Music
Quick-Change Artist
Country, rock, pop, folk: From one album to the next, Darden Smith’s songs don’t remain the same, and neither does he.
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After brief songwriting stints in Nashville and Los Angeles, Darden once again settled full-time in Texas, but he didn’t stay put for long. In 1989 he was invited by Nigel Grainge, the president of Ensign Records, to change musical colors a bit by traveling to London to write with a British musician named Boo Hewerdine. “The first day Boo and I went to write songs, we sat down in the producer’s kitchen and did ‘Reminds Me a Little of You’ in about forty-five minutes, and we looked at each other and said, ‘Wow, this is really cool.’ So we wrote a song in the morning and a song in the afternoon, two songs a day for a week, and then we did a demo tape.” Eventually Darden took Boo to Austin, where they produced an album called Evidence. Less than a year later, Darden cut a more rock-oriented solo record, Trouble No More (highlighted by two singles, “Frankie and Sue” and “Midnight Train,” that got considerable radio airplay), and set out on an extensive world tour (lowlighted by a well-publicized mishap onstage in Norway when he jumped onto a speaker during a guitar solo and was promptly knocked out by the rotating blades of a ceiling fan).
Between domestic tours in 1991 and 1992, Darden’s career path took another twist when he collaborated with an Austin dance troupe on Nine Chains to the Moon. Inspired by the book of the same name, the modern dance-theater piece illustrated author Buckminster Fuller’s fanciful theory that if every man, woman, and child stood shoulder to toe, they could make nine complete chains to the moon and back. “In 1938, obviously, the moon was considered unattainable,” Darden explained. “But Fuller said we could get there nine times if we all worked together. That ended up being a perfect analogy for our creating the performance. We scraped and scrounged to raise the money we needed to stage the show at the University of Texas’ McCullough Theatre and later in Fort Worth and Waco. I don’t read music, but I learned how to play the piano and wrote an hour’s worth of this really wild, dissonant music for the dancers. The experience completely changed my regard for the creative process.”
Following the birth of his son, Eli, in 1992, Darden spent several months in New York recording Little Victories, an album he admits was calculated to keep getting his songs played on the radio. A handful of Texas music critics accused him of having overweening ambition (the Austin American-Statesman declared, “Darden Smith makes no apologies for crafting himself a showman intent on taking his music beyond Texas”), and he didn’t completely disagree with the criticism. “I was trying to find my home musically,” he explained with a shrug. “A couple of my earlier albums had been more country-based than I probably wanted them to be. The songs I had done with Boo were more like the music I listened to: more pop, British, fresher. Yes, Little Victories was produced like a pop record, but it was still just a guy and a guitar telling stories.”
He has a point. Despite the various fashionings of his sound and appearance over the years, the honesty and intelligence of Darden’s lyrics have remained constant. Whether it’s the dark image of a Civil War widow killing a Yankee soldier with her pitchfork (“Veteran’s Day”) or a young father lying awake in bed listening to the howls of a distant locomotive (“Midnight Train”), the words he sings evoke eclectic worlds few contemporary songwriters are willing to imagine. Little Victories ’ “A Place in the Sun,” for example, was inspired by a scene in Woody Guthrie’s autobiography, Bound for Glory, and the album’s title song came about after Darden failed for hours to reach a friend in California by phone during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Trouble No More’s “Fall Apart at the Seams” was written after he read Raymond Carver’s short story “Neighbors,” in which the protagonist sneaks into his neighbor’s apartment and tries on his clothes.
“Broken Branches,” a potential single from Deep Fantastic Blue, took shape one day while Darden drove Eli to his Austin preschool. “We pulled up to a stop sign. My window was down, and a homeless guy came up to the truck and asked for money. He was pretty shabby looking and pretty much stuck his whole upper body in the window. It took me aback, but Eli just smiled and said hi—he didn’t see the guy the same way I saw him. I had this moment when I realized that this homeless guy used to be somebody’s sweet little baby. Being a father, it just really hit me.” After Darden offered his explanation, he played a rough-mix recording of the song on his boombox. The words of the refrain hit with surprising force: “Hey, that’s somebody’s daughter / Hey, that’s somebody’s son / Somebody’s pride and joy / Turned out to be / The broken branch off the family tree.”
After that, we sat back and listened to the rest of the tape. The songs of Deep Fantastic Blue (the album’s ethereal title refers to a sensation Darden once experienced while meditating) range stylistically from toe-tapping, drum-programmed, pop cuts to folkish ballads and the obligatory chug-chug-chugging train tune he always seems to include on his albums. A few definitely sound like something you’d hear on the radio. “It’s an eclectic mix by design,” Darden observed. “The producer, Stewart Lerman, is a native New Yorker. The musicians playing with me are from all over the world. Graham Maby, who is Joe Jackson’s longtime bassist, is from England. Guitarist Richard Kennedy and drummer Stanley Mitchell are from New Zealand. Their musical influences are radically different from mine. I enjoy working with musicians who don’t necessarily think the way I do.”
Typically, Darden seemed indifferent to the effects Deep Fantastic Blue might have on his ever-changing and determinedly offbeat career. “Professionally I have nothing to lose,” he said. “We made the music we wanted to make, and I’m proud of it. I suppose I hope to hear songs from the album while driving my truck through Austin.” He smiled good-naturedly as he leaned forward to rewind the tape. “But the music business is not a race. You just do what you do and enjoy whatever success you manage to find.”
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