As he approaches his 80th year, Chris Smither remains a potent songwriter and guitarist whose work is truly timeless—carved from experience and a deep perspective into the human condition.
Now well into his sixth decade as a performer, with more than 20 albums behind him, singer-songwriter Chris Smither is doing some of his finest work. His vivid lyrics and resonant baritone on his new recording, All About the Bones, are elevated by his inimitable guitar style.
Smither’s acoustic fingerpicking is based on the legacy of bluesmen like Mississippi John Hurt and Lightnin’ Hopkins. “When I heard Lightnin’ Hopkins for the first time,” says Smither, “I thought that two people were playing. The fact that one guy was doing it all floored me. And then John Hurt’s use of syncopation, the subtle way that he does the dead thumb pattern so he can use the fingers to play lead lines—it took me forever to work it out.” But Smither takes these models and makes them his own. He gets a groove going, harmonizes the tune in double-stops, and all the while thumps the floor with the back of his boots as if he were a drummer in his own band.
“People told me I was crazy when I was coming up in New Orleans. They asked me why I was playing all this old acoustic music while the whole world was going electric. There were just a few of us … guys like John Hammond Jr. We felt a kinship, and he validated my choices.”
Firmly rooted and yet distinctly contemporary, Smither is the rare performer whose music feels both timeless and timely. The scaffolding may be the blues tradition, but the house Smither builds is all his own. Musically, that means different chord types, different forms than the 12-bar pattern, different picking patterns. His words are deeply philosophical, wry, bittersweet, traipsing through shades of light and dark. They’re rich with allegory and a kind of street mysticism, and they beg for repeated listens. The album’s arrangements, minimal and intimate, feature Zak Trojano on drums, BettySoo on harmony vocals, and producer David Goodrich on, as Smither puts it, “a carpetbag of instruments.” But most often when you see Smither, who is 79, it’s alone onstage, delivering songs like a troubadour who splits his time between a Crescent City street corner and the spirit world—which may actually be the same thing.
All About the Bones - Chris Smither
I asked Smither how he developed his approach to lyric writing. “Coming from the blues base, I had to admit that I’m not a sharecropper, I wasn’t going to write about 40 acres and a plow. I’m the son of a university professor. You write what you know. So I talk about the things I’m interested in, and that turns out to be what most people are interested in—life, death, love, hate, why am I so miserable, and how am I going to feel better. A huge marker for me, believe it or not, was 1968’s Disraeli Gearsby Cream. I thought, ‘These guys are a bluesband, but they’re making it their own with contemporary sounds and lyrics.’”
Nonetheless, “The two main guys for me were Randy Newman and Paul Simon,” Smither relates. “Newman is painterly, he creates an indelible picture. It’s like the photographer Matthew Brady from the Civil War; it’s all there to take in. Paul Simon helped me understand how words feel in the mouth, that they have intrinsic value beyond their meaning.”
Like Simon, Smither finds a melody and then makes vocal sounds, sometimes intelligible, sometimes not. All the while he’s thumping out those Delta-inspired grooves. “Half the time I write songs, I’m halfway through before I have any idea what they’re about. I get a tune in my head and just start making funny noises, a conversation with that part of the brain we’re not on speaking terms with. Then I’ll sit back and ask ‘Where is this going?’ Eventually a little light comes on and I start to see what the song needs. Then the left brain takes over, and I can be more diligent about it.”
Chris Smither's Gear
Smither onstage with his current favorite instrument, a custom Collings cutaway with strings ranging from .013 to .053.
Photo by Carol Young
Guitars
• Collings custom 12-fret cutaway
Tuner
• Boss TU-12H
Strings & Accessories
• Elixir (.012–.053 sets with a .013 substituted for the high E string)
• Shubb Capo
“People told me I was crazy when I was coming up in New Orleans. They asked me why I was playing all this old acoustic music while the whole world was going electric.”
