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For Darden Smith, that relationship, with Columbia/Sony, came to an end in 1994, not long after the release of his third solo album for the major label conglomerate. There had been his self-titled debut, released on Epic in 1988, Trouble No More on Columbia in ’90, and Little Victories on Sony imprint Chaos in ’93. And despite the fact that Little Victories had done moderately well, selling somewhere in the vicinity of 50,000 units and spawning singles for the title track and “Loving Arms” — even a video that saw some time on VH1 — the landscape at Columbia had changed. Alternative and grunge were in, singer-songwriters were out, and Smith found all his A&R champions gone from the label. After recording demos for a fourth album, Smith and the label decided by mutual decision to “call it a day.”
“It was exactly like divorce,” says Smith. “As a matter of fact, it happened at the same time as my divorce. It was pretty similar. However, I’d been around other artists this had happened to — I mean, almost every artist goes through it. It’s just part of the process. In the major label world, sometimes you’re better off going to another label where you get a fresh start. I knew that at Columbia I wasn’t going to get a fair shake. I would rather take my chances going and leaving, and seeing what happens rather than staying around just because it was a safer thing.”
Sitting in his East Austin rehearsal space, Smith doesn’t look like a man under construction. On the contrary, he’s well-built, resembling a prime conditioned athlete (or an NFL safety, as he was described in a Chronicle feature from ’93), rather than the singer-songwriter one might expect from his delicate, sometimes breezy pop tunes. His first album in three years, Deep Fantastic Blue, released last fall on Plump Records, (a small indie label owned by his manager) doesn’t give much indication of a rebuilding process either; instead, it reveals the further maturation of an artist firmly entrenched in the AAA format. Nevertheless, one doesn’t go through a divorce — two divorces — without hitting ground zero.
“Everything kinda crumbled on me at one point,” acknowledges Smith, “which was very painful, very hard to go through at that time. I went through a pretty chaotic, personal time. But in retrospect, it was best thing that ever happened to me. I was going through a divorce at the same time I was getting out of a record deal, and it sort of put it all in perspective: It’s just a record deal. It’s not my life. In that way, it was good.”
Having spent the better part of six years on the road, Smith was tired, and obviously, somewhat demoralized. So, he decided to take a break, spending the next nine months simply getting back in touch with his life, writing songs, and spending time with his son, Eli. It is, of course, in the minutiae of everyday detail where real life resides, and Smith found it, most notably at his son’s day care. “I was marveling at how passionate that life is,” says Smith. “And I’d really gotten removed from that in my years of traveling. I started digging just being real simple.”
Unfortunately, “simple” might also describe Smith’s career at that point. Though he still had his manager, Smith, in addition to losing his record deal, had also lost his booking agent. And because every potential agent answered management’s queries with, `Call me when you get a deal,’ Smith found himself unable to get much more than regional gigs. But the itch to play was getting more and more fierce, and finally Smith and Co. decided on a folk booking agent, who was told it didn’t matter where the singer-songwriter played, as long as he played. Recounting the story, Smith emphasizes the word play, saying it over and over like a child that can’t wait for his God-given right.
“So I started going up to the East Coast a lot, playing clubs, little towns,” recalls Smith. “And some of them were really funky. Some of them, there’d be no P.A. and I’d show up and sit down and play. And I was reminded how much I really liked to play music for people. And it’s a good gig, a great job. And I started to see it more as my job: This is my work.
“I’d gotten really caught up in the business and the game — the game of the music business. It’s a fascinating game, but it’s not about music. It’s not about touching people per se, and I marveled at the fact that here I was in some weird little town, in some weird little gig, and people would have my records. And I’d go play, and they’d dig it. And it was like, `This is fun.’ All the pressure went away. The only pressure that was there was to get to the gig on time.
“And then it was just about having fun. I found myself really enjoying playing. Just playing. By myself. Just playing. Playing my songs. So when I did come back to it, I came back to it from a really different perspective. What did I have to lose? Just go out and make a record that I wanted to make, ’cause I don’t have a deal. You can’t get dropped once you’re dropped. What are you gonna do, drop yourself?”
Certainly, an album was his to make. However, he still needed someone to put it in stores, and if the landscape of popular music had changed in his waning days at Columbia/Sony, by ’95, Smith was on an entirely different planet — planet punk. Shopping for a deal, Smith found little interest, and eventually settled for his manager’s label (“He actually gave me the best deal”) Plump, which had made its foray into the marketplace with live albums by Shawn Colvin, Peter Himmelman, and Howard Jones.
Yet not only had industry trends shifted — as well as Smith’s own goals — so had his songwriting. Along with his rediscovery that playing was fun, really fun, and that both playing and songwriting were his life’s work, came the realization that writing songs wasn’t just about telling stories — it was about telling his stories. Suddenly, Smith didn’t feel like couching his tales in funny metaphors. Who was he kidding, anyway?
“I had some friends that really challenged me,” explains Smith. “One in particular, said, `What are you gonna do here? Are you just gonna sorta do the same thing, or are you gonna try to take this, and without getting too high-minded about it, be an artist? Be someone who actually takes your life and really turns it into work.’ I kind of thought about that; `Yeah, that’s what I call myself. Now’s an excellent opportunity to see if I can do it, because I have nothing to lose. I have everything to gain by pushing myself.
