“…these song are more about seeing difficult things in your rear-view mirror and looking at the road ahead. …I think it’s an optimistic record, at its heart. This is a record about moving forward, getting on with things. The clue is in the title.”
“The last UK tour for me was 2022, so it’s been a minute,” smiles John Smith, aware that it’s been a while since (festival appearances aside) he graced the nation’s stages. “Quite a bit has happened between then and now – like making the new record. I’m really looking forward to getting back out there.”
After kicking off in Bristol last week, Smith’s tour zig-zags across the UK before winding up at Coventry’s Warwick Arts Centre on Saturday, 27 April 2024. It may be “a minute” since his last full jaunt, but there’s no sign of any cobwebs, as the singer/guitarist is very much match-fit and well-rehearsed thanks to a series of successful US dates.
“It was amazing,” he says of his shows across the pond. “It’s building out there. It’s taking a long time – America’s a big place – but slowly but surely, things are happening.”
Among his personal highlights were filming a live session at legendary Nashville guitar emporium Carter Vintage Guitars and a trip to Saginaw, just northwest of Detroit, in Michigan, to visit Mules Resophonic – makers of handmade steel custom resonator guitars favoured by such artists as Kelly Joe Phelps and Charlie Parr.
“I got to meet the guys who built my steel guitars that so inspired the new record – so all in all, it was a good time,” he smiles.
The record in question is Smith’s sixth studio collection, The Living Kind – the much-anticipated follow-up to 2021’s lauded The Fray.
While some observers heralded The Fray as a significant breakthrough for Smith, the musician doesn’t feel he experienced any sudden career shift or leap forward.
“I put it out during the lockdown, so all the success that album had I watched from behind a laptop, so I felt completely … disjointed, you know? I felt removed from it,” he says.
“But I haven’t really been aware of a major step up since Great Lakes, ten years ago – that album changed everything because it got me on the radio, and more people started coming to my shows, and I started playing theatres. Since then, it’s just been a kind of steady, slow climb. It all just feels like progress.”
The Living Kind began to take shape when Smith visited Joe Henry, the musician/ producer whose production credits span acclaimed albums for Bonnie Raitt, Billy Bragg, Joan Baez, Rhiannon Giddens, Elvis Costello and Lisa Hannigan (on whose Passenger Smith and Henry first met).
“I went to see Joe in January of ’22, in Maine, and we wrote a song together after dinner, one night. We just went upstairs and made a demo, and then he just said to me, ‘Look, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t make a record like this – I think we could actually make an album, here in the house.’ So we agreed we’d get together when when I was back in the US.”
Henry had a very specific sound in mind, one which played to Smith’s strengths as a musician and vocalist.
“He wanted to create a sound that sounded like me, that was idiosyncratic, but also sounded different to anything else I had done,” Smith recalls. “The idea was to put me front-and-centre, and have other voices enter the stage, dance around and then disappear.”
And unlike The Fray – which boasted an array of guests, including Sarah Jarosz, Bill Frisell, Lisa Hannigan, and members of The Staves and Milk Carton Kids – the new record would be squarely focused on Smith, bolstered by subtle atmospheric backing from Henry’s son Levon and bassist Ross Gallagher.
“We decided to keep it a very small ensemble. We considered guests, but then just felt like it would be too much of a diversion from the core.”
With a plan in place, a year later and Smith was back with a set of new songs, composed largely over an intense six-week period.
“I went and wrote the songs knowing the limitations of the space because we were just recording in Joe’s music room, above his garage. It’s not a very fancy studio, but I know that he gets a very special sound in there.”
Thematically, The Living Kind picks up on some of the dark personal strands present in The Fray, yet here they find the songwriter in a far better place. If The Fray came from turmoil and despair (as the writer experienced family tragedy and loss at the start of the pandemic), its follow-up comes from a much stronger, more stable and accepting position.
“The Living Kind is more about moving forward than from being in the thick of things. The Fray I wrote at a time where I was quite desperate really, and I had written those songs as a way of staying sane. Whereas these song are more about seeing difficult things in your rear-view mirror and looking at the road ahead.
“I think it’s an optimistic record, at its heart. This is a record about moving forward, getting on with things,” he says. “The clue is in the title.”
Perhaps surprisingly, the song that kickstarted the whole project was not the title track but album closer track 10, the stark, minimal, and intimate ballad Lily.
“We wrote Lily together, Joe and I. That was the song where we made a demo, and it just felt so good and so real that we decided we could make a record.
“I suppose it’s a love song,” Smith continues. “It’s about the women in my life; it’s about time, how time plays tricks on you and how the world moving around you can make you feel like you should be doing something other than what you really ought to be focusing on.
“Trick Of The Light is kind of about that as well.
“It’s just about holding on, staying true to your your censor, you know … staying on the path.”
When it came to re-recording Lily for the album, both Henry and Smith felt they couldn’t better the spontaneity and emotion of that spur-of-the-moment after-dinner recording.
“We just used the demo. We were so happy with what we’d done we just used that original guitar and voice, and we just re-did the double bass and added some backing vocals, and that was it.
“So that song is the one that signified to us that we we could make a record in that room and do it simply and intuitively. Lily cleared the path for the album.”
John Smith’s The Living Kind is out now via Commoner/ThirtyTigers. John’s tour concludes on Saturday, 27 April 2024, at Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry. Dates/info: johnsmithjohnsmith.com
