Sunshone Still – Ten Cent American Novels

Where do I begin to describe Sunshone Still. The beginning, a very dear friend of mine first introduced me to Chris Smith (Sunsone Still) about a year ago. He had just released his first album Dead Letters. At first he had somewhat of a reminiscent sound to the likes of Nick Drake and Elliott Smith, both of which I love, but the more I listened the more I fell in love with his voice. Dead Letters spent the summer with me in the car, I was particularly drawn to a song called “Damn You California”. I’ve often been asked if that song was written about me, it was not, but that could be our secret Chris.

Today seems to be the day of interviews so please forgive me if the post is long I have an independent review on this album and and interview with Chris Smith himself. Thank you Chris for taking the time to answer my questions. I wish you the best of luck.

YCD: What is the major difference between TCAN and your previous album Dead Letters?
CS: The cinematic nature of TCAN as a whole. Dead Letters will always be really special to me because it feels very authentic and honest to me – as evident in the lo-fi quality of the recording. Since TCAN is a concept album covering a complex history, it needed varying sounds to represent the varying themes. For example, “Blood and Thunder” is a song about self-hate, so it needed an angry, cathartic build and release to it. On the other hand, “Blue Bead” is the start of the peaceful denouement to the story and needed to be quiet and thoughtful.

YCD:Why did you decide to do a concept album? In particular this story.
CS: In the past few years, I’ve really come to admire well-done concept albums such as Willie Nelson’s Red-Headed Stranger and Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois. I guess the concept album approach had been fermenting in my mind. Last fall/winter, I started writing a “new” album, but it was going nowhere and I felt like I was re-hashing a lot of the same personal themes from Dead Letters. I wasn’t doing anything new. I guess I had writer’s block. Around the same time, I had just heard an interview on NPR with Hampton Sides’, author of Blood and Thunder. From that interview, I knew I wanted to write a song about Kit Carson and his first Indian wife, Singing Grass. After reading some of Sides’ book though, I just knew that this was the story I had to tell. Sounds too simple and cheesy of an explanation, but I just had this feeling that this part of the Native American story was my challenge.

YCD: What is your hope for this album?
CS: That’s hard to answer because I hope to see many outcomes. I’ll give a couple though. First, in this small way, I’d like to remind people, particularly US leaders, that genocide happened under the direction of our OWN government. The greed and arrogance that caused the destruction of the Native American still persists today as seen in our current foreign policy and energy policy (i.e., Iraq, Global Warming, etc). Another hope would be simply to sells some records, so I can pay off the awesome debt I accrued in just making the CD. I don’t ask for much.

YCD o you write your own lyrics and music? How important was the addition of instruments to this album? (I love the composition of this album, horns, strings, it’s just beautiful!)
CS: Yes, I write the lyrics and music. I’m kind of selfish in this regard, but it’s truly because I want an uncompromised artistic outlet for myself. Certainly, I worked with and relied on the other players to come up with their own parts for their instruments, but the basic chord progressions, melodies, and lyrics were my job – for better or worse. I asked a long-time friend, David Chenu, to take my “Ten Cent Theme” and compose a string arrangement for “Ten Cent Theme Outro”. He also wrote the horn arrangements on the album. He’s a musical genius. And I’m not just saying that.

The addition of other instruments, like strings and horns, was necessary to properly tell the story. For example, the second track, “Manifest Destiny”, is a song about our so-called Divine Right to spread the ‘great experiment’ of the US from sea to sea. That song had to be huge and bombastic. It had to slap you in the face and say, “Here’s a great idea – Let’s conquer the rest of this land at all costs.” Adding horns and strings to this song created that sense of urgency.

YCD: What are the biggest obstacles you feel a singer/song writer faces today?
CS: Getting heard. Yes, the Internets (Stephen Colbert reference, anyone?) has made it easier to get your music out to people at a relatively low cost, but there are so many other independent singer/songwriters (some good, some bad) and bands out there competing for your ears. Anyone can make a record now, so they all naturally want you to listen to their creation. So it’s hard getting a potential listener to filter through all those other options and find me. Not to mention all the other forms of media that sit in your palm. It is so easy to get distracted these days.

YCD: When are you coming to Los Angeles?
CS: I don’t know. My hope is to do a West Coast tour sometime in 2008. Can I crash at your place? YCD: Mi casa, tu casa!

YCD: Will you be touring soon? If so when?
CS: At present, I’m playing shows close to home, Columbia, SC. Can I be completely honest and put down the ‘Hey, I’m a highly sought after singer/songwriter’ wall? OK. First, I still have a serious day job, so it’s hard to travel outside of the Southeast for any great length of time. Second, I’m still relatively unknown in the Southeast, so it’s hard booking gigs at the better venues. Did I mention I still book my own shows, am not good at it, and hate it? So yeah, I still have some obstacles in my way. We’ll get there though.

YCD: Anything you would like to tell new listeners about your music, you etc.?
CS: Buy the damn album and you will have good luck and sex for seven years. Plus, it may help me play in a lovely city near you soon. Burning it from a friend or enemy is OK too – just spread some love about the record. But don’t blame me if you have bad sex for seven years.

Independent Review by Chad:

I’m a big fan of concept albums and will usually give the creator of them the benefit for even attempting to pull one off. The more apparent the concept, the better, and the more difficult. It’s gonna be easier to write 10 songs about love than it is to write 10 songs about loving the cute redhead in the flowery skirt who broke your heart at the Stevie Nicks concert. But to even add to the difficulty, think if that redhead was a cult leader who was bent on massacring anyone who had lawn seats before her. And make her a sympathetic character. It ain’t easy.

Taking a historically controversial character and writing a concept album is not something a novice should do, certainly not what one would expect for a sophomore album. But just add that to the joyfully unexpected things to come out of TEN CENT AMERICAN NOVELS. Coming off of Dead Letters, you’d expect his follow up album to be another batch of moody, heartbreaking, sad songs (that’s not a bad thing). TCAN is dense in lyric content, instrumentation, and emotion. It’s as if Sam Beam had a kid with Sufjan Stevens and they let Steve Earle raise him (not sure which is worse, the musical comparison or the sexual allusion).

It’s easy to think that you can make a good album by adding more ’stuff’, bet it more lyrics, more songs, or more instruments.Well, it’s not. And it’s also not easy to add more stuff and make them cohesively speak to the same idea. The horns on TCAN speak to the passion with which Kit Carson lived, the violins let you know that he experienced the breadth of emotions that a man can feel, and the electric guitars never let you forget that Kit Carson was a man’s man.

The density of the concept is impressive not only in the lyrical content, but in the liner notes, the song titles and layout, and even the only Sunshone Still photo. You won’t wrong yourself if you pick and choose songs from this album to listen to exclusively. Each stand on their own as well crafted, interesting, and inspiring. But taken as a conceptual whole, TEN CENT AMERICAN NOVELS is as impressive an album as I’ve heard, regardless of the creator’s notoriety.

Official Release date October 30th! Go buy the album. I have several favorite songs, one which I’ve posted for download, but you can listen to a few off his Myspace Page.

Buy