“At that point everything was changing for me. I saw that it wasn’t about a record, a song, it’s about my life. I just quit looking at writing as `I’ve gotta write a record.’ It was more like, `I can write songs for the rest of my life.’ Why not start writing only this way? Start writing where it’s just the real deal. Quit writing bullshit. Just write the real deal, and make that how you write. I’m not always successful at that, but everything started to shift around that time. It just got a lot easier to write. As soon as you pull the wool back, start looking at the real deal, it gets more comfortable being really honest on the page and going out and singing the songs. It was kinda scary at first. But it’s better — I don’t know if anyone else likes it.
“At the same time that I kinda got more serious in that way, I really stopped taking the music business very serious. I was serious without taking myself seriously. Taking the craft serious. Sitting down and asking myself is the song true? Is it real? If it’s not real, don’t sing it. If it’s not real, why write it? Quit wasting time writing for the sake of impressing people.
“I have a lot more fun with writing, now. I’m much more reverent about the process. I see that writers are really lucky, in that their gig is to take what comes into their life, and then turn it into a song or a book. And it’s not necessarily that what you write is a big hit, it’s that you have to write.”
For the 35-year-old Brenham, Texas native, a kid who’d grown up listening to Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark on Houston’s country/folk beacon, KLOL, and later stole his brother’s ID so he could see people like John Prine at the Texas Opry house (“and every Austin band that came through”) — a budding musician who attended UT — songwriting had finally merged into a job and art. What a concept, doing what you love and getting paid for it; a concept that began germinating in Smith eight years earlier after an encounter with Pete Anderson, Dwight Yoakam’s right-hand-man and a savvy producer in his own right.
With three albums already under his belt (including ’86’s Native Soil and ’89’s Evidence, a collaboration with Boo Hewerdine), Smith went to see Anderson at Austin’s music biz infrastructure HQ, the Four Seasons hotel, armed with 12 “slamming” songs and hopes of having Anderson produce his next album. Instead, Smith was informed that he had “one really great song,” and three more that were “about 80% there.” Call me in six months, said Anderson.
“I was shattered,” remembers Smith. “Totally shattered. But on the way out he said, `Look. Paul Simon and Bruce Springsteen are probably gonna put a record out next year, too. You gotta compete with those guys. So go get a Bruce Springsteen record and a Paul Simon record, and if your songs don’t hold up to that — they ain’t gonna fly.’
“Of course it took me two weeks to pick up my guitar. I was walking around going, `I’m 27 and I’m washed up.’ And at the same time I went, `Wow, this is work, and I wanna do this. I don’t want it to just be okay. Some people have beginners’ luck. I think I had some beginners’ luck. But then I had to really up the ante in order to keep going. Pete really busted my chops on songs through the making of [Trouble No More]. He taught me that getting your chops busted was not about getting slammed or getting ripped apart. It’s about getting a better song, and that’s what you’re after. At that point, I started thinking about it completely different and seeking out people who could fill that role for me.”
On Little Victories, that role was filled by Chip Taylor, author of “Wild Thing,” and “Angel of the Morning,” among others: “His first hit was in 1962,” says Smith. “So, he comes from an era where you have two and a half minutes to tell the whole story. I come from the era where Bob Dylan goes on for eight minutes, and you still don’t know what the story is. And we’d be going along and Chip would go, `Wait, wait, wait, wait…. What the fuck are you talking about? What’s all this cloud shit? It’s just a guy and a girl right? Well, where are they at?'”
Talking about the collaborative process and his work with Taylor, Hewerdine, Nashville’s Gary Nicholson, and most recently Paul Williams — yes, that Paul Williams — Smith becomes animated, clearly excited about the relationships he’s cultivated with some of his fellow songsmiths.
“I like the collaborative process. It’s really taxing, but it’s possible for one and one to make three in the creative process. You can build a better thing with someone else than you can by yourself. And two people together can come up with something so powerful. Sometimes, the other person doesn’t do much, just sits there, and that’s what you need — someone to watch you. That’s the collaborative process, and it’s something I’ve fallen in love with, actually. And I’ve pulled that experience into making records, writing songs. I don’t like to do things where I don’t have someone to go up against.”
Because most of his collaborators live in more traditional centers of the music business — New York, Los Angeles, Nashville — Smith spent the better part of his 13 years here in Austin thinking that he had to get out.
“Until about four years ago,” he agrees. “Then I realized, one, I’m a Texan. Two, I’m a Westerner, and three, I like Austin. It’s a cool place to live…. For years I thought I needed to go somewhere else to push myself and I realized I can push myself creatively anywhere. It’s not about being somewhere else. Going somewhere else is not necessarily about moving forward. It can be about running away. I just decided at a certain point, this is where I live. Stop trying to run away. Just shut up. Sit down. Write songs.
“And that’s what I do. I really like it. It’s really cool. And there are times when I want to quit — times when it’s so hard to make a living, so hard to keep going, traveling, being away from town. And I’ll think, `It’s not worth it. Screw it.’ But I wasn’t forced to do this, I volunteered to do this. And then I fell in love with it.
“Now, I’m just in love. And there’s nothing I can do about it.”
The process begins anew.
Darden Smith appears at the Cactus Cafe this weeked, Friday 4 and Saturday 5.
This article appears in April 4 • 1997 and April 4 • 1997 (Cover).
