First in 12 years is a welcome return for well-connected Nashvillian.
‘Quiet Town’ is the new record from East Nashville habitué Mindy Smith. It was recorded at Skinny Elephant Recording Studio with Neilson Hubbard producing and is her first since her eponymous fifth LP in 2012. Smith assembled a crack team of players to support her return to the studio, including Hubbard himself on drums, Will Kimbrough, Juan Solorzano and Megan McCormick on guitars, Danny Mitchell keys and Lex Price bass. Backing vocalists include Matraca Berg, Park Chisolm, Nickie Conley, Maureen Murphy, K.S. Rhoads, Jodi Seyfried, and Kate York.
Together this potent crew have fashioned a gentle almost unprepossessing record, one that is actually well named, sounding as it does like it truly belongs in a ‘quiet town’. In its tone it is a contemplative record, both personally and globally. It finds Smith reflecting on things lost or changed in ways that don’t fit her vision of or feelings for the world that she inhabits. Whilst there is a sense of foreboding, even grief attached to ‘Quiet Town’ it is never defeated (defeatist), with Smith finding ways to get the better of hardship and self-doubt and offer us glimpses of hope, comfort and gratitude in the process.
The overall sound and production of the record would be at home with those 80s / 90s female singer-songwriters who helped to usher in alt-country – Mary Chapin-Carpenter, Suzy Boguss, Patty Griffin, Katy Moffat are all brought to mind in one way or another. In particular the key touchstone here would be Nanci Griffith. Vocally and sonically ‘Quiet Town’ offers many flickers of Griffith’s tender-hearted wistful balladry, the final track, ‘I Always Will’ could be a second cousin to ‘From a Distance’, swapping out horns for strings but retaining the mournful piano and the ever so slightly cloying sentimentality.
Here, as on the rest of the record, Smith’s voice is rounded, soft, appealing in its simple yet full melodic directness… yet it could be, perhaps unkindly, considered a tad featureless. It needs a touch of something, an edge of some kind, to really bring these songs to life, to lift them from the pleasing to the truly engaging and affecting. It lacks that combination of fragile, cracked vulnerability, leavened with steely inner depths that gave Griffith her power to connect with the listener.
The primarily acoustic songs are poetically inclined, often charming and occasionally passionate but there are only rare glimpses of the emotional intricacy (and intimacy) that emanates from the writers’ creative imagination at play here. In the track ‘I’d Rather Be a Bridge’ Smith makes what she tells us is a plea for compassion and connection but the predictable metaphors – birds in cages, dark and cold caves that Smith calls into play are not saved by the simplistic refrain that “I’d rather be a bridge than be a wall” because “Bridges always lead us somewhere, walls keep us apart”. It’s an eminently worthy proposition but expressed in a clunky and predictable way.
There is plenty to like here, with a sense of movement and flow to the music on offer, giving us the feeling that we are travelling with Smith on her journey. Ultimately though the destination of the ‘Quiet Town’ is not as stimulating as we might have hoped.
