Old Flattop

Chris Smither

One day in the late 1960’s a young songwriter was encouraged to go to Cambridge, Massachusetts and play in the music clubs there. That was Chris Smither. Celebrating his newest record and over fifty years of touring, Smither continues as a leading songwriter drawing deeply from the blues, American folk music, modern poets and philosophers and is still one of America’s most distinctive acoustic performers. 

His 20th release, All About the Bones is as elemental as the inky black shadows cast by a shockingly bright moon. Featuring eight brand new Chris Smither songs and Smither renditions of Eliza Gilkyson’s Calm Before the Storm and also Tom Petty’s Time to Move On, the listener is welcomed into some gothic mansion on an imaginary New Orleans street, and there in the lamplit parlor confronts the band, a minimalist skeleton crew. 

As noted by the New York Times, Rolling Stone, MOJO, NPR, and others, in the decades of travels to All About the Bones, Chris Smither has gone from up-and-comer to journeyman to veteran to icon, and yet the whole time his path has more closely resembled Joseph Campbell’s “Hero with a Thousand Faces”- an unblinking, fearless trek into the depths of struggle and revelation, and a return back to the land of the living, to share the hard-won treasures found along the way.