mock interview

I caught up with Jim Smart at the top of Mount Everest, where he was reading The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

Mock Interview, part 1

What’s up with the title?

Mist refers to several things. The songs were written near a lake in the Adirondacks where clouds would regularly creep down out of the forest to blanket the lake in a three inch layer of mist. So there's that literal reference. But as the songs developed, I started to think of the mist as the noise in the background of our lives. The static from a radio, the sounds of the city, and anything vague which hides or blurs the details of the world. The noise of the world, in fact.

There's a tension between wanting to sweep the mist aside and have a good clear look, and wanting the mist to blur everything, like a good pint of Guinness will do. I’m interested in the tension between wanting to shroud life in mist the desperate need from time to time to see things absolutely clearly.

This is my “cut the crap” album. I stripped away most of the lush harmonies and wailing guitars and manic drums. I’ve quite pretending it’s a band and just used my own name. When I painted the self portrait, I took a long look at myself in the mirror, which is what I tried to do with these songs.

I love the background instrumentals on this CD. They add a depth and sophistication not there in your earlier work. Did you compose all those parts for each instrument?

No. I recorded very sparse versions of the songs and gave recordings to my talented friends. These are people that I regularly play with around Honolulu, so I know their strengths. They are musicians who easily make stuff up to go with any song. They listened to the songs, jammed along with them in my basement a few weeks later, and I had the task of deciding how to use their raw material. I would cut and manipulate their performances until I was happy with the overall mix. I think they are first rate performances. Martha and Kevin are a real team-style string section; they coach each other and give advice and ideas during recording. The more bottles of red wine I opened, the better they got! Speedy's steel playing is an inspiration to me. The thing with Speedy is that he can play about six instruments better than I can, so I felt I was just using the tip of the iceberg.

I relate to much of the funny lyrics in Cover Everything In Mist, especially the need to spend time collecting myself in the morning before I get bombarded with chatter and need to assume the roles expected of me.

I’m a morning person, of a certain kind. I’m up early doing things, but I don’t want to talk to anyone until I have to.

I'm confused my the ending, starting with the line "it's a beautiful mistake that I'd like to make ..." I'm not sure what "it" is. Are you saying that allowing the mist to cover everything is the mistake... is a safety bubble?

It's a bit of an odd line, that. It's like a pause in the chaos. It could refer to different things for each listener. Perhaps covering the world in mist, let's say by getting drunk, or tuning out the news, or whatever, is a big mistake, but it looks like a beautiful option at times. It's probably my favorite song from the album, just because it all poured out of me one morning when I had a lot on my mind, and it's kind of random. I wrote it without a lot of analysis of the lyrics; they just felt right, and it's good to have some that are hard to pin down.

Tell me about the shift in voice at the end of Many Miles. The narrator begins with "he" and ends with "I", but the I is he.

Really? I think of that as a very "I" song. It mentions other folks, but it's really all about me. It's just a simple reflection of a lonely day, redeemed by the thought that someone out there cares about me.

The lines "vanished in the mist" and "add them to the list" are switched on your printout compared to the order on the CD.

Yes. I did that because I thought of better lyrics later, after it was too late to record them. I'm a terrible tinkerer. I can never leave things alone. If there's a bit of white in the corner, I'm sure to paint something in there, and continue to change it until someone rips the brush out of my hand.

Why all the paintings?

All of the paintings were made at the same time as the recordings, in the fall of 2004. I'd be thinking about a song, and whether it needed more harmonica or whatever, and trying to come up with the right artwork for the project. My two year old daughter was often hanging around, so her brushwork is on the paintings, and her voice is on the recordings. She inspired me, and kept me company, and understood my creative drives.

Van Gogh Stripes seems to be about a specific moment.

Van Gogh Stripes is a song about a specific evening at the end of my time at Camp Treetops. I invited my friend Bob to watch the sun go down over the lake with a few beers. But I’ve always liked how the low sun over the water makes stripes with alternating opposite colors, blue, orange, blue, orange. In my college painting class, I told the teacher that I found that image soothing, and she mocked me in front of the whole class: “Does anyone else find this soothing? No, of course not.” She was the main reason I gave up painting for 15 years. But I’m back now, comfortable with my flaws and idiosyncrasies.

Van Gogh Stripes was the working title of the album for many months. I decided to keep that idea in the artwork, but chose a name that was more vague. I didn’t want people’s first thought to be “this doesn’t look as nice as a real Van Gogh”. It’d be like calling your album “songs like the Beatles used to make” or something. There’s only one Van Gogh.

If you ever have a chance to see Van Gogh’s paintings in a museum, don’t miss it. Much better than prints in books, the originals stand up off the canvas like mountain ranges. I wish I had a couple in my living room. Starry Night would be nice, or that one of the crows in the cornfield. I like that one.

Anything else before we wrap up? I’ve got to go feed the giraffes, and one of the tigers got loose.

Well, getting back to Cover Everything in Mist, I should mention that several of the lyrics come from the places and daily routines of Camp Treetops. Trouble is the name of a very nice rock with a view overlooking the Lake Placid area. So "heading for Trouble" can mean going on a short pleasant hike; in my case, I went up there in the morning to be alone and contemplate the world, which ties in with the song. No one will know this, of course.

We taught the kids to use their pocket knives in their own personal safety bubbles. I thought the phrase applied to the whole camp, living separate from society for seven weeks.

The morning I wrote the song, you wrote an e mail about the value of living in a media blackout every now and then. I was writing down things on my mind and interesting phrases in my journal, and the song just poured out the moment I touched a guitar. I really surrendered to it. I didn't worry about what was a chorus, or whether to repeat a section or not. I just made it up into my little digital recorder, and later I edited that in a very rough way down to the three minute wonder we have on Mist.

to be continued...