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CHARLIE SMYTH // THE WAY I FEEL

A veteran of the ’90s Chicago & Seattle punk scenes, Charlie Smyth’s sound has evolved over time, meandering like a tattered feather on the Southern breeze and settling somewhere beneath the ever-widening shadow of modern Americana. Grand, loose and vibrant, the Nashville-based troubadour’s new solo debut, The Way I Feel, is dusted with strings, mariachi horns and wistful blankets of steel guitar, its loose-lugnut drums propelling the whole beautiful jalopy of a record forward as if the wheels could come off at any minute. The record is a breathtaking statement of creative purpose, imbuing its too-often safe and by-the-numbers genre with an undeniable sense of musical adventure.

Influenced by his work as a painter and visual artist, Smyth has a unique way of looking at and describing the world around him, his lyrics unfolding in vivid, earthy brush strokes. “The air tastes like chewed-up pencils / Old beat-up utensils, tossed on the desk like forks in the road / Busted forks in the road / Glittering in the sunshine,” he sings on “Buddy”. The Way I Feel is indeed dripping with sunshine—and plenty of wonder, too, the songs anchored by Smyth’s wizened baritone, which clings by a frayed thread to the quivering harmonies of his wife and frequent collaborator Kalee Smyth. Together, they sound like a gorgeously mismatched pair of classic-country crooners, Dolly singing with Willie or Kristofferson instead of Porter Wagoner, Emmylou with Leonard Cohen or Lee Hazlewood instead of Gram Parsons.

It was Kalee who encouraged Smyth and his freshly wrangled band—Eric Penticoff on piano, bassist Jeff Moon, drummer Adam Mormolstein, multi-instrumentalist Andy Gibson, horn player Jamison Sevits, and one-time George Jones fiddle player Billy Contreras—to record the songs that would become The Way I Feel. “A lot of my friends are great musicians, but they’re high-priced hired guns who stay busy doing sessions and touring for a living,” Smyth says. “I wanted a band I wouldn’t have to pay to play with me, so I began looking for people who wanted to make music just for fun. The structure at the time was, ‘I’m writing songs and playing rhythm guitar. I’m not going to tell you guys what to do. If that sounds fun to you, let’s do it.’ Giving everyone that kind of freedom lit a fire under the band—the energy with that approach was really contagious.”

The Way I Feel kicks off with a decidedly more downhome (if faithfully joyous) cover of Neil Diamond’s Robbie Robertson-produced song “Beautiful Noise,” the original’s synths and accordion swapped out for resplendent, organic brass. It’s one of a handful of satisfyingly constructed covers chosen by Smyth for the album. Featured alongside imaginative originals like “Daggers,” “Country Girl” and “Faithfully” are distinctive renditions of Ray Price’s Slim Willett-penned “Don’t Let the Stars Get In Your Eyes”, the album’s quasi-title cut, “That’s the Way I Feel,” co-written by country greats George Jones and Roger Miller, and another “Possum” cut, “The Cold Hard Truth”, written by Jamie O’Hara. Smyth discovered these songs on budget-vinyl he found at Seattle’s Lifelong Thrift. “Other than ‘The Star Spangled Banner,’ the covers on The Way I Feel came from records I picked up at the same place for a quarter each,” he says. “I’ve noticed that on a lot of my favorite singer/songwriter albums, they throw in covers, which is really cool, especially when you don’t realize at first that it’s a cover. With Gram Parsons, I thought ‘Cash on the Barrelhead’ from Grievous Angel was his song, but then I found out it was The Louvin Brothers.’”

Charlie Smyth first picked up a guitar in his late teens while an art student at the University of Illinois, immersing himself in the robust punk and post-hardcore scenes of Chicago, where he played in several bands before leaving the city at age 22, bound for newly christened grunge mecca Seattle. There, Smyth formed experimental rock band Laundry, who recorded with renowned producer-engineers Barrett Jones (Nirvana, Melvins, Jesus Lizard, Pearl Jam, Whiskeytown) and Kearney Barton (Young Fresh Fellows, The Sonics). Laundry was poised to break, opening shows for Morphine, The Fugees and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and catching the eye of Lou Reed’s ex-wife Sylvia, who managed the band and produced the video for their single “Golden West,” directed by Andy Warhol associate Jon Behrens.

