A treat for longtime fans, Smeed showcases his raw talent with an intimate and engaging acoustic live performance.
It’s fairly expected that a live album will contain an artist’s most well known songs, along with maybe a couple of deep cuts, but Kansas born singer-songwriter Sky Smeed decided to do things a little bit differently, using “Live at Rock House” as not just a live greatest hits compilation, but also an opportunity to introduce three brand new songs – not to mention his cover of Bob Dylan’s 1963 classic ‘Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright’.
One of the three new songs, ‘Good Luck’, is outwardly optimistic, but really it’s written from the perspective of a person who likes telling others just how lucky they are a bit too much, and so by the end of the song, Smeed decides to have karma come back to bite them when “a bolt of lighting from the sky” comes and strikes them dead. The other two new tracks, ‘Nine to Five’ and ‘Keeping Rolling On’ each respectively explore life away from the rat race and encourage perseverance in hard times. ‘Keep Rolling On’ features Smeed making a false start and a joke of it, and one of the best things about “Live at Rock House” is the small moments and spoken song introductions that have been kept on the recording. These charming little comments add extra character and give an added layer of intimacy, so it feels like you’re there, experiencing the live show first hand.
‘Chicken of the Trees’, on which Smeed encourages audience participation by telling them that it’s a “clap along”, is a short, fun jingle of sorts he wrote for a “canned squirrel meat company” that he inherited from a distant relative in Arkansas (“Chicken of the trees / Down home flavor that will bring you to your knees”). Similarly eccentric, ‘Smoke and Spice’ is a love letter to barbecue cooking, the lyrics a mishmash of recipes and restaurant ads, with a great audience sing-along three quarters of the way through. “As true as any fishing story should be” is how Smeed introduces ‘Lunker Bass’, a sweet, simple tale of going fishing with his father when he was a boy: “I was five years old sunbleached blonde / When my father and I fished my Uncle Bill’s pond / On a rundown dock with a few cane poles / A jar of worms and some big tad poles.”
The heaviest of all the songs featured, ‘I Don’t Know What To Do’ runs through the gauntlet of emotions experienced upon the death of a loved one, and on the chorus Smeed achingly confesses “I don’t know what to do / With myself without you / All night long the whole day through / I don’t know what to do”. “You can fucking sing-along to this one as well, if you’d like,” feels as a good of a way to introduce a Dylan cover as there can be and Smeed’s take on ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright’ is faithful to the original without falling into the trap of feeling an unnecessary rehash.
“I’ve been doing this for way too long to quit / Most of my friends have already up and split,” Smeed confesses on ‘Without Music’. “But I’m a simple man, I love the feel of guitar strings / Without music I wouldn’t have anything.” That sentiment certainly rings true on “Live at Rock House” because a live album is always going to be for true fans, the lack of polish and production never making it all that easy to digest for uninitiated listeners, but then Smeed isn’t really about trying to please or win anyone over at this point in his career. Ten albums in, this feels like a record he needs to make, a showcase for his music in its purest form, and should that pick him up some new fans, great, but otherwise he’ll be just fine doing exactly what he does and doing it well because without music, he wouldn’t have anything.
