Chris Smither photo by Jo Chattman
Chris Smither Unearths More Songs For All About the Bones
Folk Blues guitarist and singer/songwriter Chris Smither will be releasing his new album, All About the Bones, on May 3rd, 2024, and playing out often to celebrate it in this, his 80th year. He got together with longtime friend and producer David Goodrich post-pandemic to see if he had any songs “left in him” and under these right conditions, a very rich and energetic collection was born which seems to take into consideration the panorama of life and death as well as the key human emotions that drive us all.
Setting himself deadlines was key to getting these songs moving toward completion, and interacting with David “Goody” Goodrich often proved the key to unlocking the lyrical components that were a little resistant. The result was a real flowering of possibilities, substantially bolstered by Zak Trojano’s drumming, BettySoo’s harmony vocals, and globe-trotting jazz musician Chris Cheek’s saxophone. I spoke with Chris Smither about grappling with songwriting, his relationship with Goody, and the stories behind a few of these tracks which continue to prove that rhythm is king.
Americana Highways: I know that you released some previously recorded material during the pandemic, but this is your first big original album since then. Did you find you had more time to write without playing as much?
Chris Smither: The funny thing about the pandemic is that if you’d told me that I was going to be idle for a couple of years, I’d have told you that I’d have two albums written by then. But I didn’t write anything! Then when things started opening up again, I said, “Okay, do I have another one in me?” I said, “Yeah!” Over the years, I’ve discovered that the surest way to make me start writing songs is to start putting things in motion, so I told my producer, David Goodrich, that we were going to do another record. It took me a real long time to get going, for the songs to start moving. I had a lot of guitar parts and musical ideas, but the lyrical component didn’t come together until almost 6 months before we started actually recording.
AH: That’s still ahead of people who write the lyrics when they’re in the studio!
CS: There was one where the ink was still wet! [Laughs]
AH: So you have to talk yourself into it by putting yourself on a schedule?
CS: I work best under pressure. I have to have a deadline, even if it’s self-imposed. Fortunately, David has a knack of building a fire under me. It’s almost not conscious, but he’ll get fed up with waiting and he’ll say, “I’m coming up!” He lives in Texas now. Sometimes I force myself to go to Texas, but he’s lived up North before for years and may be moving back. He’ll come up and we’ll spend a few days together. There’s something about my relationship with him. When he’s in the room, things start to happen. He talks to me, he’s very sympathetic.
AH: You’re a real duo working together at this point. As an editor, I often lean on people to get things done, like David does, but secretly, as a writer, I am exactly the same as you in needing those deadlines.
CS: I get it! Everybody needs somedbody like that, and when you find them, you hang onto them. It’s not exactly the same as a muse, but there’s a catalytic reaction going on. It’s pretty amazing.
AH: What did he think of the new songs?
CS: I played them for him in person. He’s always very encouraging. I would play him the guitar parts and basically, we’d just talk as much as play. Sometimes he’d say, “Hey, just sing. I don’t care what you sing.” So I’d sing. The title tune on this album, he just started with a nice little bass Blues riff. It’s just the sort of thing that we’ve jammed on for years. I started playing with him. He said, “Sing something!” And I sang, “It’s all about the bones.” [Laughs] He said, “Oh, that’s good!” But he always says that. It’s a strange business.
There was this one tune where I had showed it to him a couple of years ago and we’d videoed it. He asked if I’d worked on it at all. We ran over it again and we were playing it together. He tends to come up with things that he knows are in my wheelhouse. We were duetting on it, and he said, “Just start singing. Just hum.” At the end of that day, he said, “You can write something to that. You got it in you. I still believe in you.” [Laughs] Then he said, “That’s your prompt.” A day and a half later, I had that song, “Still Believe In You.”
AH: Was that like a challenge, so by making that the actual lyric of the song, you’re saying to him, “I’ll show you!”
CS: [Laughs] Yes, you understand perfectly. It’s a mutual, challenging thing.
AH: “All About the Bones” is an incredible song. I’m amazed by it. I think so many songwriters would hope that someday they’d write that song. It’s incredible that it came about in such a natural way. But you have been doing this kind of a long time!
CS: That’s true. You get to the point that you’ve done it for so long that when you hear that kind of resonance, you think, “Oh, ok.” When Goody’s in the room, that tends to happen for me. It’s the particular gestalt that we have. The song wrote itself. It didn’t require much editing or changing.
AH: You have the great saxophone on there, too.
CS: Oh, yes, Chris Cheek! Goody is a more sophisticated musician than me. He’s schooled, whereas I’m self-taught. He has consistently, over the years, pushed me in new directions. Chris Cheek was in town, in Northampton, Massachusetts, and one day, Goody said, “Hey, how would you like a world-class saxophone player on your record?” I’ve learned that I don’t say “no” to anything he suggests. Who am I to say “no” to one of the world’s best sax players? He’s a beautiful cat. He was involved in a very avant-garde Jazz project in Switzerland with complicated music, then he’d come back to Northampton and he just loves to play these simple things. That’s the way Chris is. He’s an instinctive player.
