Grant Maloy Smith

Grant Maloy Smith embodies the archetype of the career musician who sustains himself across multiple disciplines, serving for years as a bandleader, film scorer, and singer/songwriter. He began in pop by fronting the group Britannia throughout the 1980s before pivoting to Americana once he reached middle age, an evolution that drew notice with his 2017 release Dust Bowl: American Stories.

Born in Jacksonville, Florida, Smith developed an early passion for music and picked up the guitar after his family relocated to Rhode Island during his teenage years. He attended the Rhode Island School of Design yet left before completing his studies, electing instead to assemble and direct Britannia in 1981. The band continued until 1984; afterward Smith married and briefly stepped away from music to take a position at a firm that produced data-recording equipment. He moved to California in 1991, then returned to Rhode Island in 1995 and founded his own data-recording enterprise, Dewetron. Back home, he began writing scores for independent films, commencing with 1997’s Night of the Beast. From the late 1990s through the 2000s his principal output remained film music, highlighted by the erotic thriller Pray for Power, which starred Playboy model Lisa Boyle.

Smith resumed songwriting in 2001 with American Merman, the first of three pop albums issued on his Small Dog label during that decade. In 2012 he turned toward Americana and followed with Yellow Trailer the next year. Over the ensuing period he played frequently across the United States and Europe while preparing the songs that became Dust Bowl: American Stories, released in 2017 on Suburban Cowboy Records. The album reached number two on Billboard’s Heatseekers chart in July 2017 and remained in the Top Ten of the Americana/Folk Album Sales chart for eleven weeks.

Its success led to Smith’s Carnegie Hall debut in 2018. That same year he issued the single “Man of Steel,” which the National Veterans Foundation adopted as its official theme song. Also in 2018 he released “Fly Possum Fly,” a holiday children’s song paired with a book of the same title. In 2019 came the further possum-themed track “The Possumbilities Are Endless” as well as “I See You,” recorded to benefit the elder-care organization Masterpiece Living. Early in 2020 he put out the EP Our Country, Vo. 2, which was soon followed by the single “Old Black Roller” and the song “Waiting for the Good Old Days Again,” written in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.