A Conversation with Chris Smither – HuffPost 7.16.14

Mike Ragogna: You’ve got a newly recorded, two-disc retrospective, Still On The Levee. You’ve had this wonderful career that the masses…

Chris Smither: …don’t know a thing about!

MR: [laughs] Yeah, what is that?

CS: Back before cable, on UHF, you used to see this guy being advertised. He was some kind of a country or cowboy singer and people would say he sold millions of records and you’ve never heard of him.

MR: Why, that’s Slim Whitman!

CS: Right. It’s funny, sometimes, I feel like Slim Whitman. I haven’t sold millions of records, but it’s kind of like that. In a way, I don’t know how to explain it, but I’m not sure that there’s really anything to explain. One of the things that I take from it? Parents, people my age who have kids who want to get into music often ask me, “Is this a viable thing for anybody to do?” and I say, “Well, the strange thing is I’m hardly a household name at all. But the fact is that I own a house, there’s two cars in the garage, I put my kids through school. It’s at least as good as advertising.”

MR: I always wait for the end of the interview to ask this, but you just brought this subject up, so what advice do you have for new artists?

CS: Well, my first advice is to remember that it’s supposed to be fun. There’s no reason to get into this game unless you’re enjoying it. It’s hard enough as it is and if it’s no fun anymore, then there are a lot of other things you can do that are no fun that will make you more money. Another answer that I’ve heard artists give is that you do it because you have to. If you don’t have to do it, if there isn’t something that drives you to do it, then think about something else, maybe. At the same time, I think that’s a little harsh. To me, I look at it as a legitimate career choice. Maybe that’s because I’m from New Orleans, where that’s just one of the things you can do. You can be a plumber, you can be an electrician, or you can be a musician. Musicians are just working stiffs like anybody else. When I first moved from New Orleans up to the Boston area, I would meet people from Providence, Rhode Island, and if they were Italians, the mob was a career choice for them. That was just one of their options. It always took me aback. That was the most amazing thing I’d heard, and yet in New Orleans, the same thing is true of music. It’s just a career choice, something you can do.

MR: Speaking of career choices, what would you have told Chris Smither when you were first starting?

CS: Actually, my advice to Chris Smither, if I were talking to him now, I would say, “Go for it.” If you’re passionate about it and it makes you happy, go for it. You learn soon enough whether it’s going to work or not. You usually learn soon enough to change. People change their minds all the time. The interesting thing for me is that I never thought about it as a career choice until I was already doing it. I didn’t make up my mind that I was going to be a musician. I was going to be an anthropologist in real life. I always thought that music was just an avocation, it was something I did when I was trying to avoid what I was supposed to be doing. I dropped out of school after four years, I never got a degree. I just left and I said, “I’ll try to do this for one summer.” Now it’s been forty-seven years.

MR: So Chris. You thinkin’ this music thing might just stick after all?

CS: [laughs] I think I might be able to make a go of it.

MR: It is interesting. These days, I believe lot of kids get into music because it’s the American Dream, you know? Take American Idol. It presents the narrative of following the American Dream to superstardom.

CS: I always thought it was peculiar. Sometimes you can ask little kids, “What do you want to be when you grow up,” and they say, “A rock star.” When I was a kid, that wasn’t a legitimate aspiration, that was just something that might happen to you, like winning the lottery. Nowadays it’s kind of an aspiration, “I want to be a pop music star.”

MR: Right, or anything that has the word “star” associated. Speaking of music stars, you have had your very fair share of people covering your songs, and you put some of them on your new album. How did you whittle it down to the twenty-five we have here?

