Considering a prolific career that stretches back fifty years, it should come as little surprise that when folk singer-songwriter Chris Smither recorded his 2014 album Still on the Levee, there was much more material than would make the final cut. Fast forward to 2020 and now Smither has released the rest of the material from those fabled sessions in New Orleans, which find him revisiting his roots in the Crescent City and collaborating with royalty like Allen Toussaint and Loudon Wainwright III. More from the Levee isn’t a collection of scrappy outtakes. We have certainly seen this as artists sidelined from touring due to the pandemic have scrambled to release any material they can dig up, but Smither has never taken a half-assed approach to his music, and these new old songs sound rich enough that it’s a wonder they didn’t make it onto the 2014 release. The album finds him revisiting longtime favorites dating back to his early years, including “Lonely Time,” “Drive You Home Again,” and “Caveman” while even sharing a new track. Connecting it all is Smither’s timeless, earthy everyman approach to songwriting and folk music that is on par with the likes of John Prine and Townes Van Zandt that hits you with the heaviness of a humid summer day in New Orleans. In his recent review of the new release, Glide contributor Jim Hynes described it as “not an album of outtakes” with songs “as good as any in Smither’s storied catalog.” He summed it up by suggesting you “pull up a chair and listen closely to these well-crafted songs.”
These days, Smither can be found in Amherst, MA, where he has lived for over a decade. Life in this Northeast college town is certainly different than the other big cities he has lived over the course of his life, but the change of pace has suited him well and also allowed him to gig regularly throughout a region where he has always cultivated a loyal fan base. Even at the age of 75, Smither maintained a steady tour schedule before putting everything on hold just like the rest of the music community. But he has managed to stay busy during these strange times, writing new music, tending to his garden, live streaming performances, and even starting to perform for limited, socially distanced audiences. Recently, Smither took the time to speak with us about how More from the Levee came to fruition, his process as a songwriter, New Orleans and more.
How have you been passing the time these days? I know everybody’s kind of sick of answering that question because a lot of us are doing a whole lot of nothing, but have you been staying busy?
Well, pretty much. I’ve been doing a bunch of streaming shows. I mean I want to play gigs, but I’ve probably done 10 or 12 streaming shows and I’ve been playing a lot of guitar actually. In normal times when I’m doing a lot of touring, I hardly ever pick up the guitar at home. I don’t need to practice it because I usually play so much. But these days I’ve been playing it like an hour or two every day and I have about four or five songs started. [This] may turn out to be a fairly productive time period for me, but I was a very slow writer anyway, you know, so [when] I get forced to downtime like this it’s probably for the better. But my garden has done better than it’s been for I think any of the last 10 years I’m here. I’m here to attend it, you know? So I got tons of produce.
The silver lining.
Yeah.
Speaking of guitar, you talk about playing guitar and you’ve been doing it for so long and you have such a unique style. These days, do you find yourself still discovering new styles of playing or new styles of music?
I’m not sure I would call it new styles, but you know, I like to think I’ve gotten better over the years. I know in some respects I’ve gotten better as a whole. I’m a much more intuitive player today than I ever was. I just understand scales better than I did. It’s easier for me to play what’s in my head. I don’t have to search for it and hunt and peck around so much. I sort of know what’s going to work instinctively and that’s just decades of practice that. I mean, I could have gotten to [this place] a lot faster if I had ever been formally trained in music, but eventually, you know, you get there one way or the other.
And in terms of material these days, where are you pulling inspiration from? Is it current events or looking back?
Well, the inspiration is the lack of anything to do. I mean, you sort of drive yourself to do it. It’s interesting, I’ve been asked that question many times, like where do I derive inspiration? Inspiration is a very minor part of any kind of writing, songwriting in this case, [but] fiction and poetry too. Most of the time when you talk to writers, [they say] you just go with it. The way you get inspiration is to start writing. You don’t get the inspiration and then start writing, you start writing and then you get the inspiration. The pieces tend to write themselves there. I’ve never really, and I say this quite confidently now and someone could probably prove me wrong, but I’ve never heard a song – a good song – in which the author or the composer knew what it was going to be about before it was written. You don’t think it out in your head and then say, ‘oh, I just got to write this down.’ It happens in the writing. It’s a very organic process and it has to surprise you. And if it doesn’t surprise you, it’s not going to surprise anybody that listens to it either. I really believe that’s what you need. It’s honest. And in poetry and fiction, you know, there has to be an element of surprise at the same time. [And as much] as it’s surprising, something turns out to be inevitable, you know, the kind of surprise that you go off course this the way but it has to come around, you know? And if it doesn’t surprise you, it’s not going to be that way. It’s a difficult concept to explain and I’ve tried to explain this many times in songwriting classes. The way that you write a song is not to wait for inspiration. You just have to sit down and start writing, you write anything.
Interesting. Cause I’ve heard some songwriters say it’s almost like some kind of alien beam. Like they stick their antennas up and they just sort of absorb something. And then the song kind of writes itself in that sense.
Right? I mean, that’s, that’s why you hear so many song writers and poets say that they feel that they think it comes from someplace else, that it doesn’t come from them. I think that’s nonsense myself, but I understand the feeling. It does feel that way, that it comes from inside of you, it comes from a part of your brain that you’re not really on speaking terms with and you have to just let it sort of filter in. [The poet Stanley Kunitz] said, you just have to sit. I really took this to heart and he said, you just have to sit and wait. Most people are not patient enough to wait. And he said, the irony of it is that you don’t really have to wait that long. He says if you have to wait 20 minutes, it’s extraordinary. It’s usually less time than that. You just sit there and you wait and eventually, and this is the way he put it, “she will come” and you’ll just scribble something down. And then you’ll say, okay, and it’s not really your conscious mind. I look at it and say, well, I don’t know where it’s at. Where’s that going to go? And eventually more stuff comes out and more stuff, and you find that you get to the point where there’s enough things and you have to walk away from too and then come back and look at it an hour later or a day later or a week later, and look at it and say, ‘oh, I see what I’m trying to do.’ It’s almost as though a stranger had written it, you know?