As a young man, Smither had a break that every songwriter dreams of when, in 1972, Bonnie Raitt covered his song “Love Me Like a Man.” The two were part of the folk and blues scene of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the late ’60s. Subsequently others would record this gem, including Diana Krall. Emmylou Harris made another Smither tune famous: “Slow Surprise,” in the soundtrack of the 1998 Robert Redford movie The Horse Whisperer. All this built his reputation, but Smither’s daily bread is one-nighters across the U.S. and in Europe. He’s developed what he calls “a small, incredibly loyal” following.
“I can see phases of my career,” Smither says when asked how this latest record might differ from his youthful work. “The last three records or so have been a refining of my vision, though if you asked me to define that vision, I’d be hard-pressed to do so. On the one hand, you can listen and say there’s nothing new here. But on the other hand, I’m notdoing things that are unnecessary. Everything’s getting stripped down. The record sounds full to me and yet there’s so few people on it.”
As befitting a man about to turn 80, many of the songs on All About the Bones deal with love and death, such as “In the Bardo.” The bardo is a Tibetan Buddhist term that refers to the intermediate state after death and before rebirth. Smither says,” I was morethan halfway into this, with all kinds of lines and material, but I just felt lost. And that’s when it occurred to me—where am I lost? I’m lost in the bardo. Once I recognized that, I could put the whole thing together.
Smither’s new album, like much of his finest work, is about, as he puts it, “life, death, love, hate, why am I so miserable, and how am I going to feel better.”
“A huge marker for me, believe it or not, was 1968’s Disraeli Gearsby Cream.”
“I’ve always wanted people to understand the songs the way I do,” he adds, “but it’s even better when they come up to me and say, ‘I understand that song perfectly,’ and I go ‘really?’ And then their explanation bears no relationship to my concepts, and yet makes perfect sense. I tell them, ‘You’re absolutely right.’”
It's heady stuff, and yet Smither makes his “In the Bardo” feel down-to-earth—his warm, gentle fingerpicking that splits the difference between John Hurt and the modern American-primitivist school inviting the listener to embrace his lyrics: “Deep into the shadows / It’s on the way, on the way now / No answers to the questions / No sense of direction home / Just a subtle indication / a whispered invitation to let go.”
“You’re headed towards a cliff,” Smither says with a half-smile,,“and you have no idea when you’ll go over. You ask, ‘What the hell am I going to do now?’ I like to talk about this stuff. Ideally, nothing comes as a surprise in life. If you’re prepared, nothing can throw you.”YouTube It
Chris Smither plays his beautiful contemplation of life and death “In the Bardo” at a gig in Fort Smith, Arkansas, last year.
Valerie June’s songs, thanks to her distinctive vocal timbre and phrasing, and the cosmology of her lyrics, are part of her desire to “co-create a beautiful life” with the world at large.
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If you’re familiar with June’s sound, you know how effortlessly she stands out from the singer-songwriter pack. Her equal-parts warm, reedy, softly Macy Gray-tinged singing voice imprints on her as many facets as a radiant-cut emerald—and it possesses the trademark sincerity heard in the most distinctive of singer/songwriters. Her music, overall, brilliantly shines with a spirited, contagiously uplifting glow.
Owls, Omens, and Oracles opens with “Joy, Joy!” with producer M. Ward rocking lead guitar over strings (June plays acoustic on nearly all of the tracks and banjo on one). It then recurringly dips into ’50s doo-wop chord changes, blends chugging, at times funky rock rhythms with saxophones and horns, bursts with New Orleans-style brass on “Changed” (which features gospel legends the Blind Boys of Alabama), and explores a slow soul groove with electronic guest DJ Cavem Moetavation on “Superpower.” Bright Eyes’ multi-instrumentalist Nate Walcott helmed the arrangements with guidance from Ward and June, and frequently appears on piano and Hammond organ, while Norah Jones supports with backing vocals on the folk lullaby “Sweet Things Just for You.” The entire album was recorded live to tape, which was a new experience for June.
