Chris
Smither has been singing and songwriting for over 37 years. He comes our way
nearly every January, performing in our local music series. To be honest, it’s
hard to get myself out of the house on a cold January night, but Chris’s
show is worth the effort. His lyrics reflect a hard-lived life full of knocks
and struggles, but his gentle smile belies a deep inner peace. I can picture
him now, closed eyes, foot tapping and head tilted back as he sings life into
our cold bones every winter.
Our conversation happened in the basement of the church where
he was performing. I only had 20 minutes of his time before the show. I hope
some of his quiet wisdom is captured here.
Ann: Chris, There’s a certain honesty
in your music that just makes me feel less outnumbered.
Chris: You feel outnumbered sometimes?
Ann: Yes.
Chris: I’m familiar with that feeling.
Ann: Late at night maybe after hearing the news, I feel very outnumbered.
Chris: Umm, that’s a good time to feel that way. The truth is that you
are outnumbered.
Ann: Do you feel any obligation towards your gift. I hope you consider yourself
as having a gift when it comes to your music.
Chris: Yes, I do. I understand the question. I’ve been doin’ this
for a livin’ 37 years — longer than that if you count when I first
picked up a ukulele. There was a turning point 10 years ago where the whole
thrust of what I was doing and the way I thought about it changed entirely.
I remember this specific instance. Twenty-seven years of playing music for a
living built up to this one moment.
I was at a festival in Canada. It was a big event and I was feeling cheated
because I had been promised a spot on the main stage and didn’t get it.
I had been led to believe that I would get at least 20 minutes of my own, you
know? But instead, they sort of loosely collected everybody who did anything
that remotely resembled blues and put ‘em all up on the stage together.
There were four solo acoustic artists and one band up there together. Of course
the band sort of overshadowed everybody, you know? The whole thing wasn’t
very well thought out. I was annoyed. They wanted us to just jam together on
all these songs — one after another. It was irritating. What if you put
Brahms and Beethoven and Bach all together? Would you just say, “Well,
they’re all piano players. They can jam. They can play things together?”
“No!”
It came my turn. I played the song. There were ten to fifteen thousand people
out there — a big deal for me! After I played my song, the others had
their turns. As it went further down the line and I was just waitin’ for
my turn to come around again, inside I was just seething. I thought,“This
is so unfair!”
But a change came in the time that it took for my turn to come around again.
It suddenly dawned on me, and I don’t know how this happened. It was like
a little window opening someplace in my brain. I guess it was the culmination
of a lot of lessons that I’ve been learning over the years. And I said
to myself, “You know what? This isn’t about me. This is about music.
This is about the music! And the only thing that I have to do is play the song,
just lay the song out the best way I know how. And what happens to it after
that is beyond my control. It has always been beyond my control. I’ll
never be able to make it happen. There are all these little conditions that
I’ll never be able to touch. The only thing that I can control is what
I do and my attitude towards it. That’s it. And as long as I keep thinkin’
that this is about me, I’m gonna be unhappy. And as soon as I think that
it’s all about the song itself, and what happens to the song, the better
off I’ll be.”
So, it came around my turn, and I played the song, and I played the song in
that state of mind. Of course it would be very nice to be able to say that the
crowd was blown away and cheered me to the sky, but that didn’t happen.
But I felt so much better about it. That was the whole thing.
There is a service to the gift itself, you see? You have to serve it. It does
not serve you.
And in terms of an obligation to it, I’m not sure that I feel necessarily
an obligation to the gift. It’s just part of me, you know? It’s
just part of what I do, and I feel enormously lucky that I’m allowed to
make a living doing that. And, of course, all of this is very different from
the way it was when I first started. When I first started, when I was a kid,
I was just like every other kid. I had dreams of super stardom. I was going
to be a household word, and all the women in the world were gonna love me. I
went through a really long period of just totally self-destructive behavior
and wound up very sick from alcohol abuse and, to a certain extent, drug abuse.
But the main drug was alcohol. And it was really getting out of that that taught
me almost everything that I know about how to rearrange my priorities and the
way I think about things.
Because there’s nothin’, nothing more self-centered than an addict.
It’s what makes the affliction what it is, the need to sustain self, in
spite of anything else that might be going on all around you.
Ann: So alcoholism is not the result of disappointing your own self equation:
This plus this will equal this and I’m not that, so I’m gonna drink?
Chris: No, no.