CS: The answer to that is that I had help. Most of the work and most of the whittling down was done by my producer David Goodrich. He has a much better perspective on the totality of my career than I do. When my management and my producer first proposed this project to me, I didn’t see the point of it. It wasn’t until I’d gotten into it and gone back and looked at it that I realized I didn’t have any perspective on how much stuff there was. I had never internalized what a pile of stuff it was, because I go day-to-day and year-to-year and album-to-album. I just keep doing it. I put one foot in front of the other. Somehow it had escaped me that the whole thing could be viewed as a body of work. I didn’t really think of myself or my work that way. Actually, it wasn’t until the project was almost finished that I looked at it and said, “Holy s**t, this is a lot of stuff, it’s kind of amazing.” Dave and I went in and recorded almost twice as many songs as are on here. You can think of this as almost being the first installment because the rest of the stuff is as good as this, but it didn’t fulfill several criteria; did it represent a certain period in my growth, did it represent a certain feeling? There are several different things. There are a couple of lyrical stages in my writing where you could see an obvious change in the way I approached lyrics and the way I approached guitar playing and the way I approached playing with other people. What he was trying to do was get together not only very good songs but songs that were representative of each period and each stage of the game. I think he did a pretty good job. He did a better job than I would’ve. I get tied up in sentimental favorites that might not be necessarily representative and give a whole picture.

MR: You said you looked at your work as a complete body for the first time. So what are your thoughts on the career Chris Smither has had to this point?

CS: I just feel really lucky. We talked about it before, I’ve reached the point where I’m very comfortable, I get a degree of respect from my peers. As we talked about at the beginning of this interview, I’m not a household name. The great mass of American people don’t know anything about me. But the people who found me do know who I am and I’m rewarded for it. It seems hard to believe to me that I could be sitting here in my own house talking on the phone with you about all this. I have a good life and it’s all been from doing things that I love to do. I mean, I would cheerfully have paid somebody to be allowed to do this.

MR: What about these recording sessions? There must have been some interesting tweaking and catharsis that happened while re-recording the music on this album.

CS: For one thing, it was the most time that I’d spent in New Orleans since I’d moved away, and I left New Orleans when I was almost twenty-three. I grew up there. We spent three weeks solid doing this recording right in the heart of it. I was getting back into the neighborhoods and looking up a lot of old friends at the same time. You know, I found myself going back into a head that was not familiar to me anymore, and I suddenly remembered what it was like to live there and to think of New Orleans as the center of the universe. Nobody realizes this unless they live in New Orleans, but New Orleans is this very inward-gazing whirlpool that looks at its own navel all the time. It thinks of itself as the center of the world, and the rest of it just sort of “out there” and in some ways, it’s vaguely threatening to the rest of the world. But the real center of everything is New Orleans, and I started to think into that again and what was nice about that was that it put me back in the head of where I was when I wrote some of the earliest songs. It was a vivid reminder of exactly where I came from. So much of this project was this self-exploration going back. I would say at least a third of these songs I had to relearn because it had been so long since I’d played them, and I would go back and listen to recordings of myself that are twenty and thirty years old and sit there and listen to them and go, “What the hell is he doing?” [laughs] And it was me playing! I would sit there and puzzle it out and work it together. Sometimes it was muscle memory alone that retaught me what those songs were about. Some of them I never remembered and I had to reinvent them. I had to rearrange them in my mind and come up with the way that I’d play them now as a seventy-year old man instead of a twenty-four year old guy.

MR: And a few icons dropped by to pay tribute like Allen Toussaint and Loudon Wainwright III. You’re aware that you’re revered by the revered, right?

CS: [laughs] I’m aware that I have friends, and I’m grateful for it. You can’t value that too much.

MR: Being from New Orleans, how did the Katrina disaster affect you?

CS: It did not touch me directly. I was concerned when it happened because I’ve still got a lot of friends in New Orleans. I’ve been interested in it ever since, I’ve contributed some time and effort into the reconstruction, but not a great deal. In the first couple of years, I talked about it a lot on stage and I tried to emphasize to people that you can’t just forget about it. It’s not just one of these things that happens and after six months, you can say, “Oh yeah, that happened a long time ago,” because the fact is that it’s a very valuable place. To tell you the truth, they don’t really know how to take care of themselves down there very well. They do what they do extremely well and what they have going in terms of a city is extremely valuable to the American experience, but they don’t really know how to take care of themselves. In some respects, people have to take care of them. They’re very worth taking care of.