Yeah. That’s interesting.
It doesn’t sound like I convinced you [laughs].
I’ve had it work both ways as a writer. Your perspective makes a lot of sense to me. Speaking of songwriting many of the songs on More from the Levee go back quite a few years. Do they still resonate with you as a songwriter?
They do! In fact, they’re very surprising. “Lonely Time” is actually the oldest one, that’s a very old song and I relearned it for this project. Of course, this recording was actually made six years ago. So recently I’ve been going back into the back catalog and I relearned it again and I played it on some streaming concerts. It was one of the most popular songs there. Of course, that were a lot of people who were reacting to it who have been listening to me for decades, and they they’re kind of really pleased to see an old track like that come up, but there are other people who had never heard it and thought it was a wonderful song. Maybe I knew something back when I was in my twenties.
Yeah. Plus, it takes on a whole new relevance these days.
Try giving it a new suit of clothes. You sit there and you say, ‘oh wow, it turned out pretty well.’
Six years after the release of the original collection of songs, what motivated you to go back and release more material from these sessions?
Well, we always had the [songs]. We had recorded, I think almost 40 songs in that two or three week period down in New Orleans and we picked up a bunch of them for the initial release. It was always in my mind that we would release the others at some point and it just never came around. And then suddenly this project was done. The release was conceived pre-COVID. [for] Record Store Day. They invited me to submit a vinyl recording and they wanted either something that had never been released or a classic album from way back when, and so we had this material that hadn’t been released, then we sat and we listened to it and said, ‘this sounds pretty good. This would make a nice record.’ So that’s the way we did it. Well, of course, the plans got interrupted for Record Store Day and it never really happened. So now it’s sort of being released simultaneously as vinyl and CD, there you have it.
There is a new song on the record called “What I Do.” Where did the story come from for that and why did you decide to include it on this album?
Well, you know, we were down doing this record and David Goodrich, my producer, he was enchanted. He’d never spent that much time in New Orleans and he was having a lot of fun. It’s a very fun place to hang out in for like three weeks [instead] of doing some one night stand and blowing out of town the next day. He went by and saw where I grew up, he wanted to see the house that I grew up in, so I showed him that and he said, ‘you should write a song for this project. You should write a New Orleans song for this project and we’ll put it on the record.’ So I did. It’s a song about what New Orleans means to me, but also it’s a song in response to people asking me and I get asked this quite a lot, what did New Orleans do for your music? The answer, of course, is I don’t know, other people have to figure that out. That’s why the last verse of the song goes, ‘fish don’t understand the water. They just do the things they oughta. Birds don’t understand the air, they don’t even know it’s there, they don’t have a clue but just like me they do the things they do.’ I just do what I do. For some people, it sounds a lot like New Orleans. That’s the theme of the song. And actually, I was not comfortable with it when we recorded it. That’s why it didn’t come out on the initial release. I thought to myself, it was brand new song and I normally don’t like to record brand new material. I like to, if I have my druthers, the songs have been out and I play them for live audiences, but I’ve tried them out on stage and gotten comfortable with them. I hadn’t had a chance to do that with this song so I didn’t feel like I was hearing it right. Well then six years later, I heard the recording and I said, ‘jeez that’s a good song. We should put that on there.’
So, in that time period, you never did play it live?
I never played it live. And now that when we started doing this project, I listened to it and I said, ‘God, that’s a good song. So I sat down and woodshedded it for a while and now I’m quite comfortable with it. It’s turned out to be quite popular in the few performances that I’ve done it.
New Orleans is such a part of your identity and your story. What’s your relationship with the city like these days?
Well, you know, I’m still very comfortable with it. I still like it. But having said that there’s a reason I moved out and there’s an aspect of New Orleans that kind of drives me crazy. That is the reluctance of anybody there to take care of business. That’s changing a little bit, but that’s one of the reasons that they were so devastated by [Hurricane] Katrina, because they’re, they’re a little bit like young adults who don’t really know how to take care of themselves. They do their best, you know, but basically, they’d rather do it tomorrow than today and that kind of thing just drives me wild. It’s come together a little bit better since Katrina, [which] made them change a lot of things, especially the school system, which is much better than it had become. It was quite good when I was a boy growing up there, but it had really fallen into some terrible disrepair and that’s been reorganizing. It seems to be doing pretty well at this point. But I love to visit and I loved spending three weeks down there. That was the longest I’ve spent there since I left home, and I love re-familiarizing myself with the neighborhoods and the feel of the place. By the time I left, I was back home again, and I still have friends there. I have a lot of my high school friends who still live in New Orleans.
It’s good to keep those ties, especially considering some of the talent that you had on these sessions, some real New Orleans royalty.
Oh yeah, for sure. Well, that was amazing. Having Allen Toussaint come in and play piano on three numbers, we were very excited and he did not disappoint.
Had you known him from prior years?
I had met him. I was much more familiar with his son Reginald Toussaint, and my wife has done production for Jazz Fest for the last 20 years. Allen’s son also works at the festival and she was working with him, so I knew him better. In fact, it’s, it’s through him that I got Allen to come in and play.
Oh, wow. Gotta love those family connections.
Absolutely. Don’t neglect those things.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