Ann: I’m not an alcoholic but I drink more when I am disappointed in myself
or when I think life has disappointed me somehow.
Chris: Well, you know…
Ann: Would you talk about it?
Chris: It’s an interesting question. It’s difficult. It’s
hard to explain in just five or ten minutes, or an hour. It takes years to explain
it. To really get it across. Basically, you don’t drink for any real reason.
You drink because it’s good. You drink because you like it. And you drink
compulsively or alcoholically or addictively because you have a physical constitution
that’s built that way. There are some people that you can force the alcohol
into until you make ‘em pretty sick, but you cannot make them addicted
to it. And there are other people who will become addicted to it. About 30%
of the population in the Northern hemisphere could become addicted to alcohol.
The rest of ‘em don’t have what it takes.
It’s not built in. But, the kind of thinking that the addiction itself
builds is what’s destructive and what prevents you from escaping the addiction
itself. It’s part of what prevents you from seeing that what you think
of as your friend is in fact your enemy. The addiction keeps you from seeing
outside of yourself because of the continuing necessity to feed this craving
for the substance itself. It makes you very self-centered. Thinking of yourself
at the center, being the moving and receiving force at the center of the universe,
is what keeps you from seeing anything very clearly at all, you see?
Ann: Right, right.
Chris: So the object once you sober up and start to look at things differently,
is to remove yourself from the center, from the outside in. And to see how the
world looks when you’re not at the middle of it.
Ann: That’s fascinating. I hadn’t thought of the physical addiction
coming first.
Chris: Well, you see, it depends. You know, the thing is, everybody starts
off extremely self-centered. Children are self-centered to the extreme, and
gradually as they grow older, they learn that the way they want the world to
run is not necessarily the way it’s gonna run, or even the best way.
Ann: I guess the potential for alcoholism doesn’t seem to be built into
me. But I had an addiction to exercise to the point where I ended up in the
hospital. And I was selfish. But because I was such a strong athlete people
would admire that and say, “Wow, you’re so strong and so fit”
But, later I’d say, “But don’t you see? It’s like exercise
is my alcohol.”
Chris: You were addicted to endorphins.
Ann: You talk about alcoholics being so selfish and existing as if they
are the center, but some of your early albums, when I assume you were drinking,
reflect a broader awareness. I wondered if you had honest glimpses of what you
were doing – self awareness - or did I hear something that wasn’t
there at all?
Chris: Well, I think there were glimpses of it, and then I would get sidetracked.
It’s interesting because later, when I changed again and got out of the
hold of the addiction, I remember thinking frequently to myself that I was actually
becoming something that I had once been. That enlightened perspective that I
had held for a song or a moment seemed familiar to me. To a certain extent I
was refinding things that I had lost. Things that had been obscured before.
But I was also discovering things that I just had never known, too.
Ann: There are some Buddhist references once in a while. Is that something
you studied?
Chris: I read and I sit and people ask me if I’m a Buddhist and I never
say yes. I say, I do things that Buddhists do.
Ann: I squirm under classifications too.
Chris: I know. But I do things that Buddhists do. I find them valuable and
healthy. They keep me straight. They keep me oriented.
Ann: It must be really necessary given how much you are on the road.
Chris: Yes. it’s interesting that in various recovery programs from addictions,
you’ll find a lot of stuff that’s very Buddhist. Like paying attention
to the present moment.
Ann: Accepting the now.
Chris: Yeah, that’s it. And when you travel as much as I do, it can be
very disorienting. Different places everyday. But it just helps to pay attention
to what’s happening right now all the time.
Ann: You know, this is the first New Year’s in a very long time that I
resolved to try and change a few things in my life. Are you a person who make
resolutions?
Chris: Yes. Every time I finish a record, I resolve not to quit writing. It’s
very hard for me to do that.
Ann: Hard to quit or hard to write?
Chris: It’s hard to keep writing. I keep writing and I write until I
have enough songs for a record so I finish the project and then all I want to
do is just collapse. I don’t want to keep working. And then panic mode
sets in because most of the year will go by and then it’s time to get
back to work. So I’ve resolved again and again to continue and to exercise
some sort of discipline about my writing…with varying degrees of success.
I’m better at it now than I was. I’m not as good as I wish I were.
The problem is that I think that there’s a built-in necessity to lie
fallow for a little while, you know? And just let everything reorganize itself.
Otherwise you keep working in the same ruts. So you have to sort of scramble
the pattern.
