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Michael Smith has a whale of a tale E-mail
WHAT: Michael Smith
WHERE: Jensen Center Theater, Amherst
WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Oct. 24
COST: $12
INFO: 715-824-5202, artistsofnote.com/michael
EXTRA: You can also catch Michael Smith in a free show at the Appleton Public Library, 2 p.m. Oct. 25

By Jim Lundstrom

“Songwriting genius” is perhaps the largest of the many accolades heaped on the big shoulders of Chicago folk musician Michael Smith in a career that goes back to the coffeehouse folk boom of the early 1960s.

But in a telephone call to preview his Oct. 24 appearance in the Tomorrow River Concert Series at the Jensen Center in Amherst, Smith said he certainly appreciates the praise, but he doesn’t believe it, especially not the critic who compared Smith to Sondheim for his musical theater work. Smith considers himself a journeyman filled with the necessary ego and wonder that drives an artist in any medium.
michaelsmith“When people talk about me in a real big way and make these noises, it’s encouraging to me to try and do better. I ran the race and I showed. The fact that I showed to these people encourages me to try to place or win. But it’s a search,” he said. “Sometimes I hear myself and think, ‘This cat is full of shit.’ The things I write, the things I say. It’s tiring to be around the same career for your entire life. Well, not tiring. It can be boring or discomfiting.”

What he means is that the brilliant songs you wrote when you were 25 or 30 seem silly or contrived several decades down the road when you’re a savvy, seasoned songwriter still trying to come up with the perfect song.

“There’s a little voice that says ‘Why don’t you just give up?’” Smith said. “When I was 30 and I would write songs, I would have these delusions about what was going to happen because I had written this song, like I thought it was really important. As time goes by, I’m thinking less and less that it’s important and it’s just my little obsession, my little long-term obsession. It’s like I’m crazy my entire life.

“Now and again I’ll do something that I think is unassailable, but at the same time, they’re very rare. I get a couple songs on an album where I think everything went well, but the rest of it I have big problems with.”

Smith understands the internal struggles come with the territory.

“There are a lot of complications that come with being an artist,” he said. “The world doesn’t need another damn song. Why do we need to have another novel, or whatever? It takes a certain kind of chutzpah to foist any kind of mark upon the world. You have to get an attitude about it, and you have to say to yourself, although people aren’t going crazy over me the way they did with Elvis or the Beatles, I still have something to offer. And you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out what it is. You just try to justify that notion.”

Of course Smith loves the challenge of being an artist, but you have to accept a few facts in order to proceed.

“You’ve got to really have a strong desire to do it,” he said. “And you’re guaranteed certain things. You’re guaranteed poverty or being just on the edge of poverty for the rest of your life, unless you strike it rich like Jimmy Buffett or somebody. But most people don’t. In a way, you have to say to yourself, why am I doing this?”

Smith probably mentioned Jimmy Buffett because they traveled in the same folk circles back in the day. Buffett is also one among many who have recorded Michael Smith songs.

Smith realizes being recognized by your peers does not make you a man of the people, as, say, Jimmy Buffett is. For chrissakes, people still confuse him with Christian artist Michael W. Smith. It’s enough to make a guy question his choices.

“I think there were moments when I lost sight of music,” he said. “A lot of it for me was working with other people and having to cope with their personalities, when for me it is a solitary pursuit. People who work with other people well make better music. That’s something I’m coming to understand. Now I kind of pretend I’m in a band. John Fogerty did that for a long time. He would literally do all the parts and gave it a band name.”

Smith’s musical career took a substantial turn in 1988 when he wrote the music for Chicago’s famed Steppenwolf Theater in a production of The Grapes of Wrath that eventually went to Broadway, where it won two Tony Awards.

A reviewer of the 1990 Broadway production described Smith’s score: “…echoes Woody Guthrie and heartland musical forms ...Sometimes salted with descriptive lyrics from Steinbeck, the music becomes the thread that loosely binds a scattered society.”

“The words worked well for lyrics,” Smith said. He was a member of the band and toured with the production for two years.

Smith has since collaborated with puppeteer Blair Thomas and director Frank Galati, who also directed Grapes, to write and perform music for Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, which returns for its fourth year in Chicago and December.

“I’m proud of The Snow Queen,” Smith said. “I was emotionally involved in that show and the story from the time I was 7 years old. I worked hard on it and continue to work hard on it.”

Earlier this year he and puppeteer Thomas unveiled a production of Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant.

“I’ve done maybe 50, 60 performances of The Selfish Giant. It’s the most fun of anything I’ve done. I would like to do Selfish Giant for the rest of my life,” he said, adding that there is joy in playing for children.

“They just sit there and don’t feel constrained to look at you or listen or applaud. They’re just experiencing you. I’m so relaxed when I sing to kids. There is nothing I can do to control the situation except to sing and play and have a good time. They’re not that engrossed in you. It’s the phenomenon of a show. They simply accept you as part of the furniture. For me, that’s thrilling. I get to be exactly the way I feel.”

Smith has a few more theatrical shows in thee works, including a collaboration with fellow folk musician Anne Hills, setting a girl’s diary entries to music. Smith and Thomas plan to create another work based on either an Andersen or Wilde story, and in the spring they will unveil a musical version of Moby Dick.

“That’s interesting, trying to make it work,” Smith said. “It’s large in certain ways and demands that I read the damn book. It’s pretty good, so far. I’m surprised how modern seeming it is. It’s a pretty jolly story. I was expecting Nathaniel Hawthorne. But Mr. Melville is pretty gleeful. It’s fun and it actually has songs in the text that I know.”