Caitlyn Smith’s long and winding path
Songwriter is in the midst of a breakout year, 15 years in the making
When Caitlyn Smith starts singing in a noisy bar, it’s not uncommon for people to abruptly stop talking midsentence and turn around to see where that soulful, powerhouse voice is coming from. The 31-year-old musician, who also has written songs for everyone from Garth Brooks to Meghan Trainor, can certainly silence a room — but it wasn’t always that way.
One of her most popular songs — with more than 4.6 million streams on Spotify — is “This Town is Killing Me,” a scorching ballad about the gruelling path to become an artist in Nashville. The lyrics (“I pour my heart out,
three minutes at a time on a J-45, but no one’s listening/They’re too busy drinking on the company tab”) were inspired by a gig where she played a devastatingly emotional song onstage, but no one was paying attention.
“I was like, ‘This is the worst!’ There were moments like that over years and years of trying to do this,” said Smith. She took the song title to two co-writers, Gordie Sampson and Paul Moke, whose immediate reaction was, “Oh, we know this. We’ve lived this.”
Nashville is filled with inexplicably difficult journeys for talented musicians, and Smith’s path has been particularly long and winding. She’s in the midst of a breakout year, going from hit songwriter to releasing a critically adored debut album, “Starfire,” in January. Still, many people don’t know her name. Part of the reason it took her so long to get footing in Music City is because she’s not really country, yet she’s also not really pop. She’s “genre-less,” as she puts it, which is challenging in a town where people like clear-cut labels.
Smith has been trying to find her place in Nashville since she was 16, travelling back and forth from her home in Minneapolis, where she played small gigs in coffee shops. In 2009, she married songwriter Rollie Gaalswyk, and four years later, they cowrote a heartbreak song called “Wasting All These Tears.” “The Voice” winner Cassadee Pope recorded the tune, which became a Top 10 hit and gave Smith and her husband the motivation to move to Nashville full-time.
Still, Smith knew she wanted to go the artist route; record labels just weren’t interested. Her voice was undeniable, and executives loved her songwriting — in fact, they would take her songs and give them to their other female artists. They just couldn’t figure out what to do with Smith’s own not-country-but-not-pop sound.
“I’ve probably heard ‘no’ from every label in town at least twice,” Smith said. She theorizes she was making music that she thought people wanted to hear, and they could tell. “In hindsight, I’m so glad that nothing ever worked out because it took that long journey ... to finally go, ‘You know what, I’m sick of trying to write for radio, or trying to write for Joe down the street at the record label. I’m just going make music that I love.’”
So in summer 2016, she released an EP independently, which included “This Town is Killing Me”; the wrenching “Before You Called Me Baby”; and the upbeat “Starfire.” To her surprise, her songs caught on. Then she heard from hit songwriter Shane McAnally and manager Jason Owens, who were starting their own record label — would she be interested in signing with them?
Smith laughs remembering the sequence of events, because at that point she had finally let go of the record label dream and was making money as an independent artist. But their new imprint, Monument Records, was a revival of a record label that once housed Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Roy Orbison and more. She liked that they were artists who crossed musical boundaries, just like she did. Smith signed the deal.
As Smith prepped to officially take the leap as an artist on a label, she was becoming increasingly well-known as a hit songwriter. During a writing session with Meghan Trainor and Justin Weaver, they wrote a slow jam called “Like I’m Gonna Lose You” that became a four-times platinum smash for Trainor featuring John Legend. Smith also wrote “Hear Your Heart” with British pop singer James Bay, and kept getting cuts in Nashville for artists such as Garth Brooks (“Tacoma”); Lady Antebellum (“747”); and Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton (“You Can’t Make Old Friends.”)
Now, she’s on her first headlining tour after rave reviews for her first full-length record. She also wants to find ways to expand “Girls of Nashville,” an all-female songwriter night she launched with her good friends, singer-songwriters Heather Morgan and Mags Duval. Four times a year they hold a showcase that quickly sells out and features veteran songwriters and up-and-coming artists looking for their break. The events started when there was lots of talk around town about the lack of opportunities on radio for women in country music.
“We didn’t feel like we wanted to add to the noise,” Smith said. “We wanted to instead just take a stronger stance and be like, ‘You know what? Women are all over this town and crushing it, we just need to showcase it and talk about it and celebrate it.’”