sees all-too-often at shows. The energy of the gig is truly undeniable, like molten embers scattered every time Wood brings his hands down on the keys with the force and precision of a blacksmith’s hammer. His vigor recalls some priceless old videos of Tom Waits – and while he doesn’t resort to kicking the piano in order to play it, there is an interlude in ‘Black Box Warrior – OKULTRA’ – where he stops to “take a call” on the red phone that’s been sitting on the flower-accented stage all night next to his two mandolins, and he throws up both legs across the top of the keyboard while fabricating the one-sided conversation.
No matter what point in the chronology each attendee first learned of Will Wood, everyone has something to be excited for; including fans of narrative podcast Camp Here & There, for which Wood provides the soundtrack. It’s hardly his only foray into other media, and he’ll be providing the score for the game Éalú later this year, itself spawned from the visuals in Wood’s ‘Tomcat Disposables’ music video. Wood’s love of rats stretches is has been noted over many years and even more silly names – and from a vantage point on the balcony one can spy a person hoisting up a little gray rat doll of some description in one of the front rows around the time they’re playing ‘Skeleton Appreciation Day in Vestal, NY’, a delightfully cheery tune in defiance of its lyrics that has entire groups singing and dancing, arms around shoulders, in the balcony boxes.
Keeping with the subject of rodents, one of the most gut-wrenching moments from “In case I make it,” is ‘Euthanasia’ – no one goes into this one blind, courtesy of the title, but the way Wood’s voice reaches toward its highest ranges, like many people do when they talk to a pet, it’s impossible not to feel that lump in your throat time after time. Thankfully, Wood spares our tear ducts that one, and after a bulky set featuring songs like ‘2econd 2ight 2eer’, ‘White Knuckle Jerk’, and of course ‘Mr. Capgras…’ – and seeing him pull out a melodica at some point [such a dignified name for something that looks like the love child of a toy keyboard and a kazoo] – he opts for a pair of quiet mandolin-driven ones to close the main act, alone onstage. Had he elected to vanish from the world of music after all, the delicate sincerity of ‘White Noise’ would have been a perfect parting note.
But just as Wood returned in a general career sense, he and the band have yet more for their Boston audience as well. Sitting down, he muses on how having a few weeks off after this show gives him the opportunity to stress his voice in a way he normally wouldn’t, and so treats the city to arguably the perfect one-two punch of an encore, both from SELF-iSH – bridging the quiet reprise at the end of the otherwise-manic ‘Dr. Sunshine is Dead’ into its source, ‘Cotard’s Solution’, the song that made me, upon first hearing it, drop what I was doing and queue up the album in its entirety. Everything that makes Wood’s music so compelling is present here in this song, and throwing caution to the wind he gives an unprecedented vocal rendition that can only be described, in a positive way, as “utterly filthy”. The band joining in on backing vocals in the final chorus with the refrain of “Kill me! Kill me!” feels not only like a perfect cap for the show, but also the fulfillment of my own years-long wait to hopefully hear this musical megalith performed.
How would I describe Will Wood’s music to the uninitiated? I suppose I’d tell people to go looking in the Bermuda-esque triangle that’s bounded by World/Inferno Friendship Society, a really fucked-up carnival, and the cantina band from Star Wars. That’s about as good an approximation as any – maybe the narrator from Nick Cave’s ‘Curse of Millhaven’ drops in for a bit here or there. But all touchstones aside, nothing really can succinctly encapsulate what makes Wood’s music simultaneously fun and fascinating to dig into. Perhaps unsurprisingly, nothing can quite rival a rat-obsessed New Jerseyan with a piano and a deep-seated talent for alchemizing psychic trauma into song.
Photos and words by Collin Heroux