Mindy Smith – On the inside
“Music has always been a struggle for me,” Smith continues, veering abruptly in another direction, or at first seeming to. “I was your typical teenager who wanted to be a hot shot. I’m not gonna say that I didn’t, ’cause that was how it was, and it didn’t work out so well. I actually stunk. I hadn’t had a lot of support from my teachers. My mother had a different outlook on music and presented it in a way that must have had an impact on me, because that’s how I’ve been able to do what I do. That’s how I’ve been able to find music as a great outlet to express a spiritual perspective.
“I don’t think you can verbally teach someone that. You have to experience it for yourself, and I experienced it watching it in my mother. Singing with Dolly Parton has that affect on people. Or Alison Krauss. There are people who have that affect on people and you can’t explain it.”
Smith’s mother, who died of cancer in 1991, sang everything from cantatas to hymns to contemporary gospel music. Sadly, Mindy has only one recording of her mother singing, a low-fidelity dub of a song called “Love In Any Language” that she performed at a wedding.
“It’s a terrible recording but it’s very moving,” Smith says. “It’s the only recording we have of her singing and it’s a shame because she spent all of her life singing. I had planned on doing something after she got well, but that wasn’t the way it panned out.
“God had a different plan, I suppose,” Smith adds, choking back tears. “I’m not thrilled about it.”
Neither was Smith terribly thrilled about growing up a preacher’s daughter. (Her brother went on to become a minister like their father.)
“There aren’t a lot of PK’s in New York,” Smith explains. “Most people that I was in school with were Jewish or Catholic. Young kids couldn’t understand that my dad wasn’t a priest. They couldn’t figure that out.
“We lived right next to the church. It was tough. I wrote ‘Raggedy Ann’ about it.”
The song, which appears on Smith’s first album, is something of an update of Dolly Parton’s “Coat Of Many Colors”. Its chorus, set to a fragile melody, goes: “I’m just a little girl, and I’m Raggedy Ann/Making believe I’m happy, hey, Raggedy Ann/Falling apart at the seams.”
“But who doesn’t think back to their childhood and go, ‘Oh, that was kind of tough, you know?’ Like having a parent who works all the time. We were so lucky. I had friends who were jealous that my parents were always around. We had dinner at the family table and that’s what they wanted, so everybody has their perspective.”
The one thing, by her account, that Smith was not while she was growing up was “cool.” Appearances to the contrary, she still doesn’t see herself that way. In the bio for Long Island Shores, she even admits to having an “identity crisis” during the making of the record, largely over thinking that it should have been much “cooler” than her debut.
“With my first record, people tried to put me in a box as, you know, a girl with a guitar from Nashville, and I got really confused by that,” she says. “Now there’s nothing wrong with being a girl with a guitar from Nashville, and I’m very proud of my first record. But I also thought, ‘I have so many colors inside me. I have to show them.’ With this record, I just wanted to make sure that happened. And I think that as an artist and as a person, I might have tried too hard to do that. After awhile I felt like maybe I was running away from Mindy Smith.”
The upshot of this process was that some of the more progressive things she recorded with her supporting cast — which included Dan Dugmore on steel, Bryan Sutton and Buddy Miller on guitars, Reese Wynans on keyboards, and a rhythm section of Michael Rhodes and Eddie Bayers — didn’t make it onto the album.
“I just had to give that up,” she says. “I’m not cool. I guess I thought that I should be cooler than Mindy Smith. It’s not gonna happen. I had somebody say to me, ‘Thanks for representing those of us who aren’t cool,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s kind of a cool perspective. I like it. I’ll work my uncoolness.
“I like to watch, you know, documentaries,” she adds with a sheepish smile. “I’m one of those people. I’m definitely interesting, I’m just not hip.”
Interesting but not hip is an apt description of Smith’s new album, which, despite involving Steve Buckingham again (as co-producer), and featuring some of the same musicians, isn’t a rehash of her debut. With mandolin player Lex Price joining Smith and Buckingham behind the board, the new record has a richer sonic palette, from the raggy blues of “You Know I Love You Baby” to the liquid ambience of “You Just Forgot” to the Anglo-Celtic accents of the title track. Smith’s lithe soprano, by turns gauzy and keening (and sometimes both at once), animates everything with an ease that belies her often turbulent lyrics.
The arrangements are still built around acoustic instrumentation and thus still inhabit the folkier reaches of the singer-songwriter continuum. Some of the music, though, is darker than on Smith’s previous album. At times, the record’s more aggressive forward motion imbues it with a modern rock sheen akin to some of Kasey Chambers’ noisier work. The album even employs the occasional drum loop, courtesy of Roger Moutenout, a Nashville engineer who has worked with Sleater-Kinney and Yo La Tengo.