Chris Smither | Time Stands Still

October 27, 2009

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show is the incredible musician, Chris Smither. He’s been in the music industry for about four decades now, and has an incredible brand of music. He taps his own feet as the percussion to his music, and often tours with just him and his acoustic guitar, and his tapping shoes. Incredible singer: Chris Smither. I’m going to listen to a song from Chris Smither called, ‘Don’t Call Me Stranger,’ and right after we’re going to be talking to him about his newest album. Here we go, ‘Don’t Call Me Stranger,’ by Chris Smither.

[Music]

Dr. Kent: That’s an amazing tune called, ‘Don’t Call Me Stranger,’ by Chris Smither from his latest album - and what an album it is - called ‘Time Stands Still.’ It’s his eleventh studio album. Welcome to the show, Chris Smither.

Chris Smither: Thank you. How are you?

Dr. Kent: I’m great. I saw you many years ago for the first time in Middlebury, Vermont, at the little coffee house there.

Chris Smither: Was it snowing?

Dr. Kent: I think it was, yes.

Chris Smither: It always snows when I play up there. I play up there every year, and it snows every time I’m up there.

Dr. Kent: It’s amazing to see, I believe that year it was just you and your feet.

Chris Smither: That’s normally the way I play: 99 percent of the time, that’s just exactly how you’ll hear me.

Dr. Kent: This last record of yours, ‘Times Stands Still,’ was produced by David Goodrich, who played with Peter Mulvey for a very long time. I know you and Peter are good friends. I just chatted with him a couple of weeks ago.

Chris Smither: Yes, and in fact that’s how I met Goodie, and then once I spent some time with him, I asked him to help me on a record, and this has been about the third album that we’ve produced together.

Dr. Kent: There’s an amazing sound on this thing. This feels to me like it’s so fresh and new. The sound of that song, it’s nasty, it’s gritty, it’s down on the earth. Tell me about the sound of this album.

Chris Smither: Well, it’s deceptively simple. It’s virtually live. There’s very, very few overdubs on the record, and we could do that because it is so simple. It’s basically just a trio working on the record. The idea for that came from a festival that I played about a year before we started work on the record. It was a festival in Holland. They wanted me to play, but they didn’t want any solo action. I basically always work solo. I said, ‘Well, that’s too bad.’ They said, ‘Can’t you get a band together?’ I said, ‘Maybe I can bring a trio,’ and they said, ‘Well that’ll do.’ So I brought a trio, and we had a wonderful time, I mean it really was a wonderful time. Everybody loved it, including us. They gave me a recording of our set that had been done off the board. I didn’t listen to it for a few weeks, but when I finally did, I said, ‘Well gosh, no wonder everybody liked it!’ I sent it to Dave, and I said, ‘Listen to this. This is the way we should do the next record.’ He listened to it, and he said, ‘Yeah, let’s give it a shot.’ And that’s what happened.

Dr. Kent: Yes, and it still has that feel of solo. It’s still got your feet, and it’s still got the simplicity of the one sound. Maybe David Goodrich kind of has that because he’s done this sort of duo with Peter Mulvey for so many years. Maybe he’s great at making you sound like a soloist.

Chris Smither: He is. He knows what to do to make the sound bigger, but to not at the same time step on what I’m doing. It’s a rare skill. I feel like I’ve been looking all my life for a producer that knew how to do that, and I finally found one.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about your style. You’re a fantastic guitar player, and you’ve got this voice that you’ve been carrying around your whole life. Tell me about how your style has changed.

