Folk duo a family affair
Zac Smith takes breaks from The Geese to play shows with dad
Who says you have to give up your musical dreams when it’s time to start a family?
Andrew Smith certainly hasn’t. Not only has the Kelowna-based indie singer-songwriter and celebrated tap style guitarist kept at his craft, he’s helped raise four kids while doing it.
So it was probably inevitable that at least one of them would get the music bug as well. In Smith’s case, it was his 24-year-old son, Zachari, who built a reputation for himself over the last few years as a member of Vancouver’s The Geese.
It’s not really a surprise that the two would eventually join forces, either.
“I wanted him to study music so that he’d have a leg up in a way that I didn’t, but it turned out that he was interested in literature,” Andrew Smith says from Saskatoon, Sask., where he and his son are loading in for a house concert.
“He turned into this great multiinstrumentalist, anyways, and it seemed like us joining together has been a really good idea.”
The musical aligning of Smith père et fils wasn’t in any way planned; it came about a few years back, when Andrew booked a series of shows across the country to be present at Zachari’s graduation ceremony at an East Coast university.
“We puttered our way back across the country after graduation, and he started to play with me at these small shows I had booked,” says Andrew, who looks remarkably younger than his 49 years.
“Zac was playing with his own band (The Geese) at that time, but these shows felt really good to both of us, and we decided to keep doing them.
“After we played, people would ask which one of our records had both of us on it, so we decided it was time to record one, and that’s how we made our album Travelling.”
The record was put together quickly at the studio Andrew owns and operates in Kelowna, B.C., with Zachari supplying much of the material.
“Zachari said ‘OK, I’ll write some songs,’ ” recalls Andrew.
“I don’t work that way myself, but he just sat down and wrote them out. He’s got some amazing ones in there like the title track and the song Store
houses, which is about how Mitsubishi has cornered the market on bluefin tuna, so that when the fish go extinct they can name their price.
“It’s an angry song; he brings that protest tradition that’s in folk music, and he does it so well.”
Zachari has continued to perform with The Geese and Andrew has his own solo career, but the family team-up takes up a certain amount of their time. The two make their way around Western Canada regularly, and then across the country and to Germany and Switzerland at least once a year.
They’re a thrifty unit, able to make a big sound out of an armful of instruments that they swap around, and a makeshift rhythm unit that Zachari tinkers with.
“The empire is continuing to grow,” laughs Andrew, who switches between mandolin, banjo and guitar.
“Last time we were through, Zac had this small setup, but now he has this percussion station with a suitcase for a kick drum, along with his Dobro and guitar.
“We’ve always had that thump subharmonic rhythm happening, but now it’s fuller. Some of my instrumentals are funky and high energy, so now we’re able to pull it off, even in some of the louder bars we’ve played in.”