Sarah Smith Building Her Fanbase One Audience at a Time

Whether it’s performing on a stage, crafting a new song or laying down tracks in a recording studio, Sarah Smith brings an unrivalled, unmistakable, and undying devotion to her music.

The London, ON resident forged her reputation as a deeply passionate artist for her tenure as the lead vocalist for the popular Ontario rock band The Joys. Since going solo in 2012, Smith has become a must-see attraction throughout southwestern Ontario, parts of the west coast and in central Europe, where she tours several times a year.

Smith is working hard to expand her fan base by teaming up noted singer/songwriter Emm Gryner for a number of shows, including her first solo foray into Eastern Ontario with an intimate house concert at Ellena’s Café in downtown Napanee on Thursday, April 21. The duo is also playing in London on April 23 and at Hugh’s Room in Toronto the evening before Napanee on Wednesday, April 20.

“I am really excited. I haven’t been in that area of Eastern Ontario for a really long time. Under The Joys I played in that part of the province, but I haven’t been there under my own name. And I really want to build a fan base there; I know there are awesome music fans. Canada is such a huge country and I have little pockets of fans all over. I have only been a solo artist for 3 ½ years and I have tried to build as much as I could on the west coast, northern Ontario and mostly southwestern Ontario, but I want to get to the Kingston/Ottawa area and that’s where my focus is. So playing in Napanee is a great start,” Smith said.

Gryner and Smith have truly connected as artists and mutual admirers.

“Emm is an amazing songwriter and I think that she works her butt off. She is just a go-getter and she discovered me through the producer of my first solo album, Kevin Doyle. I know that she and Kevin had done some work together in the past and that he had become really good friends with her. She found me through him and came out to one of my shows in Hamilton. It was a packed house and I think she said, ‘hey, maybe this is a chick that has the same work ethic as I do?’” Smith said.

“We ended up just really connecting on that alone, never mind the music. She has her life in perspective too, which is something I can learn from.”

Smith is touring in support of her second and most recent album, The Journey. Her ebullient, energetic and mesmerizing live show was also captured on a 2015 DVD called Sarah Smith: Plugged and Unplugged. As a live performer, Smith truly pours her entire being – mind, body, heart and soul – in to each and every song – an amazing feat to do night after night considering she plays between 250 to 300 shows a year.

“I would say it’s close to 300 shows these days. A number of shows aren’t even marked on my website because they’re private events and stuff like that. I probably play six nights a week, and sometimes two shows in one night. This year I have been trying to slow it down a little bit. I have been trying really hard to take a break and ramp it down, but I have this incredible urge to play music; I really love it. SO whenever I try to slow down, something else comes along like a video shoot or a writing session or studio session – I am always busy with music,” Smith explained.

“The way I look at it is that I am just so blessed. I can’t believe how much I have filled my life with music. But I realize that I need to take care of myself. My number one job in life is to take care of me and my body and my spirit. That’s really my job – music is just a bonus. I really do try to eat clean, I exercise, I have spiritual practices that I have in place for calming. I try not to get too stressed or overworked. Even when it appears that I am really busy, I am always giving myself time to take care of me. And my voice is a big part of that. The voice is part of my physical body, it’s a part of my spiritual body, it’s a part of my emotional state. I have to take care of all those things so my voice is okay.”

Her shows with Gryner, including the one in Napanee, are rare solo appearances. Normally Smith prefers to work as part of an acoustic duo with an accompanist, or as part of her rock band configurations.

“I really don’t like playing solo. I feel very naked and afraid when it’s just me up there on the stage. I think I have done just one solo show so far this year; I prefer duos. If you have a smaller budget I will play as a duo if that’s what the venue calls for. This is a little different because I have Emm for support, even though she won’t be up on the stage with me. I have a rock trio and an acoustic trio, which create two different sounds, and I love it,” she said.

“This year I seem to be getting more offers to bring my full band out on the road, either as a four piece or five piece, which I am very happy about because I love playing with my band.”

Even Smith says she is pleasantly surprised at how popular she has become throughout a number of central European countries.

She explained that she is simply following the demand.

“It works the same over there as it does here. I just played a lot of shows over there and one show leads to another. You meet another booking agent and that leads to more towns. It’s just an effect that happens when you play a show and you are passionate about what you do, so people want to share their knowledge and share information so you can play in another town and another venue. It’s like a domino effect, that’s totally what has happened for me over in Europe,” she said.