Chris Smither: It’s just a gradual accumulation of characteristics. I started off listening to Blues guys, [indecipherable] Mississippi John Hurt, guitar players like that, Skip James. Probably that accounts for at least half, if not two thirds of my style. It was a combination of trying to imitate what they were doing and not really succeeding, but at the same time coming up with something that’s valid in it’s own right, and just learning a little bit at a time, trying to figure things out. I’m a self-schooled musician. I always think of myself as not really knowing a whole lot about music, at least not in any formal sense. Gradually, it’s gotten to the point where, if you work at something long enough and keep to yourself, and keep yourself isolated enough, then you’ll start to be recognizable. Whether that will be good or not is something else again, but at least you won’t sound like anybody else. The voice just comes from, as you put it, I’ve been carrying it around my whole life, so it sounds fairly lived in. It’s been a long time.

Dr. Kent: From love songs to political songs, I remember one of the first songs that I really loved, I was exposed to first from Peter Mulvey, and I traced it back to you of course, and that is ‘Every Mother’s Son.’ I especially love that song; it’s just such a unique perspective. Where do songs come from for you?

Chris Smither: Sometimes they come from the newspapers, and that one did. It was a pretty terrible story about some father who’d just killed his son. He was trying to make him be quiet, and he wound up killing him, and didn’t really understand why he’d done it. To me, that was the most poignant part of the story. He just seemed like such an ordinary person. You could hear him talking on TV, because I saw a story about him on television, and it was one of these banal things; if it hadn’t resolved in the death of a young child, it wouldn’t have amounted to anything. It was just so unimportant somehow. To me, that laid the foundation of the song: this could happen to every mother’s son. It could happen to you, it could happen to me. We don’t like to think it could. It just seems like that’s the nature of the thing. That was my perspective on that one. A lot of songs just come right out of the newspaper, and just things that I read. I’ll say, there’s a theme there, there’s an idea there. Something that would support some sort of commentary.

Dr. Kent: That actually reminds me. I’ve heard Tom Waits and his wife Kathleen Brennan, they do that: they mine the newspapers. There’s a hint in that last track we listened to, ‘Don’t Call Me Stranger’ - I heard a tiny bit of Tom Waits in there; maybe I’m wrong.

Chris Smither: It could be. I sort of think it’s coincidental, but at the same time, I’m a fan of Tom Waits, and I’ve known him since his first record, and it wouldn’t be a surprise to me if we came up with the same sound or the same take on a certain kind of thing, because he’s certainly rooted in the same kind of ground as I am. I think there’s a very similar sensibility going on there.

Dr. Kent: There’s real dirt in the music, and at the same time, there’s real melody. That’s what I see. I guess Dylan has kind of come around to that too. Incredible sense of the dirt. Does some of that come free - it seems to me that you were talking about Skip James, and some of those 78s, and on this album there’s a song by Frank Hutchison. Do you love those old 78s, that scratchy sound?

Chris Smither: I’m not so much a fan of the scratchy sound that’s produced by the technology, but in terms of the spiritual dirt, I love that. Dylan in a sense has never gotten away from that. He went through one little day when he tried to sing a little prettier than his natural voice, but it just didn’t work. He’s just let it take its own course. I’m always thinking to myself that people say, ‘Well he’s a terrible singer.’ And I say, ‘Well, no, he’s not a terrible singer. He’s not a pretty singer by any means, but he’s an extremely effective singer.’ He gets it across, you know? That’s what we’re really talking about in terms of what I try to do, and Tom Waits, and Bob Dylan, or anybody else that we’re talking about. It’s the people who are trying to get something across. They’re not trying to just sort of paint a living room a pretty color. They’re trying to tell you something, and if it’s effective, it’s effective, and they’ve accomplished what their aim is.

Dr. Kent: So what do you think about some of the younger musicians, who I believe really did benefit from your playing a whole bunch in their own style, like Peter Mulvey? Do you often get tributes from those folks that say, ‘Your style meant so much to me’?