June shares her perspective on the album and her work, overall. “It’s not ever complete or finished, your study of art,” she offers. “It’s an adventure, and it keeps getting prettier as you walk through the meadow of creating or learning new things. Every artist that you bring in has a different way of performing with you, or the audience might be really talkative or super quiet. And all of that shapes the art—so it’s ever-expansive. It’s pretty infinite [laughs], where art can take you and where it goes.... I kinda got lost there a little bit,” she muses, laughing.
June’s favored acoustic guitar is this Martin 000-15M, with mahogany top, back, and sides.
Photo by Tim Bugbee/Tinnitus Photography
June didn’t connect with guitar in the beginning, but discovered her passion for it later, when the instrument became a vehicle for her self-empowerment. She took lessons as a teenager but was a distracted student, preferring to listen to her teacher share the history of blues guitarists like Big Bill Broonzy and Mississippi John Hurt. “I didn’t pick it up again until I was in my early 20s, and my band that I was in with my ex fell apart,” she says. “I still was singing and I still was hearing these beautiful voices sing me these songs, and I didn’t want to never be able to perform them. It was a terrible feeling, to be … musically stranded.
“And I was like, ‘Now, I could go get a new band and get some more accompaniment, but how ’bout I get my tail in there and keep my promise to my granddad who gave me that first guitar and actually learn how to play it, so I’ll never feel like this again.’ The goal was that I would never be musically stranded again.”
She became a solo performer, learning lap steel and banjo along with guitar, and called her style “organic moonshine roots music.” Today, she eschews picks for fingers, even when strumming chords, and is a vital blues-and-folk based stylist when she lays into her playing–especially in a live,solo setting. After two self-released albums, 2006’s The Way of the Weeping Willow and 2008’s Mountain of Rose Quartz, she connected with the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, who recorded and produced her 2013 album, Pushin’ Against Stone, at Nashville’s Easy Eye Sound, which helped launch her now-flourishing career.
Valerie June’s Gear
Guitars
Amps
- Fender Deluxe Reverb
Effects
- TC Electronic Hall of Fame
- MXR X Third Man Hardware Double Down booster
- J. Rockett Audio Archer boost/overdrive
Strings
- D’Addario XL Nickel Regular Light (.010–.046)
- Martin Marquis Silked Phosphor Bronze (.012–.054
Photo by Travys Owen
As we talk about art being a shared experience, June says she can be a bit of a hermit at times, but “when it’s time to share the art, then there you are. Even if you’re a painter and you just put your painting on a wall and walk away, that’s an interaction that brings you out of your studio or your bedroom to understand this whole act of co-creating—which to me is a spiritual act anyway. That’s why we’re here, to really understand those rules and layers to life. How do we co-create together?
“And I think it’s so fun,” she enthuses. “I enjoy learning, even when it’s hard. I’m like, ‘Okay, this chord is killing me right now, or this phrase.... but I’ma stick with it. And then that likens to something that I might face when I go out into the world. I’m like, ‘All right, I can get through this.’”
I suggest, “When you say ‘co-creating,’ it sounds like you mean something bigger.”
“Both in the creation of our art, but also in the creation of a life,” June replies. “’Cause how can a life be something this artistic? You get to the end of it and you’re like, ‘Wow, look at what I co-created! With all these other people, with animals, with nature, with sound that’s all around....‘ All of my life has been a piece of art or a collective creation. I imagine them like books: different lives on a shelf. And you go pick one—‘Whoa! I created a pretty fun one there!’ or, ‘Oh, man, I had no hand in that....’ Close the book, next one!” she concludes, laughing as she illustrates the metaphor with her hands.
“So does that make all of your inspirations your co-creators?” I ask.
