“I
don’t think I can make a living doing anything else and be
happy,” confesses Mindy Smith, the country singer-songwriter
phenom who became a critical darling with her Dolly Pardon-cover
“Jolene,” and the title track of her debut album, Come
To Jesus. Problem is, she’s not exactly country, sort
of how Shawn Colvin (whom she sites as a major influence) isn’t
pop—even though both manage to keep limbs firmly planted on
various genre-specific circles that dot Music Twister.
If anything, Smith is a sort of Appalachia-flavored folk-pop, with
a honeyed voice that could make gods weep, much like another of
her influences, Alison Krauss. Her 12-song album of intimate, sometimes
crushingly painful songs were all, with the exception of “Jolene,”
composed by her. It’s what she is most proud of, her role
as a songwriter—that the songs on One Moment More
(Vanguard, 2004) are all pieces of her, many of them with sharp
edges one has to be careful around. It’s not uncommon to spot
folks crying in Smith’s crowds, or, in fact, to see Smith
herself crying on stage. In the past, she’s even had to cut
short her performance of “One Moment More”—a song
about the death of her mother—because of her insistence upon
“pouring [her] soul out every night” becomes too much
for her to handle. “I think there’s something to be
said for that,” she decides. “It’s hard to capture
that in a recording.”
In Smith’s sleepy voice, you can still hear her Long Island
roots, though her exposure to the slower Southern drawl of Tennessee
seems to have blunted the accent a bit. “I’ve been at
this—at least here in Nashville—for six years, and then
three years prior. Almost eight or nine years working on all this,
trying to make something happen,” she explains. “I started
out doing music, singing wise, and the only reason I started writing
was to have original material. And then it wound up that the writing
element of it became my bread and butter for a while. Then all of
a sudden, the artist thing kicked back in.”
It was about then that she signed her publishing deal with Big Yellow
Dog Music, but the poverty and virtual homelessness leading up to
that moment had led her to question her pursuit of music time and
time again, almost to the point of giving up, which she says she
made several attempts at (thankfully, with little success). “Those
were my hardest times. Also being on the road. Missing my friends,
my family, and my dog,” she says.
The greatest cost of a life on tour for Smith is the neglect of
her writing. She made almost no headway in that department despite
her insistence that writing is her only way to stay sane. “If
I don’t have time to do that, I don’t have time to figure
out where I’m at,“ she says. “It’s a challenge.
It’s a challenge I have to learn how to deal with cause if
I’m going to be doing this for the rest of my life, I have
to learn how to write on the road.”
This has become a pressing matter as of late, since she intends
to return to the studio this summer. She says she has enough material
for two albums, but she keeps on writing. Her new material is intended
reflects the “blessings” she’s enjoyed this past
year and a half, though, as one can expect from the somber tone
of many of the tracks on her first album, celebrating might not
always come easily to her. “Some days it’s just dry,
so you just have to dig around a bit more and I’m digging
pretty deep,” she says.
It’s almost ironic that Smith is actively seeking to move
away from the languid, angst-ridden lyrics that made her first singles
so authentic sounding. Consider “One Moment More,” a
song most critics seem to think of, as Smith puts it, the one “about
my dead mother.” But it’s also the most elegant track
on an album defined by elegance. Smith was only 19 when her mother
died, yet the way she shares herself through her voice places you
right there with her during her mother’s last days. Later,
when she describes many critics’ misconception of her as just
“some 19-year-old kid who hasn’t lived life,”
she points out, “I’m 32 and I’ve been in this
world what I consider a while, long enough to write about things.”
Yet one cannot help but wonder why, of all the youthful years she
could have chosen out of a hat, she took 19 as the age she believes
others see her as. It’s not difficult to imagine that she
will always be there, though: 19 and desperate to not let go.
And in that, Mindy Smith might just be the tragic heroine in a tragic
play about her own life. She may be “blessed,” as she
repeatedly refers to herself for her recent success, but she’s
trapped, like so many of us, in that one moment when everything
we knew and believed about the world changed.
Mindy
Smith opens for Mary Chapin Carpenter on May 19, 8:00 p.m., at the
Michigan Theater, 603 E. Liberty, Ann Arbor, michtheater.org. Presented
by the Ark. Tickets $27.50 - $40, available through Ticketmaster
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