Rock music was always Smith’s guiding light. So while Smith hated straining his voice to be heard over the noise (“I’ve had enough of people yelling,” he told Rolling Stone) and the way their audience reminded him of the dudes who gave him hell back in Texas, it did bring him closer to the sound he heard in his head.
But the truth is his solo work bloomed alongside their music, which had softened and matured by 1996’s extraordinary swansong Mic City Sons. The rise of Smith’s spare, self-recorded solo material and Heatmiser’s blistering rock songs are often held in contrast. He also met like-minded artists, including classmate Neil Gust, who helped him feel useful in a different way-trading punk 7"s and collaborating on music.Īfter graduation, Gust and Smith returned to Portland, where they formed the grungy alt-rock band Heatmiser. At college, Smith studied political science and philosophy and was so affected by feminist texts that he momentarily wanted to become a fireman to offset some of the damage he did to the world simply by being a straight white man. His next stops were Portland, Oregon, where he lived with his father-a preacher turned Air Force pilot turned psychiatrist-and Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He left as a teenager, a decision he attributed to a town full of bullies and an abusive step-father. He described his earliest compositions as more like transitions than actual songs as he reflected to Under the Radar in one of his last interviews, he didn’t understand why every part couldn’t be the best part.įrom Omaha, Smith and his mother moved to Dallas. When he started writing his own music, he followed this blueprint, accidentally stumbling upon the avant-garde. His favorite song was the multi-part “ A Day in the Life,” which he might have heard like a television constantly changing channels, each one landing on the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. Smith’s first love was the Beatles, a band whose career lasted less than 10 years, so their every move carried immense weight and meaning for those discovering it in retrospect. He soon learned to seek the same thrill in music.
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