Beck talks about Austin’s Daniel Johnston at SXSW
Singer-songwriter Beck appeared at South by Southwest on March 18, 2022, for a keynote conversation about his career in music.
Contributed by SXSW, Austin 360
Darden Smith was taking a break from a recording session near El Paso, watching the sun set over a grove of pecan trees, when it suddenly hit him that the songs he’d been writing were part of something bigger.
During the first year of the pandemic, Smith took several two-day drives from Austin to Tucson as part of the work he was doing for Songwriting With Soldiers, an organization he co-founded a decade ago as a musical form of therapy for veterans. Those drives became a creative spark: He would write songs, recite essays into his phone to transcribe later, and take black-and-white snapshots with an old Polaroid camera he’d recently unearthed from his garage.
Amid one trip, he booked three days at Sonic Ranch Studios in Tornillo to get some of the songs down. “On the second night of recording,” he recalls, “it just kind of hit me: These songs hang together with the photos and with the essays that I’ve been writing. And it’s a book, with an album. As opposed to an album with a book. The core of it was this book.”
The result, “Western Skies,” combines 11 new original songs with a volume that includes photos, essays and lyrics. They’re meant to go together, but it’s also possible to buy or stream the album separate from the book. And there’s more to come: A spoken-word album of Smith reading the essays set to music is due in the fall, along with a package of videos he’s shot for the songs.
“Western Skies” might well be the best record Smith has ever made, stretching back to his 1980s rise as a promising young singer-songwriter following in the footsteps of Lyle Lovett and Nanci Griffith (both of whom sang on his 1986 debut, “Native Soil”). It follows a decade that found him focusing less on records and more on projects such as Songwriting With Soldiers and similar programs geared toward schoolchildren and frontline healthcare workers.
Related: Songwriter Mary Gauthier’s collaborations with war veterans hit home
He also published his first book, “The Habit of Noticing: Using Creativity to Make a Life (and a Living),” in 2018. “I swore I’d never do another book because it’s so much work,” he says with a chuckle. “But I remember walking back into the studio and …….