Live Music: The Woods

With a US Music Row radio charting debut song and glowing features from Billboard and NPR, three-part harmony trio The Woods have quickly become a Nashville group to watch. These three musicians together create a confident, roots-steeped style that evokes the folk and classic rock sounds of the 1960s and 70s, The Woods don’t sound like anyone else, and they wouldn’t have it any other way.

Formed in 2021 in Nashville living rooms and home studios,The Woods’ members — Dan O’Rourke, Raquel Cole, and Leland Rooney — each bring a depth of experience as musicians, songwriters, and performers.  O’Rourke is an established writer and folk-influenced recording artist. Cole is a seasoned musician with her own successful career as a Canadian country solo artist. Rooney is an inspired, multi-genre guitar virtuoso. However, it is the dynamic blend of vocal tones in the trio that is, perhaps, most compelling to listeners.

Their debut single,“World’s on Fire,” (which they released independently in March 2022) found enthusiastic early acceptance with fans, radio programmers, and national media. The song saw airplay on more than 70 US country stations and reached Top 50 on the Music Row Country Breakout Chart. Billboard’s Tom Roland called the song “an engaging, hooky workout with fierce triple harmonies, a loose, acoustically driven country/rock groove, and an almost esoteric lyric that’s open to multiple interpretations.” And NPR noted The Woods “create a perfect combination of power and mystique, softness and grit, to make the songs truly soar.”

This past year The Woods found themselves on tour with The Cadillac Three and opening for artists such as Drake White.  Their second digital release, “If You Really Love Me” has over 1M views on TikTok and they are thrilled to be releasing a new song this summer called, “Road Trippin”! New fans of The Woods will be excited to know that they are hard at work in the studio recording more music to release soon!