With a vengeance. Since entering recovery in the mid-1980s, Smither has exceeded himself as a singer, songwriter, guitar player and performer at seemingly every turn. He’s released five sublime studio albums and a pair of live records that contain 34 tracks between them and never overlap; he also plays between 100 and 200 solo dates a year. His understanding of spiritual transcendence might hinge on the art of “undoing,” on being instead of doing, but he nourishes his self-surpassing spirit as an artist with the most assiduous of work ethics.
Nevertheless, as one might expect from someone who embraces life’s paradoxes, a certain “less is more” dynamic has attended this process. Take Smither’s finger-style guitar playing, which owes a pronounced debt to that of Mississippi John Hurt. Recently, at the urging of his manager, he archived a box of analog tapes from early in his career; in the process, he discovered just how much he’d pared back his playing over the years.
“I sat there listening to myself at age 22 and it’s all there, everything that I do,” he says. “But as with almost every young musician I know, I played much faster; I hadn’t learned to slow down yet. What’s really happened is certain refinements of technique — learning what not to do and where to leave the spaces. Probably the best thing that ever happened to my guitar playing was that I quit thinking of myself as a guitar player.”
Apropos of Smither’s philosophical take on life, the shift was a matter of perspective — of self-perception. “Frankly, when I was young, I was a better guitar player than most of the guys who were around and playing songs. But that didn’t mean I was a great guitar player. What happened was that I gradually began to place a lot more emphasis on getting my lyrics across, not with dazzling guitar work, but just with competent orchestration on the guitar.”
Smither doesn’t tour with a band; his orchestration, which he refers to as “one-man rock ‘n’ roll,” consists of nothing but the urgent call-and-response among his vocals, his foot stomping and his blue acoustic guitar. “Lightnin’ Hopkins was instrumental in that,” he explains. “He was the guy that showed me you didn’t have to be a band, and you didn’t have to have Marshall amps stacked to the sky.
“What you had to have was that drive — that feel, that pulsating rhythm. I mean, rhythmic blues, as opposed to slow drag blues, that’s what that’s about. That’s the form that can deliver a line that would be almost pathetic in any other context and make it have meaning. It was what drove our parents crazy when they would read rock ‘n’ roll lyrics and say, ‘How can you listen to this drivel?’ We didn’t hear it as drivel because of the way it’s accented. It just drives home like a jackhammer.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m a firm believer in lyrics that read well on the printed page, but it doesn’t have to be that way,” he went on. “A great example is ‘Honky Tonk Women’ by the Rolling Stones. God, what a song! And yet it doesn’t read well. People don’t even know what the words are.”
The turning point in terms of Smither’s ability to achieve the jackhammer effect to which he aspires came twelve or thirteen years ago, when he started miking his feet. It happened rather serendipitously one night, after he and his manager detected a correlation between performances in which he couldn’t find the pocket and venues that had carpeted stages.
“I would feel very good warming up in the dressing room and then go out and have a terrible show,” he says. “It took me the longest time to realize that I couldn’t hear my feet, and that the audience couldn’t hear my feet. And the feet are important. There are lots of things that I don’t do on guitar that I do with my feet. The guitar sounds curiously naked — untethered — without the feet…. So finally, my manager Carol said, ‘Mike ’em. Put a mike down there.’ And all of a sudden, things started to come together; the sets got more consistent. I was more in control and I would relax.”
This integration of sound and sense, this emphasis on how things feel, extends to Smither’s lyrics, where the way the words sound conveys as much meaning as what they actually say. “It’s not just what the words mean; it’s how they fill your mouth up and what they do in your ear,” he says. “A lyric line that flows like conversation is devoutly to be wished. The meaning can almost be irrelevant.
“That’s why I like some of Paul Simon’s best stuff. You listen to a song like ‘Boy In The Bubble’ and what does it mean? It means everything, and yet you have a hard time pinning it down.”
And as his ace covers of songs written by everyone from Neil Young (“I Am A Child”) to Elizabeth Cotten (“Shake Sugaree”) attests, the words Smither sings don’t have to be his own. Not one to subscribe to the post-Dylan fallacy that singers can only be great artists if they write their own material (which, of course, isn’t even true of Dylan), Smither consistently elevates cover versions of songs to an art form. Besides the aforementioned remake of Dylan’s “Desolation Row”, his new album includes a sly reading of Mississippi John Hurt’s randy “Candy Man”, a swampy take on the late Dave Carter’s Rabelaisian “Crocodile Man”, and a crepuscular rendering of the Buffalo Springfield’s gorgeous “Kind Woman”.
“I wish more people would do them,” he says, referring to songs written by other people. “When I do covers, I’m saying a couple of things: This is where I come from, and these are the people I belong with. Now that’s sticking your neck out, you know?
“I will not tackle a cover unless I hear something that I think the artist missed. That said, there are songs that I love that I’ll never try to do. I dearly love to listen to Ray Charles sing ‘Drown In My Own Tears’, but I will never try to do that song. I couldn’t, because he hit every base. There’s nothing left for me to do.”
Although not spiritual in any obvious sense, Smither’s approach to covers — just like his mystical/existential take on life, and his attention to how sound and sense create meaning — betrays an emphasis on connection. It’s a transcendental ethos, if you will, one in which he’s perpetually reaching beyond himself for deeper, more abiding connections. His performances convey this impulse exquisitely. But perhaps nowhere does he express this hunger to connect — and the mysteries it inevitably entails — as explicitly as in the liner notes to Live As I’ll Ever Be. (The record’s use of the term “live” is as much a nod to the art of living as to the fact that all the tracks on the record were played before a live audience.)
“I’ve often said, and I think it’s true, that I write the songs and make the records that I can go out and play, to create opportunities to play,” Smither writes. “Playing is the thing, and playing is ephemeral. It has to do with the time spent in collaboration with an audience to make something happen. The song does not exist as such without the audience, and it is transient even then.
“So we have here a contradiction, a permanent representation of something impermanent. And I like it very much…it moves me, it sounds the way I sound to me, and best of all, it is nowhere near the whole story. Come see me sometime…I’ll tell you about it.”
All of which is about what you’d expect from a guy who writes line like “I’m not the passenger, I’m the ride.”
ND contributing editor Bill Friskics-Warren is the co-author, with fellow ND contributing editor David Cantwell, of Heartaches By The Number: Country Music’s 500 Greatest Singles.
