He’s enjoying a long second act
SINGER-SONGWRITER DIGS INTO HIS MUSICAL ROOTS
Chris Smither, who quit music for a decade before returning in the 1980s, brings a set of new songs from his “Call Me Lucky” album when he plays Friday in Houston.
C hris Smither recalls the moment he became a musician for the second time.
A Florida native who spent parts of his childhood in Texas, South America and Louisiana, Smither eventually found himself in New York City at the height of the ’60s folk-music boom. He made two records in the early ’70s, both well-received and one of them yielding a song that would become a standard for Bonnie Raitt. Then Smither quit for more than a decade.
“When I left home in my 20s, I was doing nothing but music,” he says. “But I started beating myself up so much with the drinking, just generally screwing up my life.”
Smither put down the guitar and started working in construction, “because I’d always been good with my hands.”
He remembers attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in the early 1980s.
“A woman asked, ‘Chris, what do you do for a living?’ ” he says. “I started to say, ‘I’m a carpenter.’ Then I looked at her, and said, ‘Actually, I’m a musician. If you’ll excuse me, I have to make a phone call.’ ”
Smither found a pay phone, dialed up his boss and quit.
“It was time to get back to the real business at hand,” he says.
By 1984, he’d penned enough songs for a long-awaited third album, fittingly titled “It Ain’t Easy.” In the years since, Smither has been an unshakable force amid all manner of musical trends, with his impeccable guitar playing and world-weary voice. He’s put out about a dozen albums since then, all of them well worthy of recommendation. No two members of Smither’s following will have the same set of favorites, though most will rally around “Happier Blue” from 1993.
The new “Call Me Lucky” is Smither’s first set of new songs in six years and will be a welcome new set to his base. Smither, who plays McGonigel’s Mucky Duck Friday, remains in fine voice, and he still pulls a clear and distinctive sound from his guitar. And he threads just enough surprises into the mix to keep things from sounding the same.
Opener “The Blame’s on Me” sets a strong tone, an uptempo song built around a lyric about the lost art of accountability.
Smither says some small part of the song
ties back to his days in construction.
“People seem disinclined to believe that it’s much easier to accept blame rather than fight things out,” he says. “In the bad old days, I was doing residential construction. We had this woman, who was a very good carpenter. And every time there was a kerfuffle, some row or disagreement, the owner would come in and say, ‘This is terrible work.’ People would be casting about to see who could be responsible. And she’d always say, ‘That’s my bad.’ Whether she had anything to do with it or not. Her point was that you have to fix it regardless.”
Elsewhere, Smither alters some old, familiar songs. The old country-blues song “Sittin’ on Top of the World” gets pulled slowly through the swamp.
“I wanted it to become the antithesis of what it says,” he says. “Not sitting on top of the world, but instead being about to dissolve into tears. I always like those songs that are like the guy in the ocean looking back at the beach thinking, ‘I’m not waving, I’m drowning.’ ”
The country blues have long held sway over Smither. He spent his freshman year of college in Mexico City, learning Spanish. He planned to be an anthropologist. His roommate from College Station played Lightnin’ Hopkins’ “Blues in My Bottle” and Smither was captivated. “I kept trying to figure out who else was playing with him. Then I realized it was just him on the guitar. I didn’t think of it as blues. I thought of it as one-man rock ’n’ roll. I realized you could play rock ’n’ roll by yourself. So I went around looking for other people like that.”
So Smither staked out an interesting space for himself between old folk, blues, pop and rock. His first album included originals as well as songs by Randy Newman, Neil Young and Skip James.
His songs and those written by others are all exhaled in a distinctive manner unique to Smither.
To wit, “Call Me Lucky” includes a pretty drastic reinterpretation of “Maybelline.”
“I don’t think Chuck Berry ever played in a minor key in his life,” he says. “But I thought about how different it sounded with that approach. It started with a conversation about what he might be thinking at 90 years old. Had he gotten resigned? So we tried the minor key, and at first it made us laugh. But we realized a whole other thing was going on. It changed the thrust of the song. Instead of a joy ride, it became almost sinister. It led to this whole conversation about songs, how people think they’re fixed entities. But they’re not. They’re malleable. They’re infinitely malleable.”
Smither drops away for a moment to take another call.
“Sorry about the interruption,” he says. “That was the guy that cuts my hair. I have to go a long way to get a haircut. He’s been doing it 30 years.”
People can be less malleable about some things. Like their barber of three decades. But like with his process for writing, recording and performing, Smither has his way. And for what it’s worth, his mane is formidable compared to some of his peers.
“I still have all this hair, and it’s still not grey. I don’t understand how that happens,” he says. “At 73, you just learn to take it. You learn you don’t question these things.”