“It’s all based on the fan base. All my friends over there say they believe in me and want to help me. I sometimes wish I had a manager and my own agent that would do all this work for me, but instead I have all these wonderful people who just want to help me.

“So I have been over to Germany and the Netherlands and Luxembourg a lot because of this. I personally think there is a market for me – and every artist – all over the world. It just depends on what you focus on. For me, I have to focus my efforts on one or two countries to start. It doesn’t make sense to spread myself really thin. So that’s why I am just focussing on Germany and The Netherlands at the moment and it seems to be working. The ball is rolling, people are contacting me, the shows are happening, radio play is happening, so I am just pushing forward.”

Smith half-jokingly refers to herself as a ‘selfish’ songwriter, as her music tends to be self-revelatory, deeply personal and quite confessional.

“I am the worst songwriter because I just write about me and my feelings and my experiences, my emotions, my relationships, my drugs, my inner spirituality, my pain – it’s all about me. So it’s kind of like therapy,” she said.

Some of her more recent songs exemplify this ‘laying the soul bare’ approach, and feature remarkable honesty, depth and emotion as she seems to be coming to catharsis or exorcising some long-held demons through her writing.

“The song Stars is about hitting the road with somebody that you love and getting lost together. It’s kind of like Thelma and Louise; it’s about getting lost and hoping that you can find the right way home. Empty Void is about this void that I have always had to fill – literally an empty void inside of me that I have tried to fill. And it’s my plea to my partner to just hang tight. I have to find something to fill this void right now, so hang tight while I go through this and try to find what’s going to fill it. And I will be back and when I come back I should probably know more about myself,” she said.

“And it’s a constant thing. I go through phases where the spiritual tank is full and phases where it’s not. It’s that we’re all a work in progress. The song Into the Light kind of picks up that theme too. It’s really just about the deconstruction of an old relationship and then the rebuilding back up of that relationship into something new and better.”

Smith grew up in a church-going family and received her early musical training through the children’s choir.

“I grew up in a household where there wasn’t really a radio; there wasn’t music in the house to speak of. I was raised in a church and my mom was choir leader and we had these operettas called Psalty and the Singing Songbook, and that was my introduction to music. They were these really upbeat church tunes for kids and that’s what I was basically raised with. My mom was a church singer and my dad was a country and western guitar player. He would play Johnny Cash and sing Anne Murray around the house and that was about it. So when I was a teenager, I had a lot of catching up to do,” she said.

Things changed when she went to high school and became exposed to the popular music of the day through her peers.

“And one day I heard Alanis Morrissette’s Jagged Little Pill album and it changed my whole life. I begged for a guitar – actually I begged for a violin and got a guitar for Christmas when I was around 13. And that’s when I really started to learn songs. And then I quickly started to write my own songs; they were just coming out of my head and out of my heart,” Smith said.

“When I was 18 I moved to New Zealand. I was supposed to be on a student exchange but I never went to school. I just played music and travelled around. When I was there I really started to get into Crowded House and that sing-along type of stuff the Finn brothers [Neil and Tim] were doing. And I just started to really dig what was on the radio.

“I remember getting into the Columbia House thing and I built my music library on that. I remember some of the first CDs I got from that in the mail were The Cars Greatest Hits, Jagged Little Pill, Chicago’s Greatest Hits, Extreme’s Pornograffitti album. I also got Bryan Adams’ Reckless and even Celine Dion. So that was my musical education – Columbia House.”

For many years, fans would comment that Smith reminded them of noted American singer/songwriter Melissa Etheridge in both her look and her style of music. The similarities were also remarked upon because, like Etheridge, Smith is in a loving same-sex marriage.

“She was not an influence to me, believe it or not. I didn’t even know who she was until I was into my solo career for about a year or so. People just kept bugging me to listen to her. I have a lot of LGBT followers and they wanted me to sing her old songs so much, so I finally got into her and discovered she is an amazing songwriter. I love her. She’s awesome,” Smith said.

And speaking of awesome, so is the double-bill of Emm Gryner and Sarah Smith, heading out to select locations later this month.

For more information on Smith, visit her website at http://www.sarahsmithmusic.com/

For tickets and information about the London show with Emm Gryner, visit http://www.aeolianhall.ca/events/emm-gryner-1

For the Toronto show, visit http://www.ticketbreak.com/event_details/10626

And for the Napanee show, visit http://www.starstop.ca/#!emm-gryner-and-sarah-smith/p8wt7

• Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for a quarter of a century. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.

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