Chris Smither: I get it all the time, in a sense. I get it in performances. I spend a lot of time talking to people at performances. A lot of players come up and they tell me not only that the guitar playing has done a lot for them, but the writing and the whole concept of how to approach writing a song. It means a great deal to me. I think I’m a little embarrassed by it. At times, I don’t really know how to take it as gracefully as I probably should. At the same time, it’s really something to sit and realize that I’m at an age now that all my heroes were when I started talking to them. I mean, I actually hung out with Skip James. I met [indecipherable]. I talked to all those people when I was just a boy. I think of myself as a boy: I was in my very early 20s. To me, they were these monumental figures. To me, they were as old as the planet it seemed. I was in awe of them. Now I find myself in that same position, and I begin to appreciate how they felt at the time. It’s a different perspective on things. But, you know, I love it. When I was 60 years old, all the younger musicians in Cambridge threw a birthday party for me. They didn’t let me play at all. They all got up on stage and played Chris Smither songs, and it was one of the most exhilarating evenings of my life.

Dr. Kent: You still persist in doing very intimate gigs. You go from living room to living room, and that’s part of the real beauty and charm of the stuff that you do. Why did you make that choice early on, to play the coffee houses and the smaller gigs?

Chris Smither: Basically, I play what I can. It’s not so much a conscious choice as the size of the audience that the music will support. There are markets in the United States where I can play for an audience for about 500, and that’s about as big as any of my shows get. I would say that the majority of my shows now run about 200 people, and there’s probably maybe 15 to 20 percent that are between 75 and 100 people. I will say that the ones that are between 75 and 100 are easily the ones that I enjoy the most, because there’s an intimacy to it that is something that I really look for. I’m almost on a search for it. My whole objective for performing, and I don’t care how big the audience is, my objective is to make everybody feel like I’m sitting in their lap, whispering in their ear [laughs]. I don’t want them to think of me as some performer a long ways off up on the stage; I want to be right in their face. Of course with a small audience, that’s much more easily accomplished.

Dr. Kent: I think a lot of folks that are stuck with the large audiences would completely agree with you. It’s wonderful for the audience, wonderful for you, and it’s great that you’ve been doing it for so long. Tell me a little bit about the song we just heard, ‘Don’t Call Me Stranger.’

Chris Smither: I just realized that it had been a long time since I’d written a ‘bad boy’ song, and I set out to do one. It’s a pretty straightforward seduction piece. The thing that I like about it is it’s long on [indecipherable] but very short on details. It never gets really specific about what’s going to happen, but at the same time, there’s a sort of erotic undercurrent to it, and it’s full of promise, and I really like that. It’s got a pretty damn good line in every verse. It’s hard to argue with a song like that, if you can pull one off: it’s got a good line in every verse, then you sort of go home happy.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about your feet. How did you train your feet as a young man, and how have your feet treated you through the years? Do you go home and have sore feet from being percussive all night?

Chris Smither: It’s not really the feet that get sore; it’s the muscles in the legs that make them go up and down. That’s the hard part. I have never trained my feet at all. It’s something that I cannot help doing. I literally cannot not do it. If somebody held my feet down, it would be extremely difficult for me to play the guitar.

Dr. Kent: And your feet have been guest stars on at least Peter Mulvey’s albums. They have a life of their own now.

Chris Smither: Yes, they do. Drummers actually like my feet. If I’m playing with a drummer, they like them because my feet show them where I feel the pocket, so it’s easier for them to see where I feel it.

Dr. Kent: You’ve got a drummer that plays with you in this trio. What does he do? You’re nailing down the downbeats, and what’s he doing?

Chris Smither: He accentuates, he plays off of what I do. There are some songs on this record where he’s playing musically; he’s not really holding down time at all. He’s just adding little percussive forces to things. I absolutely love it. He doesn’t draw attention to himself, but at the same time, if he wasn’t there, you’d notice it, believe me. You would really notice it. It would be a very different sound, much more stark. He’s got a wonderful way of understanding what it is that I’m trying to do, and emphasizing it without stepping on what I’m doing. He does with the drums exactly what Goodie does on the guitar, which is to kind of amplify the intent without actually duplicating anything.

