People who hear Duncan Wood play guitar or pedal steel think he's kidding when he says he has a PhD in physics, too. He went to undergrad at Stanford and earned his doctorate at UC Santa Cruz, where he helped build the largest digital camera in history, and invented a new technique for discovering black holes. In 2025 he defended his dissertation and moved to Nashville to play music full time. His diploma hangs in his hallway bathroom.

He grew up in Maysville, Kentucky, on the Ohio River, playing in his grandfather's big band from middle school and teaching himself guitar, French horn, and whatever else was around. At Stanford he fell in with serious jazz musicians, including bassist Zach Moses, and the two co-produced Wood's first EP. Through graduate school he kept writing and recording, buying broken amps and tape machines at junk prices and fixing them on his parents' porch.

His debut album, Away With Words, was mostly recorded in a nineteenth-century Greek Revival house in Ripley, Ohio. He played twelve instruments on the record and there are no programmed parts. A song might open with fingerpicked guitar and a quiet vocal, then build to a full wind ensemble: French horns, trumpets, trombones, bells, cymbal swells. The Wild Is Calling described the result as "how we imagine a Rufus Wainwright, Sufjan Stevens, Radiohead collaboration might evolve." The dynamic range is the point.

The first session was for the title track, recorded over a weekend in Marin County, CA with Moses, an upright bassist known for playing with Joshua Redman, Brian Blade, and Esperanza Spalding, and for recording a Grammy-nominated album with Ibrahim Maalouf. Moses helped shape the album's arrangements and production throughout. He was both Wood's dear friend and his favorite musician. He died in 2024. Wood assembled a tribute compilation, The Butterfly Effect, with contributions from artists including Louis Cole.

His studio in Nashville is a living room with big windows, NS-10s, and a Princeton Reverb amp he has heavily modified to his liking. There is a sitar in one corner that belonged to his late mentor Ernie King, a pedal steel in another, and a stack of brass and woodwind cases in another. From that room he writes, records, and produces. He plays guitar, pedal steel, and various winds at recording sessions and live shows, often with drummer Ryan Whitt and bassist Sam Bellavance. He is currently producing a second album for Santa Barbara singer-songwriter Bradberri and writing songs for his next record.