Wooden Wand

James Jackson Toth performs and records as Wooden Wand, adopting fresh project titles for each endeavor in his work as a vocalist and multi-instrumentalist. Beginning in the mid-2000s, he first partnered with the free-improvisation collective the Vanishing Voice before devoting greater attention to solo material that merged folk, jazz, psychedelic, and noise-rock strands into a distinctive sound linking him to the alt-folk and New Weird America circles. In addition to numerous limited-edition and self-issued singles and CD-Rs, standout albums such as Second Attention and James and the Quiet helped enlarge his audience. The 2012 release Briarwood and 2013’s Blood Oaths of the New Blues found Toth investigating outlaw-country directions, while several other records appeared simply under the Wand name. Beyond these independent projects, Wooden Wand material has surfaced on an array of labels—Fire Records, Kill Rock Stars, Rykodisc, Young God Records, and Three Lobed Recordings, which issued 2017’s Clipper Ship, his first full-length since 2014’s Farmer’s Corner.