Jake Smith, born in Oregon and raised in Southern California, pursues his singer/songwriter craft through The White Buffalo, an endeavor centered on earthy country rock. After issuing a self-released album in 2002, he cultivated a gradual audience that expanded markedly once a 2008 re-recording of the same collection secured high-profile international opening slots alongside placements in film and television. The 2014 song “Come Join the Murder” earned an Emmy nomination after its placement in the biker series Sons of Anarchy, while the sequence of albums Smith delivered throughout that decade reflected a gradual shift from predominantly acoustic textures toward a harder, more unrestrained rock orientation. By 2020 he had aligned with Snakefarm Records, the country, blues, and roots-rock division of the Finnish metal label Spinefarm; his eighth full-length, Year of the Dark Horse, arrived in 2022 and ventured into broader, genre-blurring terrain.
Punk outfits such as the Descendents and the Circle Jerks formed the soundtrack of Smith’s youth, yet he did not begin playing guitar until age 19. While attending college in the Bay Area he started composing and performing original material, adopting the White Buffalo moniker after friends supplied several options that he selected at random. His debut album, Hogtied Like a Rodeo, appeared in 2002, followed three years later by The White Buffalo EP, produced by Eels’ Koool G Murder. Hogtied Revisited, released in 2008, captured a bedroom re-recording of that first album; subsequent live appearances with Gomez, Ziggy Marley, and Donavon Frankenreiter, spanning territories from Japan to Australia, helped circulate word of the project. Surfer Chris Malloy’s film Shelter incorporated the track “Wrong,” and additional White Buffalo songs later surfaced on Sons of Anarchy and Californication. The 2010 EP Prepare for Black & Blue attracted the interest of Unison Music, which signed the White Buffalo; label principals Bruce Witkin and Ryan Dorn also served as co-producers on the 2012 album Once Upon a Time in the West, which featured drummer Matt Lynott and bassist Tommy Andrews. That release registered on multiple Americana charts, whereas the follow-up, 2013’s Shadows, Greys & Evil Ways, emerged as a fiercer, forward-looking, politically charged concept album that received enthusiastic praise.
Recurring figures confronting life’s harsher, more unforgiving realities have long populated Smith’s songs. In 2015 he resumed work with Dorn and Witkin on new material exploring such real or fictional individuals in extreme situations. The resulting album, Love & the Death of Damnation, issued that August, drew from country, blues, folk, and gospel wellsprings. Another surge in visibility arrived in 2017 when “I Know You” was licensed for the trailer of the video game Halo 2.
That year Smith departed from his usual pattern by entering the studio for his next album without a completed set of songs. The six-week sessions yielded the urgent-sounding Darkest Darks, Lightest Lights. Much of 2018 was devoted to promoting the record, including major support dates for Counting Crows and Alison Krauss in London and Dublin as part of Blues Fest. A comprehensive Canadian tour followed in spring 2019, and by early 2020 the White Buffalo had secured a deal with the Universal Music-affiliated Snakefarm imprint. Produced by Shooter Jennings, On a Widow’s Walk contained the reflective “The Rapture” alongside the raw “Problem Solution.” Two years afterward, Smith altered course once more, enlisting Grammy-winning producer Jay Joyce for the 2022 release Year of the Dark Horse. His most wide-ranging collection to date, the album incorporated orchestrated E.L.O.-style pop, yacht rock, and circus music.