The first time he played was on “All About the Bones” and we were blown away. We just sat there. We said, “That was fabulous!” He said, “I can do better.” Then he did it better. The way he plays on “Down in Thibodaux,” too. There’s an instrumental break where I do this stutter-step that could be confusing, the way it flows. But he’s the kind of player that gets into that little part and says, musically, “What you need right here is a comma.” And he puts the comma in. It’s beautiful.
AH: It’s very liquid and fluid what he does. It’s like he comes in and fills in all the cracks in the song.
CS: That’s right, and without being too intrusive, either. You’d expect this great big horn sound to dominate, but it complements.
AH: The whole record would have been different if he hadn’t happened to be around.
CS: Yes, that’s sort of a defining thing.
AH: People will be familiar with “Down in Thibodaux” because you released a live performance video for that one, too. I love that song, too. It really sounds traditional, but has such interesting twists to it. How did that one come about?
CS: The music always comes first. I don’t know how to fit music to lyrics that are already there. That seems backwards to me. Other people do it that way all the time, it just doesn’t work for me. I grew up in New Orleans with the bayou country right next door, and my next door neighbor’s name was Woodrow and he was from Thibodaux. I made up all the rest of it! French has all these wonderful “aux” endings, and you don’t have any trouble coming up with a rhyme! I told a fanciful story and I had it in mind because the rhythm has something of a Cajun feel.
AH: It feels like a variation on this idea of meeting the devil at a crossroads or descending into the underworld, and coming back with music. There’s the idea that music comes from this mysterious, shadowy place.
CS: You have to go through a quest to get to it.
AH: Since you associate this song with your youth, this could connect to the beginnings of music for you.
CS: It’s all part and parcel of the same thing for me. Ever since I was a little boy, I’ve always loved to sing, and nobody ever did anything to discourage it. [Laughs] It’s all grist for the mill. I was 21 when I moved from Lousiana. My dad taught at Tulane, though we had spent a year in France when I was 12, and I spent a year in Mexico City in college. But New Orleans was my home until I almost completed my fourth year of university. I didn’t quite make it.
AH: Is that when you ran away to be a songwriter?
CS: Yes, I ran away to be a guitarist and singer.
AH: That’s a very respectable, traditional thing to do in music, apparently.
CS: [Laughs] As my father said, “I don’t mind him going to the dogs, but does he have to do it with wine, women, and song?”
AH: Of course a professor would say that.
CS: Of course he would.
AH: I want to bring up, “Time To Move On” because that’s coming out ahead of the album. I’ve always really liked that song and it seems to really fit with the album.
CS: I love Tom Petty. He was such a consistent hit-writer. I don’t know how he did that. It’s not something that I’ve ever concerned myself with that. I just try to write stuff where I communicate, but he manages to do both, song after song, with these wonderful little hooks. They get into you. That was another suggestion from Goody. I said, “I don’t know.” But the more I listened to it, the more I thought, “Oh, that’s fun.”
AH: There’s a little vocal recording at the beginning of that song where you ask a question.
CS: I ask, “How do I start this?” [Laughs] I couldn’t remember. Usually songs have a very definite introduction. I don’t think on that particular take that I was aware that that was the one I was going to use. It was just me and our drummer. We played it, and it was so much fun, we thought, “That might be the take!” When Goody listened to the recording and heard my little remark, he said, “That’s how you start it!”
AH: And that’s the final track on the album. It’s a great way to close things. People have known that song for a long time, but around 2021 was when the full Wildflowers was finally released, the way it had initially been planned. Yes, he was such a hit maker, but on that album, you can hear how important songs were to him.
CS: It’s a personal record. I was a little unsure about the lyric at one point and wasn’t sure that it all made sense. Goody said that Tom Petty didn’t know about the lyric either. I said, “What do you mean?” He said that Tom had the basic track down, and then wasn’t sure about the lyric, so basically started singing things that came into his head. It has that kind of feel to it.
I also realized that the song did have a specific meaning within the context of Tom’s life because it was when he split up with his wife who he’d been with since Florida. Suddenly all the things like, “She’s a conscientious objector…now her own protector.”, made sense. It helped me settle into the lyric. But the most important thing to me was, “Time to move on, time to get going…” You can’t let it stop you.
AH: It’s interesting because “All About the Bones” is opening the album and talking about how rhythm is king. Then we have “Time to Move On” closing the album, and in a sense, that’s really what it is, also. It’s this rhythm of movement that’s so strong in that song and I think that’s what people respond to most strongly in that song.
CS: Yes, yes. It’s really what people respond to the most in music. It’s one of those things that music is melody, harmony, and time, but the crucial one is time. You can make a mistake in the melody, and you can make a mistake in the harmony, and it’ll almost go unnoticed. But if you make a mistake in the time, it’ll knock things sideways! That’s why groove is so important. That’s why we have drummers.
AH: I see that you’ll be playing soon and playing a lot. Are you going to play this album?
CS: Oh, yes. I think of that thing that Randy Newman said. He was asked, “Do you enjoy writing songs?” He said, “No, I enjoy having written songs.” It makes performing so much fun when you have fresh stuff and the fresh stuff informs the old stuff, too. It brings that back to life.
Thanks so much, Chris Smither, for chatting with us. Find more details and up to the minute informant on his website here: https://smither.com/
Enjoy our previous coverage here: REVIEW: Chris Smither “More From the Levee” is an American Original