Aquarium Drunkard’s Jason P. Woodbury reveals his Nightbird Singing Quartet

Having familiarized myself with the Jason P. Woodbury oeuvre through the years via his editorial home Aquarium Drunkard (to which I sometimes contribute), his funky A/V project Wastoids, and his guest appearances on podcasts including Bandsplain and my very own Wilco Will Love You, it has been great fun to sort the Easter eggs hidden within his latest album, Jason P. Woodbury & The Nightbird Singing Quartet, releasing March 13th, 2026. Jason’s curatorial skills and decades of professional discernment as a listener show up in flashes: his oft-stated fondness for Vince Guaraldi comes through in the record’s piano-forward moments, his vocal suggests a Jim James influence, Rick Heins’ warm pedal steel swells evoke the desert expanses surrounding Woodbury’s Phoenix home base, and the spooky tones and percussive textures scattered throughout come through like UFO transmissions or Lynchian spectres. 

In true Tape Op-ian fashion, JPW & TNSQ is the product of guys who formed their musical identities around the “good gear helps but isn’t essential” ethos – Woodbury, Heins, bassist Andrew Bates, pianist and “musical polyglot” Rob Kroehler, and producer and multi-instrumentalist Zach Toporek – operating from their respective home studio environments on humble interfaces (Bates’s UA Volt, Toporek’s UA Apollo, and Woodbury’s Focusrite Scarlett 2i2, to be exact). Overall, the record achieves the sonic spaciousness Woodbury sought in making it. It sounds like it comes from everywhere, but most specifically Arizona – with some outer space sprinkled in.