“Sylvia felt she could help us more if we were in New York,” Smyth says. “Our drummer Jake McCarter stayed behind—he was more interested in going to school for Occupational Therapy—but [singer/upright-bassist] Scot Cortese and I made the move. I was there first, and by the time Scot arrived, I just didn’t feel like doing the rock-band thing anymore. Looking back, Sylvia was great for us, but because of who she was, she was plugged into the major-label world. Let’s put it this way—the fancier the people I was meeting, the less I liked them. I got very disillusioned with the whole thing.”

After a brief stint flexing his No Wave chops with James Chance & The Contortions, Smyth left New York for a brief sojourn playing free jazz in Melbourne, Australia. Eventually, he returned to the Pacific Northwest, settling in Portland, Ore., where the longtime sideman/guitarist started working on his own songs. This newfound awakening as a writer set Smyth on a fresh journey that found him bouncing between Seattle, Chicago, and Berlin as part of several groups. He recorded a single with the late Nikki Sudden and rented a pad with Leroy Bach and Mikael Jorgensen of Wilco before finally meeting his wife Kalee and relocating to Nashville where the two formed country-folk duo The Western Shore, releasing the album Thunderstorm in 2014.

The Way I Feel (out July 13) marks yet another promising new chapter for Smyth. “I feel like the collage of sounds and genres you hear on this album are reflective of my own personal history,” he says. “I’ve lived in many different cities over the course of my life, I’ve never stayed in one place for too long, I’ve played all different kinds of music in all kinds of bands. The Way I Feel is my first full-fledged album as a writer—it really captures the specific kind of energy I wanted for a solo LP. Making this record was unlike anything I’ve experienced before.”

“Rich, vibrant…rollicking world of sound.” – PopMatters

“Charlie Smyth’s rugged vocals and dark storytelling have evolved into bluesy Americana tunes with a traditional country twang.” – Cowboys & Indians

“Earns George Jones comparisons the honest way.” – Wide Open Country

“Smyth has cut a range of musical chops in the past – from punk/grunge through free jazz.” – Americana UK

“An album that encompasses much of what he has been through to get here while also perhaps a connection with a simpler time and music. ” – Lonesome Highways

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Ben Fisher // Does the Land Remember Me?

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has rarely been addressed in American music. But on Ben Fisher’s latest release, the Damien Jurado-produced Does the Land Remember Me?, the Seattle-based folk artist—who spent three years living in Israel—dives headfirst into an entire concept album on the subject, a bloodcurdling and somber meditation that humanizes those on both sides of the divide. Fisher’s metaphorical and literal interpretations are wreathed together in a binding, barbed-wire circle as he tackles a complex and heavy narrative. His skill as a songwriter and storyteller is a big part of what drew the interest of producer Jurado, and it has landed him gigs over the years on bills with groundbreaking artists such as Courtney Marie Andrews, Aaron Lee Tasjan, Animal Collective, The Head and the Heart, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings and countless others.

His voice equal parts frayed and sinewy, Fisher spurns complacency with tremendous urgency on Does the Land Remember Me?, his second full-length. He takes great care in his storytelling, especially on standout track “1948,” an evocative duet with Noah Gundersen that features Fisher singing from the perspective of a Jewish child and Gundersen from the perspective of an Arab child at the outset of the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, known by Israelis as the War of Independence and in Palestinian society as the Nakba (catastrophe). “Are you scared of the men, Papa / They don’t want us here / Are you scared of the men, Papa / They’ve been here for years / Are you scared all of this will go,” Fisher sings over a plaintive fingerpicked guitar.

Fisher acts primarily as the record’s narrator, drawing from the three years he spent living in “No Man’s Land,” smack between predominantly Arab East and predominantly Jewish West Jerusalem. But the roots of the album date back to a 2014 excursion to Tokyo. It was there that Does the Land Remember Me?’s opening track “The Shell Lottery”—a musical history lesson on the 1909 founding of Tel Aviv—hit Fisher like a lightning bolt. “I started thinking about the scope of Sufjan Stevens’ records Illinois and Michigan,” he says. “It dawned on me that there was something to this song, and that there could be more.”

