The title of Donovan Woods's new EP Squander Your Gifts came from a remark made by someone who said that it was a sin that his songwriting partner Abe Stoklasa had squandered his gifts.Tiana Lam/Supplied
A decade ago, Canada’s Donovan Woods and his friend and collaborator Abe Stoklasa wrote the song Leaving Nashville, a brutally honest portrayal of the highs, lows and heartless rejections that songwriters in that city deal with as part of the job.
The chorus is pure grim resignation: “But you ain’t ever leaving Nashville. I ain’t ever leaving Nashville.”
Stoklasa never left Nashville. He died there in 2023, the cause undisclosed.
“He was not living in a way that was sustainable,” Woods says, calling from his Toronto home. “He was extremely solitary. Whether he intentionally took his own life or not, I don’t think he was living in a way that would guarantee a long, fulfilling life.”
Abe Stoklasa died in Nashville in 2023, the cause undisclosed.Donovan Woods/Supplied
Woods, who spends four or five weeks a year in the capital city of country music, has just released Squander Your Gifts, a five-track EP about grief, inspired by Stoklasa. The Sarnia, Ont., native went through a year-long spell of only being able to write about the late Missouri musician. The EP’s first song, I Talk About You, is sobering.
“Both your eyes wide open / All alone in your bedroom / A week before anybody noticed.”
The track features fiddle, whistle flute and mandolin. The sounds soften the song’s devastation with a wistful, cinematic lilt. Woods associates Celtic music with funerals.
“Maybe because I’m a white guy of that heritage,” he says. “There’s something about Celtic chord changes that somehow speak to the fallibility or the shortness of life. But the music also has a certain c’est la vie."
In addition to co-writing Leaving Nashville (recorded by Lady A’s Charles Kelly for his 2016 solo LP, The Driver), Woods and Stoklasa also partnered on Portland, Maine, first released by country giant Tim McGraw on his 2014 album Sundown Heaven Town. Woods issued his own version in 2015, and last year, celebrated the song’s 10-year anniversary with new duet versions featuring LeAnn Rimes and Jordan Davis.
101 Canadian albums you should listen to now
Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band’s new album rewards a patient ear
The songwriting collaboration with Stoklasa, though fruitful, did not last. Woods says his friend, who died at 36, sounded like he was 58 when he was just 24. Stoklasa was a whip-smart, annoying, hermetic, Aretha Franklin-loving man who kept the air conditioning blowing ice-cold, and cooked Woods the best steak he ever had.
“He was difficult guy to be friends with. He was constantly pushing people away, and there were a lot of people in Nashville who had had enough of him. But he and I got along. We just got each other musically.”
Though Woods hoped Stoklasa would some day renew their musical partnership, the two fell out of the collaborating habit with each other. After a while, business didn’t seem all that important any more when they got together.
“We were such good friends, the last thing we wanted to do was talk about country music. We wanted to have a nice lunch and catch up,” he said.
Woods says he and Stoklasa 'just got each other musically.'Donovan Woods/Supplied
The EP was not premeditated. One song about Stoklasa, recorded with Montreal producer and engineer Connor Seidel, led to another one or three. The These Things Happen has a line that revisits Leaving Nashville’s harsh realities of Music Row: “And sometimes they don’t have your name on the guest list at the door / And sometimes you don’t pick up a phone call and they don’t call any more.”
Woods’s guitar and vocals for the project were recorded quickly. The mandolin, whistle flute and accordion parts were contributed by Newfoundlander Aaron Collis, who was recommended by musician and host of CBC Radio One’s Q, Tom Power.
The EP’s title came from a remark made by someone who said that it was a sin that Stoklasa had squandered his gifts. Woods isn’t so sure about that.
“I think you’re entitled to squander your gifts, you know? Go ahead and squander them if you want. They don’t belong to anybody else.”
Woods doesn’t spend as much time in Nashville as he used to. His own career as a Juno-winning singer-songwriter is humming along nicely. “I don’t pitch as many songs to publishers these days.”
Then he pauses. “That said, I have a couple of cuts that might work out.” What he means is that two of his songs might be recorded by an artist on a major label. It could change everything. That’s what the song he wrote with Stoklasa is all about: “One day you’re the king, and the next, you’re not.”
Woods ain’t ever leaving Nashville.
Donovan Woods will tour across Ontario in April. He plays Aeolian Hall in London on April 16; the Westdale, Hamilton, April 17; Gravenhurst Opera House, Gravenhurst, April 18; Conrad Centre for the Performing Arts, Kitchener, April 21; Imperial Theatre, Sarnia, April 23; the Sanctuary, Ridgeway, April 24; St. Thomas Anglican Church, St. Catharines, April 25; Biltmore Theatre, Oshawa, April 28; River’s Edge at the Arlington, Paris, April 29.