Interview: JPW + Dad Weed

Zach Toporek & Jason P. Woodbury Discuss Their 'Two Against Nurture' EP

Nov 26, 2024

JPW + Dad Weed: Zach Toporek and Jason P. Woodbury. Photo: Patrick Sexton.

JPW + Dad Weed’s partnership came together slowly, but their new EP proves it was definitely worth the wait.

Jason P. Woodbury (aka JPW) and Zach Toporek (aka Dad Weed) are two Phoenix-based songwriters and longtime friends who occasionally collaborated over the years, but didn’t get serious about writing together until 2021. They finally teamed up thanks to some musical matchmaking.

“When Jason started making music under his own moniker again a few years ago, his partner Becky strongly suggested that we try recording together. And after the JPW record was done, we got back into the studio together, started improvising, and songs just started happening out of nowhere really quickly,” Toporek told me for the interview below.

“Over the years, we’d hit the studio for a weekend afternoon to hang or play gigs together every now and then, and we even had a short attempt at a formalized band at one point, but it took the world slowing down enough for us to properly get going on collaboration,” said Woodbury, who is also an editor for Aquarium Drunkard and host of the Transmissions podcast.

Two Against Nurture introduces the duo’s emerging sound, one that sits comfortably at the improbable intersection of folk rock, power pop, and hazy Sonoran desert jams.

“People have expressed confusion about the nature of the projects: Is it JPW or is it Dad Weed? Well, sometimes it’s JPW (and Zach is usually in the mix as an essential collaborator when that’s the case) and sometimes it's Dad Weed (sometimes I’m involved, other times not). But sometimes, it becomes JPW + Dad Weed, and that’s the case with these tunes,” Woodbury said.

“We just struck gold in how we work together. I am, to a seriously cheesy degree, so excited and thankful about it,” Toporek said of the new project.

I caught up with Woodbury and Toporek via email after the release of Two Against Nurture (Fort Lowell Records) to discuss their new partnership, songwriting and recording process, some major influences, and what’s next for JPW + Dad Weed.

I dig the new EP. "Everybody's Talking (Again)" has a great laid back pop vibe, like Summerteeth-era Wilco filtered through The Byrds. Would you count those artists among your influences? Who else?

Jason P. Woodbury: On that particular song, definitely Cornershop, Len, New Radicals—that kind of late ‘90s/early 2000s alt-pop kind of stuff—it’s in my musical DNA for sure. But we like to layer other stuff in the mix too, and there are some moments where I’m trying to channel my inner Gordon Lightfoot or The Traveling Wilburys. I dig The Byrds, sure—I especially like the far-out textures of The Notorious Byrd Brothers and of course Sweetheart of the Rodeo, but I think I pick a lot of their moves up via Tom Petty, who’s definitely one of my favorite songwriters and a foundational influence alongside the other Wilburys.

Summerteeth is absolutely a touchstone. Wilco is a huge inspiration in general; in fact, Jeff Tweedy’s How To Write One Song was a creative catalyst for me in terms of getting back into songwriting after years of failing to finish anything. He’s been a really cool person to talk to over the years, and he’s been very supportive of Aquarium Drunkard. AD and Wilco share that overlap I think: a zone where kosmische grooves can co-exist alongside rootsy stuff, power pop alongside really experimental ballads, whatever, if a spirit of openness connects it all. I also have a lot of love for the late Jay Bennett, who’s got some lovely records too. Summerteeth really feels like his signature statement as far as Wilco goes.

Zach Toporek: Well sure! Absolutely. I think the Byrds-y sound of the guitars on that track came to me more from Todd Rundgren. In fact, I haven’t really listened to The Byrds very much, but I kind of love trying to sound like a band I haven’t really heard but have an idea of what they sound like. That happened on a track we were working on recently, where someone told Jason it sounded like a Steve Lillywhite production, and as I kept working on it I leaned into the idea of what a Steve Lillywhite record sounded like, even though I couldn’t really name any records he’d worked on—until we were done with the track and I looked it up! But sometimes that’s a great way to get inspiration without sounding like you’re aping on another artist.

I particularly like the lyrics: "Everybody’s talking about moving away/you think you’ll be sticking around.” Is that based on personal experiences?

Jason P. Woodbury: Thanks, I like that line, too. Much of the song is very personal, drawing on some of my earliest memories of growing up in suburban Arizona churches. But that chorus line, well it just kind of tumbled out and I ran with it—it’s kind of snowballed in terms of meaning with time. It certainly reads like a remark on my continuing to live in Phoenix, Arizona, but it’s more about the first inklings of doubt I had as a kid that the ultimate point of human existence was in some far-off heaven instead of the possibility of making all the places around us more heavenly in the present moment. Now I hear it as a reminder to stay in the here and now, and not store up all your hopes for some far off future date. Easier said than done, but still.

