music
Duncan Wood makes music with the same curiosity he brings to the night sky. A singer‑songwriter, multi‑instrumentalist, and producer from Maysville, Kentucky, he was raised in a kaleidoscope of sounds: playing 1940s swing charts in his grandfather’s big band, high‑school jazz combos, and covering Queen, Zeppelin and the Beatles with his friends. Early heroes such as James Taylor and Carole King taught him melody, while later discoveries like Nick Drake, Bon Iver, and Radiohead opened the door to texture and atmosphere.
Wood left Kentucky for Stanford University, earned a Ph.D. in physics from UC Santa Cruz, and helped design software for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s giant camera. Even during that research, he spent nights writing and tracking songs, designing preamps and rebuilding tape machines so he could sculpt every detail himself.
Those experiments bloomed on Away With Words, his 2023 debut album. Cut almost entirely solo in a nineteenth‑century house overlooking the Ohio River, the record pairs folk intimacy with orchestral sweep. Wood’s home‑built studio, nicknamed Red Carpet Records for its shag carpeting, turned reclaimed gear into a warm, unpolished canvas.
The release found early champions. The Wild Is Calling hailed it as “a new classic,” F Sharp Minor praised its “exquisite instrumentation,” and Zoe Konez called the arrangements “absolutely epic as they grow.” Reviewers noted that a single voice, guitar, or French horn can widen suddenly into full ensemble without losing its human core. Wood performs nearly every part himself—guitar, piano, pedal steel, French horn, flute, drums, trumpet, saxophone—eschewing programmed sounds and heavy editing. Zach Moses appears on bass and co‑production, while opera singer Chanslor Gallenstein lends harmonies on two tracks. Outside his own work Wood produces Santa Barbara‑based singer/songwriter Bradberri and plays sessions across genres.
After defending his dissertation in March 2025 he moved to Nashville to pursue music full time, carrying physics with him as a way of thinking rather than a separate career. In his view songwriting and science both ask the same question: what hidden patterns can turn noise into meaning?
If there is a throughline in Wood’s work, it is a sense of quiet precision, an attention to texture, shape, and silence that rewards close listening. His songs often feel like artifacts unearthed rather than built, with melodies that unfold like memories and arrangements that shift just when you think they have settled. It’s the kind of music that stays with you, not because it demands attention, but because it earns it.