Does the Land Remember Me?— scheduled for a September 7 release—is a bleak but honest portrait of the Israeli and Palestinian people, who have been locked in a cycle of violence for the better part of the last century. “One of the biggest issues is that people are no longer interested in what happens there,” Fisher says. “It’s gone on for so long, the peace process is so gridlocked and there have been so many people killed. The world has become numb to it.”

As he searches for the right words, Fisher scours his conscience in search of hope—a hope that people will be moved and inspired to action through the record. “Passivity is much worse than taking a stand, even if I don’t particularly agree with that stand,” he says. “Young Americans, in particular, need to help moderate America’s influence on Israel.”

In an attempt to shed further light on the conflict, Fisher doesn’t shy away from the sheer brutality experienced by the Middle East and its people.“They Must Have Been So Scared” is one of the album’s glistening gems, but it’s also the most grim and heart-wrenching. In three verses, the ballad peels back the layers of three tragic stories. “The summer of 2014 was a particularly bloody and terrible time in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip,” Fisher says. Verse one of the song unspools the tale of a Palestinian family in Gaza who are killed by an Israeli airstrike; verse two exposes the kidnap and murder of three Israeli boys by Palestinian terrorists; and verse three tells the narrative of a Palestinian boy burned alive by a group of Jewish terrorists. Fisher later frames the hook, “They must have been so scared / Must have felt death chill the air / How could you leave them there?” around his atheist beliefs, offering up a bitter prayer “to a god I don’t believe in for all these insane deaths that happened that summer,” he says with a disarming matter-of-factness.

It’s not all conflict songs though; the second half of the record sees Fisher singing about Israeli folk heroes like astronaut Ilan Ramon and singer-songwriter Meir Ariel. “For Petr and Ilan” tells the story of Ramon’s doomed trip into space aboard the Columbia. He took with him copies of a drawing done by a young Czechoslovak boy named Petr Ginz, who was murdered in Auschwitz. With a style and lyrical form that pays homage to the American folk canon, Fisher sings, “The astronaut wore a flag patch on his arm / The little boy wore a yellow star / Got taken away in a cattle car / The astronaut wore a flag patch on his arm”

Born to a bacon-eating Jewish family and eventually majoring in Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Washington, Fisher’s sudden obsession with Israel led him to leave his family for the first time, traversing thousands of miles across oceans and time zones. “It got to the point where I was baking pita and reading [Israeli newspaper] Haaretz in the mornings,” he says. “It’s much easier to be obsessed with something when you’re surrounded by it.” Not long after graduating from college, he packed up his entire life and moved to the ancient city, where spent his time bartending, and writing, reporting and traveling for The Jerusalem Post.

?In “Brave New World,” one of the few songs drawing on Fisher’s personal experiences, he sings about the foreignness of the Holy City: “Everyone I’ve ever known lives far across a sea / My brave new world can be old and cold but you struck a chord in me.”

His return to the U.S. in the summer of 2017 propelled him to finish Does the Land Remember Me?, the album spilling forth with an elusive humanity too often mangled by the evening news and the purgatorial bickering of social-media feeds. The title song, a melodic piano-anchored affair, presents the story of a Palestinian expelled from his home during the 1948 war. Minutes later, on the wretchedly radiant “Yallah to Abdullah,” Fisher peers through the eyes of an Israeli soldier during the same war, underscoring the album’s goals of humanity and understanding.

He later etches an equally affecting moment with “Abraham’s Song,” the track with the shortest run-time on the record but perhaps the most involved backstory. “This was the hardest song for me to write because I disagree so wholeheartedly with their mindset and political agenda,” says Fisher about writing from the perspective of a Jewish settler in the West Bank. “I wanted to portray this person in a sympathetic, human light,” he continues. “I tried to paint the narrative of the settler movement, which started as an arguably innocent thing, and evolved into something sinister, ugly, dangerous and evil.”

Fisher strikes a fitting balance between emotion and reality on Does the Land Remember Me?. By allowing himself to inhabit these real-life characters, he makes possible a deeper understanding of the dire state of this tiny strip of land and its people. And his experiences only seem to aid his desire for mercy, eerily feeding into each stark moment with enthralling insight. Does the Land Remember Me? is a career-making record, timely and crucial.

“As he searches for the right words, Fisher scours his conscience in search of hope—a hope that people will be moved and inspired to action through the record.” – No Depression