Ann: You say you build in that? I call it slack time. I have to resolve
to create that for myself all the time. I am not very good at being still. But,
Some of the best things come out of slack time. I just wonder if you also have
to resolve to make slack time happen?
Chris: Believe me, slack time happens! I have to fight to keep it from happening.
Luckily I have a booking agent and a manager who will see to it that I keep
working. Working in terms of gigging, just doing performances, while it’s
physically taxing and can be stressful in a certain way, is not creative work,
except during the hours when you’re actually doing the music, you know?
And the performance itself is creative within the limits of recreating, shall
we say? And when it’s compared to that, it’s very easy. I could
do that forever.
Ann: Now, time is running out. I’ve got two questions. First: What
are your thoughts on Love?
Chris: Love is hard. Love is really hard, you know? And I’m not sure
that I understand it quite yet or I’m not convinced that I ever will.
But I have a better grip on it than I used to. I have a wonderful relationship
with my wife. It’s unlike any relationship I’ve ever had before
in the sense she’s an extension of me. I’ve been in love plenty
of times, you know, many, many times. But I’ve never been involved with
someone where the very thought of being cut away from her would be like losing
a whole part of myself, and that it would render me dysfunctional in an important
inner way. So that’s about as close as I can get to love, you know? It’s
a wonderful thing but at the same time, it does imply a certain obligation to
self and to the other person. But since the other person is self then it’s
okay. It is not something that is burdensome. It’s just something you
have to take care of. You have to take care of your teeth, too, you know! But,
fortunately it has reached a point where the rewards of the relationship are
immediately tangible. So that’s the best part of that.
Ann: Ironic when you talk about love, my husband is a fiercely independent Scotsman.
For him, giving over to this feeling of being part of another has been very
difficult. As it has been with me to a lesser extent. But I notice that we have
both relaxed and he takes care of me in a way that is very natural, as if, like
you said, he was taking care of himself. The other night he said, ‘I take
care of you because you are part of me. Not taking care of you would be like
not taking care of myself.
Chris: That’s exactly what I was trying to say.
Ann: Now for the second one: What beliefs have guided your life, how were they
formed and have they served you well?
Chris: There’s several precepts that I was raised with one was ‘avoid
debt, at all costs.’ It has served me very well. Avoid debt and never
buy anything on credit except a house or a car if you need it to get to work.
Ann: This came from…?
Chris: My father – the Depression generation. I was born in ’44.
The others, the other beliefs are more subtle. My father is a language professor
– Romance languages – and he saw to it that my sister and I were
exposed to other languages and learned them at a very young age. And there was
never any question about whether it was valuable or not. It was just one of
those things — if you can speak more than one language, you’re a
better person.
You will think better. You will do better. It has served me well! It instilled
a love of language in me. Language is not something that I take for granted.
Many, many people do. They don’t think. It’s not a conscious thing
to them any more than breathing is, and they don’t really have any formulated
ideas about what it actually does and the importance of knowing how to express
yourself. Learning four languages does that because it automatically shows that
there are things you can do in one language that you can’t do another.
And all of a sudden you realize, ‘Oh! It’s not the same. It’s
not the same as breathing,’ you know? So that’s subtle but, to me,
it’s very near the center. It’s very near the center.
Ann: It there a musicality to language?
Chris: Yes. There is. It’s interesting that everybody in my family deals
in sound one way or another.
Now, were there other beliefs instilled in me that I had to get rid of? That
were really harmful? Yes…The illusion that you can be independent. The
belief that you can be self-sufficient is so American. It is so American, and
people take pride in it. Well, first you have to learn that pride in itself
is a big mistake. But the idea that dependence is to be avoided and self-sufficiency
is to be exulted is so counter-productive. I mean, there’s nothing on
earth that is independent.
Everything that exists is dependent. You cannot get away from it. And the sooner
you recognize that fact, the happier you’ll be and the better able you’ll
be able to actually to take advantage of your own dependencies. And, also, again,
it’s what will get you out of the center and let you look at things from
the outside in and instill a basic sense of humility which is sort of a touchstone
of growth. Oh, I had to lose that. That was very hard.
Ann: A very hard one. Someone said to me once, ‘You leave emotional
landmines wherever you go.’ I had no concept that my words affected anybody
else; I thought they were just like my own thing, and so they shouldn’t
affect other people. But they do! And I have a responsibility to that.
Chris: Right!
Ann: Well, it’s been a real pleasure. Thank you very much for your openness.
