Critically acclaimed and Americana Award winning Singer-songwriter Mindy Smith’s sixth studio album, Quiet Town, brings a treasured musical voice back into the spotlight.
For Quiet Town, her first album of new material in 12 years, Smith called on producer and musician Neilson Hubbard, alongside engineer Dylan Alldredge. Hubbard enlisted guitarists Will Kimbrough, Megan McCormick, and Juan Solorzano, bassist Lex Price, Danny Mitchell on keys and horns, and a host of acclaimed vocalists for the background vocals, including Maureen Murphy, Nickie Conley, Jodi Seyfried, Matraca Berg, Kate York, and Park Chisolm.
Smith’s talent for expressing the most human of vulnerabilities is in full display on the new album. Beyond the title track, other album highlights include “Jericho,” co-written with esteemed artist and Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame songwriter Matraca Berg, which gives voice to anticipation of impending life changes of monumental import; “I’d Rather Be a Bridge,” a plea for compassion and connection; and “Farther Than We Should Have,” co-written with Natalie Hemby and K.S. Rhoads. The latter is a song about overcoming the deck stacked against kindred spirits who together trek through a difficult journey and find footing beyond beating the odds.
Arguably, Smith’s wisdom and insight grew out of the challenges of her youth. Most longtime fans know she was raised on Long Island by her adoptive parents: her non-denominational minister father and her mother, the choir director at their church. However, in 2014, Smith connected with members of the birth family she had never known, living in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Southwest Virginia. She also found her newly discovered relatives to be musically inclined, a discovery that helped her make sense of her innate attraction to Americana music. That connection inspired several of the songs on Quiet Town, most notably in the sense of gratitude and reassurance that she offers in “Hour of My Departure,” a duet and co-write with longtime writing partner Daniel Tashian.
The spirit of gratitude is the note on which Smith concludes the album. The song “I Always Will,” holds out the promise of an abiding love that can transcend whatever troubles life may bring. “I write for one purpose and that’s to figure out how to live in the world I am in” Smith has been quoted as saying. Responding to her comment from years past with a laugh, Smith says “I hope I never do figure that out, because if I did, I don’t think I’d know what I’d write about.”
Smith’s 2004 debut, One Moment More, sold over 400,000 copies and put Smith squarely on the list of artists defining Americana and roots music. A defining element of her music has always been the powerful simplicity of her straight-to-the-heart vocals, rejecting so much fussiness that often characterizes pop music, whether country, pop, R&B, or rock. Although she has carved a path for herself in Americana music, it is telling that she has cited jazz singer Sarah Vaughan as her favorite vocalist. And the Los Angeles Times raved, “Her voice exudes the gentility and grace of [Alison] Krauss, while musically she can evoke an electronics-drenched moodiness of latter-day Emmylou Harris, which can indeed leave a listener yearning for one moment more.”
