A Fabulous music event in the Dordogne!Martin Lascelles, record producer and gifted key board artist, who has left the wild world of music production behind in London and come to settle with his gorgeous wife, Charmaine, in the exquisite family home near Monbazillac, will be hosting a musical soiree with the Texan singer-songwriter, Darden Smith as guest artist. (Martin has performed and produced for Darden) Of interest to the music aficionados of the Dordogne Perigord, is that Darden will be joined on the evening by guest Paul Tiernan, who lives in Duras.
Darden Smith is performing in Paris on 6 May and then coming down to the Dordogne to perform here in a house concert on 9 May.
From Darden Smith's website, we gleaned the following:
Darden Smith was once describe as an explorer. This fits. During his 20-year career, he has recorded in folk, country and pop settings. He has co-written songs with a British rocker, released 10 critically acclaimed albums, created works for dance theater, done symphonic collaborations and through his Be An Artist Program, brought to children across the US and Europe the message of the inherent creative capabilities in everyone. His song cycle, ‘Marathon’ is currently being adapted for the stage. Darden Smith has made himself at home in studios in Manhattan, Nashville and London, as well as Austin. With every CD he releases his focus and style continues to shift, yet remains true to his roots.
His latest studio recording, ‘Field of Crows,’ was released in 2005 on Dualtone Music Group. As melodic a collection as he has ever recorded, the disc shows Smith continuing to explore rhythms, sounds and lyric themes. As it has on all of his recent Dualtone albums, his work on the nylon-string guitar adds a distinctive texture to the music. In 2006 he recorded a series of concerts in an adobe house at Ojo Caliente Hot Springs in New Mexico. The result is ‘Ojo,’ his first live disc.Born in 1962, Darden Smith was raised in rural Brenham, Texas. He says that Leon Russell’s ‘Carney’ LP of 1972 was one of his earliest musical influences. When he was in the fifth grade, Smith’s guitar teacher taught him all the songs on Neil Young’s ‘Harvest’ and ‘After the Gold Rush’ albums. She explained to the boy that Young was the composer of his songs.
“That was the first time it clicked to me that every song is written by somebody,” Smith recalls. “I was already writing poetry at the time. When she told me ‘it’s just poems and put to music,’ well, that was all I needed to hear.”
When he was in junior high, his family moved to suburban Houston. Culture shocked and out-of-place, the former farm boy sat in his room and wrote songs constantly from that point onward. Smith studied the songs of writers such as Guy Clark, Townes Van Zant and John Prine. He listened to the radio and had his head spun around by Bob Dylan, The Allman Brothers and Jackson Browne. While still in high school, he began playing in clubs around north Houston, and by the time he graduated from the University of Texas in Austin, Darden Smith was a fully realized talent and a regular on stages in the city’s thriving nightclub scene.
“I pride myself in being a Texas singer-songwriter. It’s who I am, and I will never get away from that. But that world was all I knew until I met Boo Hewerdine. I’d never created music outside of my little niche. But I was listening to things like Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe and The Pretenders. And the experience with Boo showed me that I could write music from a broader place than I had ever done before.”
After years of one success after another, Smith considered getting out of the music business. “It was just too damned hard,” he says, looking back on those years. “The travel, having two young kids, trying to figure out how to make a living and still enjoy it all. I didn’t have a label, manager, agent, nothing. I couldn’t figure it out.” Over dinner in New York City in 2000, producer Stewart Lerman and drummer Sammy Merendino recommended that, before quitting, he do just one more record, but do it only to have fun. Smith began writing and recording purely out of the love of making music, and through that, fell back in love with the process and continued to produce successfully.
Paul Tiernan.His newest theatre work is ‘Marathon’, a play based on a song-cycle, is being developed in association with the University of Texas’ Performing Arts Center. A radio documentary on Texas songwriters that he created for the BBC2, ‘Songs From The Big Sky‚’ aired in March 2006. His ongoing Be an Artist Program puts him in workshops, helping children see that they are all born artists and that creativity is inside all of us (www.be-an-artist.com).
About his extraordinary career, Darden Smith says, “I don’t worry about a lot of the stuff I used to worry about. I just go. I just want to work and make music, and that may look different on different days. After 20 years in this crazy business, I realize how fortunate I am to be able to make a living being a musician, doing what I love to do.”
For tickets for the Darden Smith soiree, please contact Martin Lascelles at martin.lascelles@aliceadsl.fr
Darden Smith performs in house concert at Les Croux, Monbazillac on 9 May 2009
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