The psych-tinged pop gets cranked up a few notches on the second track, "When I Get Lonesome." What's the story behind that song?

Jason P. Woodbury: Zach and I love that kind of Rockpile/Elvis Costello thing and ‘When I Get Lonesome’ has a dash of that with some extra fried guitars. It’s lyrically centered on my own frustrations with the process of craving the space to make art and subsequently drifting too far out into the cosmos, only to find myself wanting to connect with the people I love. It’s a tricky balance but it’s lighthearted too, a laugh at myself.

Zach Toporek: When we tracked ‘Big Wave’ and the record that ‘Everybody…’ is going to be featured on next year, those songs happened really quickly and almost spontaneously, which was very different from how I’m used to working. But the tracks that we’ve been working on since have taken a lot longer. Jason and I got together one day to work on some of those, and we had I think 45 minutes or an hour before we had to call it quits for the day. Jason showed me a demo of a new song, we looked at the clock like giddy school boys, and just started tracking. The track on the EP is literally what we recorded and mixed in that hour or so. It was such a blast to get back to working quick and messy.

The third track, "Big Wave," is a departure from the previous two, spreading those desert rock wings a bit more. Were these songs all written around the same time?

Zach Toporek: Nowhere near the same time, actually! ‘Big Wave’ was the first of the songs we did together and literally started as an improvisation on a riff that Jason had been playing around with. We weren’t in love with it, but we did love how fast, fun and easy it was to make it, and that got us started on what became the JPW + Dad Weed project. ‘Everybody…’ came a few months later, and ‘When I Get Lonely’ this last summer. We put them all together on the EP because they were what we had available to release, but they took on a cohesion to us after the fact.

Jason P. Woodbury: Yeah, I think this EP spans from 2021-2024, which is a significant amount of time. We wanted to do a sort of one-off single release of ‘Everybody…,’ but then James Tritten [of Fort Lowell Records] suggested maybe we could incorporate some B-sides and create a stand alone EP, so we rounded up this motley bunch. I wasn’t sure it made sense at first, but then it seemed to settle in my head and take on a shape I appreciate. ‘Big Wave’ is really loose, and I’ve got clams and all sorts of blemishes in that mix, but I love recordings like Alex Chilton’s Like Flies on Sherbert, gnarly and messy things. So I embraced it. That one was mastered by Michael Krassner, who is kind of like the Jim Dickinson of the Phoenix avant-experimental-hushed songwriters scene—not in that he’s a wild man, but in that he likes to accentuate really human, emotive moments in music rather than aim for perfection.

Can you tell me a little more about how these songs were recorded?

Jason P. Woodbury: I try to not overthink songs—to let ‘em tumble out and settle as they land. But it’s also fun to tinker and augment and really get under the hood too. But it can work both ways, and I find the amount of time isn’t the real thing or the point of it, it’s the spirit and intention involved. And the know-how—which Zach thankfully has. He’s thoughtful and very gracious too, and his backyard studio has been the site of a lot of exciting moments for me.

Is this music that's meant to be performed live?

Zach Toporek: Funny question! Meant to be performed live? I’m not so sure about that, because I have an irrepressible impulse to layer the holy hell out of tracks, which makes it so much more challenging to do it live because we’re not the kind of folks to play to backing tracks really. But we do play them live!

Jason P. Woodbury: I tend to think songs can be dressed up, dressed down, presented however—they are open to all sorts of mutations. So yeah, we’ve got a full crew of collaborators we play with live—Rob Kroehler, Rick Heins, Andrew Bates—and we play versions of these songs. We’ve been doing a really cool pedal steel-led version of ‘When I Get Lonesome’ that will see release in the future, Rick is great doing that. We haven’t played ‘Big Wave’ yet though. It might be fun to reimagine that.

If I got in your tour van, what would I be listening to on the stereo?

Zach Toporek: For me, I’ve been obsessed with this Melanie record, The Lost 1979 Album that just came out. That and John Carol Kirby, Kolumbo, and an annoying amount of Steely Dan.

Jason P. Woodbury: You’re probably hearing a lot of podcasts too. We both like Know Your Enemy with Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell, which is a leftist guide to conservative thinking, literature, history, theory, etc. We end up discussing the episodes at length. But I love listening to music while driving too. Lately I’ve been heavy into Peter Gabriel’s Melt and Us, and The La’s, so you’d probably hear those.

Kevin Ridel and S.W. Lauden (aka Steve Coulter) were interviewed by Eric Ernst for the ‘90s? Whatever’ podcast on Mixcloud.

This is probably the most in-depth interview the two of us have done about Ridel High since that band broke up in the late ‘90s. We talk about how Kevin, Steve Leroy and I came together in 1995, the Hollywood and Santa Barbara music scenes, Kevin’s songwriting, our influences, recording for My Records, getting signed/dropped by A&M Records, and more. We even spin some favorite ‘90s tracks (Oasis AND Blur!).