C'est La Vie

Since he last visited Australia, touring his 2009 album, Time Stands Still, the seemingly permanently laidback Boston-based singer-songwriter Chris Smither has released a 'fans only' live album, Lost And Found, a roots rock'n'roll covers EP, What I Learned In School, and the album that brings him back to Australia, Hundred Dollar Valentine, which features Morphine's Billy Conway on drums and percussion.

While the press release that came with Hundred Dollar Valentine suggests that on this album Smither is tackling the 'big questions', the underlying themes are actually much more about acceptance.

“It is!” Smither laughs, pleased that someone's realised it. “It's my own little sort of Buddhist statement, you know. The world is what it is and so make what you can of it. It's not so much asking the big questions as saying they don't really matter!”

Not that Smither simply dismisses those bigger issues or the lessons one hopes are learned from the past in suggesting we live in 'the now', as the poignant final track, Every Mother's Son, makes clear. “Of course I didn't have any way of knowing that just a few months after the record came out that there would be these horrific school shootings here… again. When President Obama gave an address about the Newtown shootings, he said, 'This is the fourth time in my administration I've had to do this.' And that came as shock – people tend to forget.”

While he's cut 12 studio and half a dozen or more live albums over the 42 years he's been a recording artist – though admittedly there was something of a “lost” decade or more there between his second album, 1971's Don't It Drag, and his 1991 “comeback” album, Another Way To Find You – Hundred Dollar Valentine is Smither's first entirely original album, and even here, he's “revisited” a couple of songs.

“My whole career I've written about eight or nine songs,” he admits of his approach to cutting albums, “and then looked around for two or three others, you know, to do, and I had written 'the nine' and was starting to cast about for something else to do and Goodie [producer David Goodrich] said, 'Why don't you cover yourself? You've got all these songs, half of 'em you never play anymore. People haven't heard you play them for years; they've heard other people play them more than they have you play 'em'.

“And I said, 'What d'ya have in mind?' Of course he had a whole list of stuff that he would love to hear me play. So I thought about it and picked a couple out that seemed to fit, and they were also songs that I was interested in seeing what they felt like to sing 'em 20 or 30 years later. And it was interesting; in a way, they reflect the thematic drift of this collection because I go back and listen to the earlier versions of those two songs [I Feel the Same, a hit for Bonnie Raitt, and Every Mother's Son] – they were much more emotionally-driven; they were full of angst and stuff like that. And I listen to 'em now and they sound more resigned. Which is another way of saying accepting!” Smither laughs again.

“And also I thought I Feel The Same was a nice little parallel with one of the newer blues tunes, What It Might Have Been, and I hadn't even realised it at the time that I was writing it, that essentially it's just an older person sort of saying the same thing from a slightly different perspective.”

Chris Smither will be playing the following dates:

Thursday 7 March - Blue Beat, Double Bay NSW
Saturday 9 to Monday 11 March - Port Fairy Folk Festival, Port Fairy VIC
Thursday 14 & Friday 15 March - Kulcha, Fremantle WA
Saturday 16 & Sunday 17 March - Blue Mountains Music Festival, Katoomba NSW
Tuesday 19 March - Cat And Fiddle Hotel, Balmain NSW
Wednesday 20 March - Gallipoli Club, Newcastle NSW
Thursday 21 March - South Leagues Club, Brisbane QLD
Friday 22 March - Woombye Hotel, Sunshine Coast QLD
Saturday 23 March - Brunswick Music Festival, Brunswick VIC
Wednesday 27, Caravan Music Club, Oakleigh VIC
Friday 29 & Saturday 30 - National Folk Festival, Canberra NSW
Sunday 31 & Monday 1 April - Bluesfest, Byron Bay NSW