MR: Were there any lessons that you think could have or should have been learned from that disaster?

CS: Well yeah, but they’re the same lessons that should’ve been learned in New York before Super Storm Sandy. Ever since I was in elementary school in New Orleans people have said, “There’s going to come a hurricane, and it’s going to bust the levees on the lakeside and it’s going to flood the whole town,” and everyone said, “Yeah, it’ll probably happen someday.” And one day it did, and nobody had done anything about it. People had been screaming about it for decades. Not one year, not two years, not five years, not ten years. Decades. Part of that is the fault of the city itself. It has sort of a “Mañana” atmosphere to it. “We’ll take care of that coming up. Not right now.” But part of it is politicians. The federal government bears a lot of responsibility for it, too.

MR: New Orleans seems to end up being a political football.

CS: Yeah, it does. Part of the reason that they don’t take as much care of it is it’s not as important of a port as it used to be. It used to be an extremely important point of entry for import/export stuff, shipping and so forth. But it’s been passed by Houston, it’s been passed by Galveston and all these other gulf ports. One of the things that makes people dismiss it and not take it so seriously is because most of what it has to offer is cultural. It’s very easy in the United States to ignore cultural importance. Politicians have made their livings on it for years, saying, “We don’t have time for culture, we’ve got to make money.”

MR: You have a couple other projects going on right now, a tribute album and your lyric book.

CS: Yep! The tribute album I don’t really have a lot to do with, that’s my record company’s doing. There are a lot of artists there who jumped on that and are doing songs. All I can say is I’m extremely flattered. I love it. I don’t really have any direct involvement in it except to sit back and say, “God, this is wonderful.” I love hearing my songs done by all these people, it’s like your kids coming home from school. They’re all grown up and they’ve changed but you like what they’ve turned into.

MR: I guess that’s most evident in the lyric book. Was working on these projects collectively like you being reintroduced to you?

CS: Oh yeah, absolutely. The book is just the lyrics. I kind of like that. I got talked into it by writers, mainly, who like the way I write and said, “Just put them like they were poems with some photographs,” and I love it. It’s like a coffee table book, that size and that weight. I put it on my coffee table and I look at it and say, “Wow, that’s pretty neat.” I love it.

MR: And I’d add that your two CD set Still On The Levee, especially since it’s presented within a “book” of sorts, also could be a coffee table piece.

CS: I love it. A lot of work went into it. I have to say that I had people helping me, I’m not responsible for much beyond the actual music on the discs, but they really did a great job. It’s just unbelievable.

MR: Hey Chris…you still on the levee?

CS: Yeah, the levee was my playground when I grew up. I grew up like two and a half blocks from the levee. It was the only high ground in town. That was the only thing that even looked like a hill that I saw growing up, it was a big, huge, open expanse that stretched for miles up and down the river. It was kind of an adventure at the time. It’s not quite so adventurous anymore. They’ve civilized it a great deal. But we used to spend all our time there. To me it just felt like home. In some ways I still feel it. That’s what I was trying to get across by the title; at heart, I’m still there. I’m still on the levee.

MR: What you up to next?

CS: I’ve got a lot of touring to do over this release. I’ve got sixty or seventy shows in the next four months, I think. I’ve just started to get my toes in the water over a new disk, I’ve got about three or four new songs started, so there’s at least one more new record in the pipeline, it’ll start happening. Maybe more than that, I don’t know, we’ll see how long we manage to stay on the planet.

MR: I would like to raise my hand for the fifty-first anniversary, part two of Still On The Levee with all of those other recordings.

CS: [laughs] Listen, believe me, it’ll come out one way or another.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne