Interview with John Smith (John Returns!)

Bringin' it Backwards

We had the pleasure of interviewing John Smith over Zoom video!
Though he was dubbed the future of folk music by Pentangle’s John Renbourn, singer-songwriter John Smith’s unique synthesis of styles puts him halfway across the Atlantic. He once made an album driving round the Deep South, recording out of the boot of his car; but his new record The Living Kindis the real masterpiece in American atmospherics – a true musician’s record, produced by Joe Henry, the man responsible for some of the subtlest Americana of recent times.
At the start of 2022 they cooked up the idea for an intimate record together – “an acoustic album that sounded like Spirit of Eden”, Smith explains, referencing Talk Talk’s 1988 classic. Along with John Martyn’s Solid Air and Joni Mitchell’s electro-acoustic odyssey Hejira, it was one of the three creative inspirations for The Living Kind.
Like Hejira, the new album is a cohesive song-cycle that seems to be cast in one rich tone-colour, one powerful mood. At the start of the Covid pandemic, Smith’s family suffered a cluster of personal crises in the space of three months. His mother began radiotherapy for breast cancer, his father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and his wife lost a pregnancy which also endangered her life. The couple, who have a young daughter, sold their house in Sussex and relocated his parents from Spain to a new home, for treatment. After that, as he sings in his first single The World Turns, Smith had to “find a new way to feel”.
Most of the songs were written in the space of just two months over Christmas last year: The Living Kind is an album made after, not in the midst, of a period of personal turmoil. It gets you right in the chest – the opener,Candle, captures the overwhelming strain of his father’s diagnosis – but in its self-possession and curious positivity it feels like the culmination of many personal evolutions.
The Living Kind owes much of its precision and confidence to its unique recording circumstances: it was cut over just four days in February 2023, in Joe Henry’s remote home in Harpswell, Maine. With temperatures dropping to -25 outside, the band – a tight trio consisting of Henry’s son Levon and bassist Ross Gallagher – didn’t leave the house at all. You can hear the closeness, darkness and warmth in the new songs – the hunkeredness, the cocoon.
It was the first live recording made in Joe’s new “music room”, a space above the garage, and cutting a record there was a leap of faith as it was completely un-soundproofed: “if a truck came by, you’d have to stop recording”.
But Henry’s organic and spontaneous way of working has revolutionized Smith’s own. Writing on his 1963 Martin and a new Mulecaster steel guitar, Smith tends to be led where his instrument takes him. He’s always played acoustic guitars with pickups inside, and enhances the rich, three-dimensional sounds with an EBow: a vibrating magnet held above a guitar string, which produces a theremin-like wail.
The Living Kind is an album from someone lucky enough to have the gift of music to help put life’s greatest challenges into some kind of perspective: “I do feel without my guitar and without song-writing I would have lost my mind, many times” Smith says. Henry detected something new in his singing, a lack of self-consciousness, closer to live performance than he had ever heard him in the studio.
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