Dr. Kent: I know you’re in Charlotte right now, and you’re going on to Georgia and Louisiana and all this. Are you doing any dates with the trio?

Chris Smither: I am. That won’t happen for a few weeks. I’ve got to do a West Coast tour, and then a Midwest tour: Chicago and Michigan, places like that. Then when I come back, I’m going to work with the trio up and down the East Coast, I think the Birchmere and Joe’s Pub in New York. There’s a good double-handful of dates that we’re going to do together. I’m looking forward to that.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s such a great, fresh new sound. It’s been an honor talking to you. Tell me a little about ‘Surprise, Surprise.’

Chris Smither: [Laughs] This really is a newspaper song. This is a topical song. I started that song back in the depth of the latest financial debacle, and I was reading the newspaper, and just a verse started coming to me, and I forget which verse it was, but it was all about what a drag it is to think that you’re rich and suddenly find out that you’re poor, through absolutely no action on your own part. By the time I’d gotten up from the breakfast table, I was off into my private little work studio, and I was working away at it. It took me about two or three days to finish, but that’s the story on that.

Dr. Kent: That’s what we need right now. I mean, ‘Surprise, surprise - you are poor. You don’t have health insurance.’

Chris Smither: Whatever it is.

Dr. Kent: Yes. How do audiences respond to that?

Chris Smither: They love it! They scream with laughter. They’re basically laughing at themselves, you know? I have yet to play that song for an audience that didn’t respond extremely favorably.

Dr. Kent: Well, it’s been such an honor. I’ve been talking to Chris Smither. His new album is called ‘Time Stands Still.’ What a sound it’s got, and it’s been a real honor chatting with you.

Chris Smither: Thank you very much.

Dr. Kent: So here’s the song from ‘Time Stands Still,’ called, ‘Surprise, Surprise.’ Let’s listen to it on the way out.

[Music]

Dr. Kent: That’s a great tune called, ‘Surprise, Surprise,’ from Chris Smither, on an amazing album he just put out called, ‘Time Stands Still.’ It’s his eleventh studio album. He’s of course influenced people up and down inside the Folk world, and Blues world. It’s been such an honor chatting with him. On the show today, wow, what a fun show it’s been. At the beginning, I talked to Thomas Childers. He’s an award-winning professor of history. His book was called, ‘Soldier from the War Returning.’ What a fascinating look at the greatest generation’s troubled homecoming from World War II. They really weren’t as far away from the Vietnam vets and Iraq war vets that we know so well with their PTSD and all of that. And then it was an honor to speak to Ronald Kessler. He’s written eighteen books in the nonfiction category, usually really uncovering secret after secret. This last one is a book called, ‘In the President’s Secret Service,’ and it goes behind the scenes with agents in the line of fire and the presidents they protect. Great, great, great insights into Barack Obama’s Secret Service, and George Bush and his daughters, and Dick Cheney, and all sorts of fun, fun things in there. Then talking with Peter Brown, of course, floated my childhood boat, and we talked about his new book, called, ‘The Curious Garden.’ Today, on the day when ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ is coming out in theaters. I’m headed out there tonight to watch that movie. I’m still a child at heart. As I told Peter during the show, his book is ‘three plus,’ because I’m certainly part of his audience. His book is called, ‘The Curious Garden.’ Check out his website; he’s got some really fun stuff for your kids, and for you as well. Then of course speaking to Chris Smither was really my pleasure. His last album, recorded in only three days, was called, ‘Time Stands Still.’ He’s been on the road for more than 30 years, and he’ll come to your town soon. Go check him out. His feet keep tapping and incredible rhythms come out of his guitar. We’ll talk to you the next time. Pick up a great book, and I hope you all have a wonderful week.

Posted by jamie | Filed Under Bluegrass, TRANSCRIPTS, Folk, MUSICIAN INTERVIEW, PODCAST