Kathleen Smith
It’s the kind of voice you could listen to for hours--just enough sandpaper to bring out the aches and pains, and just enough silliness to highlight the joy. It’s soft moonlight and hard sun battling in a mason jar. It’s heaven with just the good parts of hell. It’s you, sitting on a wooden bench in a dark room, ice cubes clinking in your drink, looking forward to the stage, where a girl in pink cowboy boots sits at a piano and serenades you with goose-pimpling, tear-inducing original songs.
A Los Angeles transplant from Reno, Nevada, her name is Kathleen Smith, and she just finished producing her first EP, “dolls.” After landing a job at MTV (a job she’d previously turned down), she pooled her wages and resources, assembled a few talented musicians, and recorded her debut. Erik Kertes (Lenka, Josh Kelley, Patrick Park), Perry Smith (New West Guitar Quartet, Kathleen Grace), and Adam Marcello (Lisa Loeb, Katy Perry, Gabriel Mann) form the core band on bass, guitar and drums, accompanying Smith’s piano. String arrangements by Kertes on half of the songs, performed by Supernova String Quartet (Rihanna, Joss Stone, Christina Aguilera), flesh out the record like a beautiful sonic painting, complete with the light and shadow of life.
For a first-time producer (she credits her engineer Paul Tavenner, Kertes & Smith with associate producing), Smith has done a bang-up job. Though short on time (a mere 24 minutes), “dolls” is nothing short of gorgeous. This small collection of songs is irreverent and witty, spirited and sorrowful. Set to release in December of 2008, “dolls” has been a lifetime in the making, and highlights a songwriter who seems much older and wiser than her years. The single, “Waiting Around,” has already been played on Los Angeles tastemaker station KCRW, and Billboard online praised her live show, where she endears audiences with silly songs about chocolate, honest songs about love and loss, and once in a rare and lucky while, a sweetly timid tune that she plays on her guitar (which she claims she has “no idea how to play”).
A country girl at heart, she began writing songs while in theater school at USC, and found her calling. “Writing is the best thing in the world,” says Smith, “and the hardest, but I’m not going anywhere.” Once you have a listen, you won’t either. You’re going to be hearing a lot more from this one.