Mindy Smith 'Long Island Shores' album

It took eight years for Mindy Smith to become an overnight sensation. The world discovered her suddenly around ‘04; that’s when she started winning awards, appearing on national TV, inspiring critics and artists to sing her praises (and her songs), and riding the momentum of One Moment More, her Vanguard debut. But when she wasn’t accepting Best New Artist honors from the Americana Music Association, sharing stages with the likes of Mavis Staples, Patty Griffin, Dolly Parton, and Emmylou Harris, or winging across the ocean to recruit new fans in the U.K., she was often doing the same thing she’d done when she was new to Nashville. She was, in other words, in a room with a guitar, closing a door and coaxing music up from somewhere down inside.

The songs of Long Island Shores, her new Vanguard release, come from that process, untainted by success and its distractions. What they reveal is an artist who is moving forward, which means digging inward as well as bridging out toward her colleagues in the mutual obeisance of co-writing.

The energies of Long Island Shores are as contradictory as the tides that wash the coast near Smithtown, where she was raised, on the northern side of the island. Beautiful to the ear, these songs are turbulent beneath the surface. The first single, “Out Loud,” breathes cautious hope over a breezy beat. “Please stay,” a playful love song, masks a deeper meditation on possessiveness and freedom. “You Know I Love You Baby” sets a hint of rage to a jazzy, toe-tap groove. Layers of meaning open to other layers, exposing these songs as complex in their simplicity. But then Mindy takes another turn on songs that bring one theme – the nestling comfort of “Tennessee,” the lazy pace of untroubled love on “What If the World Stops Turning?” – to a single blossom. “You Just Forgot,” transforms into something emotionally elusive, an intricate interweave of anger, pain, and ethereal detachment. Maybe Mindy didn’t conceive this one, but it’s hard to imagine anyone else singing it.

You can feel the presence of co-writers on some of these tracks: Beth Nielsen Chapman, Maia Sharp, John Scott Sherrill and the others, all of whom Mindy meets on some common ground of emotion and idea. And you can sense the privacy of those songs she wrote on her own, in which her convictions and doubts, her passions and humor, speak universally, through the poetry of her lyric and the beckoning in her voice.

All of this colors her words too, as she remembers how she felt after One Moment More changed her life. “It tripped me up,” she admits. “I felt like I needed to make a drastic musical change. I guess I wanted to be cooler, so I wound up wasting a lot of time until I realized I’m not cool after all.”

A laugh punctuates her speech; like her gestures, quick changes of expression, and sudden bursts of New York argot. Then we’re back to the story: “But I also came to allow myself more room to grow than I did on the first record. This one sounds more like me; nobody who hears it will be confused when they hear me playing these songs live, because I know they want to hear me tell the truth and be honest.”

Expectations were high for Long Island Shores, but none were higher than Mindy’s. “I’ve always had this need to keep improving,” she says. “I’m always under the gun to top my last song. I guess that comes from being a ‘professional songwriter’” – and here she wiggles her fingers, signaling quotation marks that also betray a self-deprecation that traces back to her first experiences with music.

She still remembers, for example, being confused and embarrassed, as the young adopted daughter of a minister and his musically gifted wife, over the looks she would get for singing out loud wherever she was, whenever the spirit seized her. “I had to learn how to not be excited about singing as I was walking through a mall,” she says. “My teachers hurt me a lot too, when I’d do it in class. That led to learning how to not love having music stuck in my head. I became very guarded. I wrestled with what to do with my life. I tried so many other avenues, but I kept having this desire to make music.”

Her mother’s death, her relocation to Knoxville with her father, and her move to Nashville in 1998, after giving college a whirl in Cincinnati, all hastened Mindy’s decision to pursue music without reservation. Recognition came locally first, beginning with first prize in the Tin Pan South writer’s contest of 2000, which prompted an invitation to join the writing staff at Yellow Dog Music the following year. 2003 led toward her appearance with Lee Ann Womack at South by Southwest and her electrifying rendition of “Jolene” on the Dolly Parton tribute CD, Just Because I’m a Woman. Though she was the only unsigned performer on that collection, Parton herself as an artist of special promise singled out Smith.

Even now, though, you get this sense from Mindy that she’s running everything she’s written through her head again – not just the new songs, but things she wrote years ago. Could she have done better on this one? Will she ever do better than she did on that one? She does know the answers, and she accepts that they point toward her continuing development in every aspect of music, from the writing and the singing to production as well.

That, of course, makes Long Island Shores a masterwork of intuitive artistry. The fact is, for all of her insistence that she’s still just tapping into her creative resources, the scary thing is that she may be right. And for all acclaim that’s come her way, and all of her drive to keep pushing ahead, Long Island Shores captures an artist who is at peace with where she is and where she has yet to go.

MINDY SMITH: ON LONG ISLAND SHORES

Out Loud (Mindy Smith/Hillary Lindsay)
“Hillary, she’s a hit-maker. When we got together, I had this guitar lick, she started to sing a melody over it, and we started writing this song. It seems to strike a chord with people who’ve heard it, because it is a sign of the times. You see the state of things, of how human beings treat each other. It’s awful. I’m not just talking about war or poverty. I’m talking about treating each other with respect. I’m not trying to wave any kind of flag. It’s not a political song … but it’s not not a political song either.”

