Sonny Smith

A distinctive and singularly inventive narrator in the storytelling lineage of Tom Waits and Randy Newman, indie folk singer/songwriter Sonny Smith first surfaced from relative anonymity during 2003 via the underground favorite This Is My Story, This Is My Song. Born in San Francisco in 1972, he moved at age 17 to the mountain community of Gunnison, Colorado, where he earned income performing piano in neighborhood clubs. Two years afterward he established himself in Denver, delivering extended four- and five-hour performances at local spots such as the Mercury Café and Muddy's Coffeehouse. Smith sustained his itinerant lifestyle in subsequent years, residing on an organic farm amid Costa Rican jungle terrain and performing as a street musician along the Pacific shoreline. These travels produced not merely compositions but also screenplays and short fiction; upon his return to the Bay Area in 1996 he set aside the piano for guitar, shaping the jazz-inflected folk lines and spontaneously generated lyrics that later formed his self-issued 2000 debut LP, Who's the Monster...You or Me? During the same year he wrote and directed the short film Kid Gus Man, and in 2001 he began contributing the regular column Steppin' Out to The New Mission Newspaper.

When the San Francisco imprint Jackpine Social Club issued This Is My Story, This Is My Song in mid-2003, Smith had taken up residence across the bay in Oakland's Fruitvale district. As the album garnered growing critical attention he initiated a partnership with Wilco bassist Leroy Bach, staging multiple Bay Area performances and, in 2004, traveling to Bach's hometown of Chicago for recording sessions. Around that period Smith additionally put out the CD-R Sweet Lorraine: Sordid Tales of Love and Woe, comprising duets with Jolie Holland, while the literary journal Watchword published One Act Plays, a sequence of story-songs. Early in 2005 he secured a three-month residency at San Francisco's Headlands Center for the Arts, during which he re-recorded both Sweet Lorraine and One Act Plays, the latter incorporating guest vocal contributions from singers such as Mark Eitzel and Edith Frost. He toured throughout the summer of 2006 in support of Neko Case, and a year later released Fruitvale, a cycle of songs drawn from his time in Oakland.

In 2007 Smith assembled the group Sonny & the Sunsets, whose fluid membership at various points included multi-instrumentalist Kelley Stoltz, Tahlia Harbour of the Dry Spells, John Dwyer of Thee Oh Sees, Tim Cohen, and Shayde Sartin of the Skygreen Leopards. During 2010 Sonny & the Sunsets delivered their first full-length album, Tomorrow Is Alright. That year the Sunsets also took part in Smith's "100 Records" exhibition in San Francisco, an event at which 100 artists designed sleeves for imaginary bands to accompany a series of 7"s whose music Smith himself created. The Sunsets subsequently issued their second album, 2011's Hit After Hit, through Fat Possum, followed by four further releases on Polyvinyl: Longtime Companion (2012), Antenna to the Afterworld (2013), Talent Night at the Ashram (2015), and the Merrill Garbus-produced Moods Baby Moods (2016). The last of these incorporated traces of 1980s new wave and funk. Also in 2016 Smith resumed issuing material under his own name with the album Sees All Knows All, an original monologue accompanied by music that enlisted several San Francisco Bay Area musicians, among them Shayde Sartin of the Fresh and Onlys and Kelley Stoltz. Produced by Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, Smith's tenth studio album, Rod for Your Love, returned the songwriter to melodic, 1960s-inspired guitar-pop terrain and featured a duet with Angel Olsen.