Nathan Smith

Joe sez: "Mon Santo is better than brownies!"
"Aesthetically Speaking" bio by Summer Hunt:
Picture yourself in a dimly-lit bar with a few close friends or perhaps a significant other. Laughter and light conversation fill the air, and then you see someone approaching the stage at the front of the room. Dressed in a plaid button-down shirt and his signature cowboy boots, you’re not really sure of what to expect. From your seat in the audience, you see him step up to his seat under the bright white spotlight and remove his guitar from its case. As he begins to tune, the crowd lowers their voices.
“You guys don’t have to be quiet; I’m just tuning,” he tells the captivated bar patrons. His voice is low and slightly growly but with a rich quality that resonates throughout the room and rises up above all the noise. The onlookers cannot help but to stop, listen and wait as the guitarist sings a few bars to get ready. Moments later, he finishes tuning and leans closer to the microphone.
“My name is Nathan Smith,” he says, “and I play music that sounds like this.” At the young age of 22, Smith has been involved with music for a very large part of his life. Born and raised in Anniston, Ala., Smith has been in various punk and hardcore bands since he was 16. “A few years ago, I stopped doing that and switched to something a little more rootsy,” he said.
Talking to Smith, it seems hard to believe he ever strayed from the folk sound that he has become so comfortable with these days. There is a slightly dreamy quality that clouds his eyes whenever he talks about his passion for music. He is well-spoken and eloquent, and his speaking voice is just as rhythmic and smooth as it is when he sings onstage.
Though his sound is all his own, he models himself after some of his favorite musicians. “My very favorite songwriter is Mark Kozelek,” he said. “He has a stunning way with chord structures, and he writes such simple words that are really heartbreaking.”
When approaching the process of writing a song, Smith is much like a painter dipping his brush into a colorful palette of possibilities. His goal is to establish a mood, or an “aesthetic,” as he commonly describes it. “I’m obnoxiously visual with my words,” he said. “When someone hears me play, I would like for them to think of things that are smoky, and dark, or rather darkly romantic.”
At the time when he was first starting out, Smith would have words on page, and then he would try to find the music to match. “I’d sit and stare at a blank piece of paper until something came out, which is possibly the most ineffective way of doing it,” he said. “Nowadays, though, things have switched. I’ll have some sort of pretty aesthetic in my head, and I have to try and find the words to match it,” he said.
Inspiration for Smith’s music comes from everything under the sun. “I’m an art student, so I’ll see pieces of artwork that move me to try and create something from it. And of course, there’s love. Or lack thereof,” he said. But don’t go thinking that he writes sappy, sugary love songs that pour out of every Top 40 radio station on the dial. “Most often I guess I find myself writing about a medium, a yearning…something that everybody can easily relate to.”
Other influences for Smith come from simple things that someone else might take for granted or might not be able to see the beauty in right away. “I’m obsessed with nighttime and gray, rainy days,” he said. “I think that they are the most amazing times to see the world.”
One song that is not only a crowd favorite but also one of Smith’s most beloved covers is Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” The song was also notably done by Jeff Buckley and Rufus Wainwright, but Smith makes the song his own as he delivers it to his eager listeners. “It is my favorite song in the entire world,” he said. “I love the feel of that song; I think the lyrics are perfect. It goes back to that yearning, that very specific ‘this is why I don’t like loving,’ and it’s very to-the-point.”
“Pilgrim’s Progress” is one of Smith’s originals, and it is one of his very favorites to play. “It’s one of the first songs that I’ve written that I really feel flows perfectly from one part to the next,” he said. “It’s catchy, and it has a very easy motion to it. It’s difficult to say exactly what it’s about. There’s the whole essence of longing for some sense of comfort.”
When the message of his music does get across, the results can vary from one end of the spectrum to another. “Music is incredibly powerful,” Smith said. “There is music for every occasion, emotion and sensation. It can evoke extreme happiness or sadness. With me, it’s always a nostalgic thing. There are more memories for me tied to music than there is to sense of smell.”
More than anything, Smith just wants to make people feel something, anything. “I want you to see something when you listen to what I have to play. Emotion with words, aesthetic with music, exactly,” he said. “I want you to associate it with something personal. That’s what I set out to do every time I write a song.”
As passionate as he is about his craft, Smith doesn’t really ask for much more than what he calls “simple appreciation.” Music means different things to different people, and beauty is really in the ear of the beholder. “Just to be uttered in the same breath as musicians that someone likes, that makes me happy,” he said.
When it comes to ultimate goals, Smith is content to go wherever his path takes him. “I don’t want to gross millions, and it’s not that I want attention,” he said. “It would just be nice to be associated with something that someone wants to hear. I want people to want to listen to me, not just because they know me, but because they say, ‘I want to hear Nathan Smith.’ That’s all.”
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