Little Devil (Mindy Smith/Angelo Petraglia)
“Angelo, my co-writer, is a rock & roll guy. He has that cool Tom Petty/Bryan Adams thing going. Now, I don’t believe that every song needs a bridge, but I love how the bridge we wrote takes this one to this jazzy place. That works for me. I love to play it live, which I think you can hear on the record: In fact, the energy was so good from the band that we stayed with the scratch vocal that I recorded in the booth. As for the lyric, I believe the Devil isn’t in a red suit with a pitchfork and tail. In fact, he can be whatever demon you’re fighting at the time – and he’s the most beautiful creature God ever made.”

Edge of Love (Mindy Smith/Beth Nielsen Chapman)
“Beth and I are both strong-willed women, but we both kind of piddle around too; we work hard, but before we got down to writing this song we had to first have tea and biscuits upstairs at her house [laughs]. We began with this great melody that she had – her melodies have this ability to grab you, right out of the gate – and I went with it. We did it all in one day. Then I cut the demo, and when Beth came to the studio to hear it I said, ‘We’ve got to give this to Keith Urban!’ And she said, ‘No, you’re going to put it on your record!’ So … sorry, Keith!”

Please Stay (Mindy Smith)
“When I wrote this a couple of years ago, it was a little more country or Americana. I’ve changed it, though, to reflect more of my other influences, like the Cure and the Sundays. What’s strange, though, is that it’s about my little dog, Sophie. It’s about understanding the option to not be my dog. She doesn’t have to be my dog, if she doesn’t want to. But we’ve found each other in the world, and that was enough to inspire this song.”

Tennessee (Mindy Smith)
“I cried when I wrote ‘Tennessee’ … but I also thought it was kind of hokey. Then I played it for [co-producer] Lex Price, who insisted that we track it right away, that day, in his basement. Now I feel that it’s one of the best songs on the record. I’m still a New Yorker, but I love being in Tennessee. I love Nashville. I love my friends here. It’s my home now. Like the song says, it’s been good to me.”

I’m Not the Only One Asking (Mindy Smith/Fred Wilhelm)
“Fred and I wrote this before I made my first record. I love gospel music, and I was inspired to find that very spiritual/roots place. This might be way these lyrics come from a parable mentality: You know that bird isn’t going to come down from that telephone wire and talk to you. Most people know there aren’t really keys to Heaven. It’s just a metaphor for wanting somebody to come and give you some absolutes, to help your life make sense. But nothing really is absolute … not until you die.”

What If the World Stops Turning? (Mindy Smith/John Scott Sherrill)
“I love this song because it’s absolutely ridiculous [laughs]. But that’s how John Scott and I are. We’re very free spirited; there are no rules when we get together. It’s like a conversation you might have when you’re on a picnic. It’s the least serious song on the record. And having Buddy Miller sing it with me was a special pleasure.”

You Just Forgot (John Scott Sherrill/Dave Loggins/Dennis Robbins)
“I never cut other people’s songs, right? But I learned never to say ‘never’ when I heard this song a couple of years ago. I must have listened to John Scott Sherrill’s demo thirty times, so when I was asked to perform at this celebration for him at the Station Inn, this was what I sang. And then I put this song on hold because I feel it’s really mine. I wish I’d written it … dammit [laughs]!”

You Know I Love You Baby (Mindy Smith/Maia Sharp)
“When Maia and I write together, we usually try to break up some people’s ideas of how music is supposed to sound. It’s not intentional; it’s just what happens. With the song, to be honest with you, the bad guy is me. I sing in first-person, but I wrote it about how other people have to deal with me. It’s like role reversal: I put myself into someone else’s shoes, which is why these lyrics are so internal. I know this person very well.”

Out of Control (Mindy Smith)
“This song is very true to the fact that I don’t always cope so well with life. I often feel like I’m in the funnel cloud of a tornado, clutching at whatever I can but realizing that I’m only holding onto something that’s spinning around and around. So what do you do? You let go. But where are you going to land? It’s a prideful issue: I’m going, ‘I can do this! Let me do this!’ And then I screw it up and God goes, ‘See? You should have let me help.’ That’s what this is about – a spiritual battle.”

Long Island Shores (Mindy Smith)
“Literally, as the song says, I was going home to a family reunion in New York. I was struggling with my childhood; I’d had a hard time as a kid because I got picked on a lot. But the minute I got off the plane at Macarthur Airport I could smell the salt water in the air; it made me feel like, ‘Wow! I want a bagel [laughs]!’ And I could start finding all the beautiful things I’d missed there. Everything in this song is real; I actually did grow up in Green Hills, on the corner of Old Nickels Road and Smithtown Boulevard, although the house is no longer there. But I think this song will resonate with everyone who loves where they’re from, no matter where it is.”

Peace of Mind (Mindy Smith)
“This is a brand new song, written just a few months ago. It’s my closure song, about being okay with who I am and finding comfort in the journey. Isn’t that what we all want?”

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Mindy Smith - Long Island Shores