Home Comforts: Wooden Shjips' Ripley Johnson on Back to Land

“In a big city you have to be driven because the scenes there are so competitive and people really take it seriously. It’s nice here; you can take it easy and not have to worry about that sort of stuff too much.” For Ripley Johnson – follicly abundant frontman of Wooden Shjips, Moon Duo co-founder with wife Sanae Yamada, and firm advocate of the psychedelic reel – moving to Portland from San Francisco has been a relatively easy choice.

Driven off the west coast by rising rent prices, Johnson and Yamada spent two years based out in the still wilderness of the Colorado mountains, before relocating to the Oregon city with the former’s Shjips bandmates in tow. “I actually love it,” Johnson adds over the phone. “It’s very lush here. We get a lot of rain and we have a nice summer, it’s a good balance of seasons. It’s affordable so there are a lot of artists here and a lot of the houses are single family homes so there’s a pretty big basement scene. Most bands rehearse at home; it’s very freeing, not having to worry about having to spend all this money down at the studio or having to lug gear around.”

Having any place to call home has been refreshing for Johnson, after nearly two years of constant touring and releasing records with both the Shjips and Moon Duo. Confessing that he’s “exhausted,” it won’t be long before he takes to the road again, with Wooden Shjips’ second album for Thrill Jockey due this November. 

Back to Land contrasts with the group’s previous LP: where 2011’s West had a loose thematic structure around the idea of America’s Manifest Destiny – the 19th-century idea of its peoples’ expansion to new horizons in the west, having first settled in the east on arrival from Europe – so Back to Land is more introspective, a retreat to the familiar that was written during a rare opportunity last winter for its chief creator to spend some time at home, revisiting old possessions and returning to his record collection. “All our things had been in storage for the previous two years while we’d been in Colorado and on the road,” he explains, “so when we got them out, I went straight back to my old records and listened to them all winter while I was writing the album. The process of moving into a new house and listening to all this comfort music put me in a frame of mind about accepting influences and feeling open to bringing that into our music.”

"There are moments when you rebel against things from your past and there are moments when you embrace them" – Ripley Johnson

As such, Back to Land glows with a warm familiarity; it was recorded and mixed to tape by Quasi producer and Elliott Smith archivist Larry Crane at his own Jackpot Studios, and the erosive nature of that process gives the record a slightly worn feel, evoking a sense of history and a story to tell within its aural fabric. Beyond that, it loosely echoes the ghosts of classic rock bands like Crazy Horse and Creedence Clearwater Revival, even as it pushes Wooden Shjips’ own sound further on from their one-chord-one-riff beginnings on their Sick Thirst-released 7”s and Holy Mountain material of the previous decade. “In the past we’ve definitely been more wary of these classic rock touchstones, like Neil Young or Creedence or The Stones,” Johnson admits, “but there are moments when you rebel against things from your past and there are moments when you embrace them. These records ultimately influence you and contribute to making you who you are as a person. So you realise it’s not simply the past, it’s actually who you are.”

Larry Crane’s involvement marks only the second time in their career that Wooden Shjips have allowed an outside producer in to work with them, following 2011’s collaboration with Trans Am’s Phil Manley on West. Listening to Crane’s previous work alongside Back to Land – be it Portland garage rockers Quasi’s 1999 LP Field Studies or, more recently, his remastering of Elliott Smith’s debut Roman Candle and mix work on Grandaddy man Jason Lytle’s 2012 solo album Dept. of Disappearance – it’s clear that he’s translated his verve for adding a light touch and working to separate elements to this new record. “It feels more hi-fi than previous albums,” agrees Johnson. “You can hear these little touches and nuances.” Having Crane involved, though, wasn’t wholly comfortable for a band still not fully used to allowing an additional voice into the creative process. “I actually really liked the process of us doing it ourselves and being totally responsible for everything, pushing through the gear we had in that room and our limited skills. Now it’s become an exercise in letting things happen and letting go, to allow the process to take care of itself.”

Back in 2011, with Moon Duo still in their relative infancy – albeit with several releases already out, including debut LP Escape – Johnson gave the impression in interviews that he rarely wrote to specific projects, pointing out to The Quietus that it only differed when it came to recording: “It doesn't really matter which band does it. The approach will be different, because it's different people.” Two years on, though, he has started trying to draw lines between the minimal set-up and maximal imaginations of his and his wife’s side project, and the more dextrous, swampy tones of his older outfit. “I get in a different mindset between one band and the other,” he says, “but then the line isn’t too hard to create. Wooden Shjips is just ‘a rock band’ – just a bunch of guys jamming, y’know? We don’t talk about things much; we just play, which is really freeing. But with me and Sanae we can discuss what to do for the next album and can be more experimental with it because we’re on the same wavelength.”

However, it was Moon Duo’s 2012 album Circles that, in part, influenced Back to Land. Written by Johnson while he and Yamada were living in Colorado, it was initially put together as a skeleton entirely on acoustic guitar. “I’d not done that before,” he recalls. “Where we were moving to up there was so isolated that we thought we could make all this noise. But actually being there, the silence was so powerful that it felt really weird to be so loud! So I started writing on this acoustic guitar, which gave Circles that strummier sort of feel. It pushed my songwriting in a certain direction and that’s carried over.”

Underneath the sun-scorched riffs of Back to Land tracks like Ghouls and In the Roses – their stoner fuzz harking back to the San Francisco they’ve now left behind – the album is laced with acoustic guitar, threaded in and out of thicker slabs of noise, and trickling through like a nattering stream through great crags of sound. It adds a heightened serenity and reflective evocation to the album, and is at its most overt on closing track Everybody Knows; it’s possibly one of Wooden Shjips' most subdued songs to date and, within their music’s own wider personality, not like anything they’ve ever put to record before. “I’ve written songs like that before and set them aside thinking, ‘this isn’t very appropriate,’" Johnson says. "But it goes back to me embracing these records I’ve always loved and opening up, so for this album I just thought, ‘heck, let’s do this.’ In the past, I’ve just left them in case I ever thought to do an acoustic solo album.”

Going back to the past to produce in the present is something familiar to Johnson, a man with a firm sense of belief in the Buddhist view that “the end is the beginning and everything else is just circling around.” For Wooden Shjips, their music transcends time even as it borrows from it, its component parts making up something that is more physical immersion than something to detach yourself from and analyse academically. Another cycle is shortly to accelerate again for them: “Part of the problem with touring is you’re playing the same stuff over and over,” Johnson comments. “Even if you mix up the songs they’re still your songs, and you get sick of yourself. It can feel very self-absorbed, like ‘look at me! Look at me!’ every night. I’m more of an introverted person, so that can be a challenge, but generally I like it.” Playing Back to Land, at least he’ll always have something to remind him of home. 

Wooden Shjips - Back To Land from Thrill Jockey Records on Vimeo.