Track By Track: Wood River Breaks Down New Album More Than I Can See

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German-born/Brooklyn-based alto saxophonist and composer Charlotte Greve is engaging listeners in a totally different way through her latest musical project Wood River.

A musician since the tender age of eight, Charlotte has garnered several awards for her work, including the 2012 Echo Jazz, the 2010 JazzBaltica Festival Newcomer Award, and the 2008 Prätorius-Musikpreis of Lower Saxony.

Having previously recorded with her band Lisbeth Quartett, as well as several other projects including Sooner, The Choir Invisible, and the saxophone quartet Asterids, as Wood River, Greve is now venturing into traditional songwriting and vocal performance more than she ever has before.

On International Women’s Day, Greve released her latest album, More Than I Can See, an ambient, experimental art-pop-infused collection rich with imagination. The album, which captures the unparalleled magic of improvisation and spontaneity, also sees the accomplished instrumentalist further exploring her vocal abilities, pushing her own boundaries and demonstrating artistic growth in the process.

Greve broke down More Than I Can See track by track for Musical Notes Global. Check out her thoughts below.

FUTURE FUN
I wrote this song a couple of weeks before we went into the studio, very quickly within one day, everything fell into place - Future Fun is about the phenomenon of not being in the moment but constantly longing for another thing that is supposed to make you happy very soon. Its like a reminder to bring back the appreciation for the richness of now and a hymn against “the grass is always greener on the other side”- type living.

“The Procrastinator”
I procrastinate on a lot of things on a regular basis, one of them is writing new songs - the power of the deadline always helps and somehow, when writing this song I wanted it to be a tune that wakes you up and gets you moving, with whatever you are doing or trying to do. It became the first song that was leaning more towards a poppier direction and at the time, although this one doesn’t even have lyrics, I thought to myself “wow, I wrote a poppy dance - song”.

“See”
This is a song about family and people that are basically like family in the broadest sense - it’s about how we realize that generations of people are slowly coming to life in our own character, both the good and the bad. It’s contemplative, it has moments of realizing all the layers of these influences through other humans - it’s nostalgic, yet connected to the present. This is the very first song I wrote lyrics for and just like that started and extremely personal journey for me.

“Pete Vinegar Likes It Sweet”
Pete Vinegar Likes It Sweet is a song by our drummer Tommy Crane. It was one of the first songs that I played on keyboard in this band and unlike some of my songs, it has tons of space for different things to happen, each time we play it.

“Shifter”
Shifter is about the different parts of our character, how we can change from one moment to the other, depending on who we are spending time and communicating with - its about all the layers in our identity that we carry around with us - how we can bring them out in different moments in time or how they can be brought out by specific persons at certain moments in time. Shifter also includes the line for the album title: “Can we be more than I can see”, which is both an unanswered question as well as a reminder to see yourself and the other person from a new perspective and in a different light, everyday.

“Hidden Word”
This is a song by our bassist Simon Jermyn and it fits very well into the 1980’s aesthetic that some of our music carries. Its is the perfect platform for out guitarist Keisuke Matsuno to play a guitar-hero-Prince-type solo and sets a great contrast to the other songs on the album while maintaining the common aesthetic. In the studio we had the vocals to all the songs recorded, except for this one and my producer Grey McMurray said, well, now we have only one song without vocals so the one take of the spontaneous vocal pass in the end made it on the record.

“Jammz”
This is a song I would have never written had I not met my former roommate, friend and fellow saxophonist & keyboarder Kyle Wilson - a man with a very specific style and taste and lots of humor in his music and personality. My music normally doesn’t have a lot of humor, most of the time its rather melancholic, nostalgic or heavy in one way or another so this was a refreshing change for my writing habits. This one is probably the weirdest song I have ever written.

“Returners”
This one really was a song that we kept changing for years, wrote new parts, scratched old ones and it somehow never felt right - then, when we took it into the studio, it finally came to life in a miraculously clear and surprisingly shoegazey way. Returners is both a song about returning habits, good and bad, and about coming back to your origin and the roots of ones character.