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.
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.
JJ Appleton
Guest Picker JJ Appleton
Blues legend John Hammond Jr.
Photo by Louis Ramirez
A: What I love about the blues is its deceptive simplicity, the immediacy of emotion, and the story/truth-telling. When they say, “Blues is a feeling,” it’s clear when two different people play the same three chords or the same lick. If you’re really doing it, your personality should be laid bare with every note you play and sing.
Professor Longhair, musical king of the Mardi Gras
Current obsession: Professor Longhair. I love his humorous bursts of deeply inventive rhythms. His use of extreme dynamics in one bar of music. His beautiful voice. His piano is the orchestra and there is a lot of musicality going on there. Professor Longhair has set the standard for me to try to become an “orchestrator” on the guitar and to find my own unique voice and style.
Ted Drozdowski Editorial Director
A: I’m connected to cosmic roots music via decades of exploring the nooks and crannies of the American South and its deep creative fringes. It’s defined roughly by Son House and John Lee Hooker to Pink Floyd, Sonny Sharrock, and Tom Waits—anything with an “otherness” that’s soulful and authentic. It helps keep me alive.
One of Ted’s inspirations, the late free-jazz guitarist Sonny Sharrock.
Current obsession: The dang movie I’ve been working on with my band Coyote Motel for about two years. After 300 hours of editing, I can see completion. And it does have “otherness.”
Coyote Motel in thier upcoming film.
Luke Ottenhof Assistant Editor
A: I was raised on folk and classic rock, but when I was 10 years old, I got Billy Talent on CD, and covertly copied my friend’s CD of Sum 41’s Does This Look Infected? onto a cassette (I wasn’t allowed to buy it because it had a parental advisory sticker). The early 2000s were a golden era of pop-punk in Canada, and while that genre post-2006 doesn’t really rev my engine anymore, those two releases set me on a path of obsession with heavy, riffy music paired with great hooks and bright vocal harmonies.
Current obsession: I’ve gotten back into soldering after taking apart my crappy Vox Cambridge 15 to finally fix it up. I was planning to just sell it for cheap to someone who wanted to repair it, but all it needed was a new gain pot, and the fix cost me $1.50 plus an hour of labor.
Luke’s Vox, redeemed by a $1.50 part and an hour’s repair time.
Gil Chiasson Reader of the Month
A: When I think of “Surfer Girl” by the Beach Boys, for instance, it is the sum total of all its parts which makes it so amazing in how it captures the context of the song. It’s about a surfer girl, a cool breeze, water spray, and hot summer sun!
The Beach Boys, when they were crafting the California dream.
Current obsession: I am currently writing music inspired by Thelonious Monk. He had these soulful chord progressions with interesting types of time signatures. His pockets, or, grooves, were full of that gold we all love to hear and feel.
Thelonious Monk had the keys—perhaps even to the universe.