Valerie June at one of her several Newport Folk Festival appearances, with her trusty Gold Tone banjo
Photo by Tim Bugbee/Tinnitus Photography
“Yeah! Even if they’ve gone before,” says June. “I was listening to some beautiful classical music the other day, and I was like, ‘Man, I don’t know who any of these artists are; they’re all dead and gone, but I’m just enjoying it and it’s putting me in a zone that I need to be in right now.‘ So, we’re always leaving these little seeds for even those who are coming after us to be inspired by.”
Some of her current non-musical co-creators are poets and authors, such as the poet Hafez, the philosopher Audre Lorde, poet Mary Oliver, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist whose works include Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, and Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses.
“It’s not ever complete or finished, your study of art. It’s an adventure, and it keeps getting prettier as you walk through the meadow of creating or learning new things.”
“These books are so beautiful and show the relationship of humanity with nature and the way trees speak with each other; the way moss communicates to itself,” June explains. “Those ways of being can help humans, who always think we know so much, to learn how to work together better.”
As she’s sharing, I see her glance out her window. “Right now, I just saw a muskrat go across the pond,” she continues. “It’s about this big [holds hands about three feet apart] and it digs holes in the yard. It’s having such a great time and I’m just like, ‘Okay, you are huge, and I’m walking through the yard and falling in holes because of you [laughs]. I’m just watching you live your best life!’ And then there was a blue heron that came yesterday, and I watched it eat fish.... They’re my friends!” she exclaims, with more laughter.
Valerie June believes in the power of flowers–and all living thing–as her creative collaborators.
It might seem like we’re getting a bit off subject, but it’s residents of nature like these who are important in her creative process.
I share how, in my own approach to art, I feel as though we can always access creativity and our ideals, as long as we stay receptive to experiencing and sharing in them. June agrees, but comments that sometimes her best self only wants to sit and focus: “No more information; no more downloads, please.”
An encounter with Memphis-based blues guitarist Robert Belfour, who June frequently saw perform, expanded that perspective for her. She shares about a time she went up to him after a show: “I was like, ‘Hey, I would love to work with you on some music and maybe we could co-write a song or something.’ He was like, ‘Nope! I don’t wanna do it.’ And I said, ‘Whaaat?’ And he’s like, ‘No. I do what I do, and I do not do what anybody else does; I just do what I do.’”
Sometimes, she says, “I think that’s just as much of an outlook to have with creating as anything. It’s like, ‘Okay, I’m there, I’m where I wanna be. I don’t want to be anywhere else.’”
“That’s why we’re here, to really understand those rules and layers to life. How do we co-create together?”
Part of what’s so enjoyable about speaking with June is realizing that she truly exists on her own plane. She has no pretense, and in that, doesn’t hide some of the fears that weigh on her mind at times. But she doesn’t let those define her. It’s her easy, exuberant optimism that sparks a feeling of friendship between us, without having known each other before that afternoon. What are some of her guiding principles as an artist, I wonder?
“I sit with the idea of, ‘Who am I creating this for?’” she says, “and returning to the fact that I’m doing this for me, and, as Gillian Welch said, ‘I’m gonna do it anyway even if it doesn’t pay.’ This is what I wanna do. And reflecting on that and letting that kind of be my guiding force. It’s just something that I enjoy, that I really wanna do.”
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From there, the conversation meanders in other directions, and June even generously asks me a few questions about my own artistic beliefs. We share about trusting your gut instinct, and walking away from situations and people who don’t serve us. This reminds her of a bigger feeling.
“With everything that these times hold for us as humans,” she shares, “from the inequality that we face to the environmental change, the political climate, and all the things that could lead us to fear or negativity.... I started to think about it, and I’m like, ‘Okay, well, maybe we are fucked! Maybe the planet is going to eject us and all of the other things are gonna come true! Well, if that’s what’s gonna happen, who do I wanna be?’
“I want to go out in a way that’s sweet or kind to other people, enjoying this experience, these last moments, and building togetherness through music. I want to co-create a beautiful life even in the face of all of that. That’s what I want to do.”
