“Old Snakes,” more so than the nine other songs on Sunshone Still’s weighty new record “THEWAYTHEWORLdDIES” captures an essence. Chris Smith, the songwriter who records as Sunshone Still, sings in his familiar sandpapery whisper:
“As young boys at the cabin / Saw a snake on the pier / And we swam in the deep / To avoid what we fear,” Smith sings, trailed by an indulgent electric guitar.
It’s a memory he shares with the listener, taking them to Lake Wylie where he and his brother spent summers jumping off a pier.
“The pier floated on large Styrofoam blocks,” Smith said. “In the water, you could see if something was on top of them. We saw a snake and freaked out.”
As the song continues, Smith laments that his brother, Garnett, doesn’t swim in the lake — or bathe in the sun — anymore because Garnett couldn’t quite get far enough away. “They still found you / Those old snakes,” Smith sings. Garnett committed suicide in July 2010, and “THEWAYTHEWORLdDIES” is Smith’s response. The record, which will get a release show Saturday at New Brookland Tavern, isn’t a tribute or eulogy. It’s more like musical therapy. (Smith’s bandmate and friend, Rodney Lanier, died in December after a brief bout with cancer. He played multiple instruments on the record, primarily pedal steel and electric guitar. “He was at the heart of so much of the tasty parts of this album,” Smith wrote in a follow up e-mail.)
Smith’s last record, “Ten Cent American Novel,” released in 2007, was an impassioned concept album about 19th century Westward expansion. The concept here is simply grief.
“When it happened, around three or four months later I told my wife, ‘I’ve got to get away’,” said Smith, who spent a week in Asheville, N.C... “She was encouraging me to do some songwriting. I didn’t think I was going to write an entire album about this. I knew I had some songs in me.”
“Old Snakes” is a portrait of the brothers’ bond. But it also highlights their divergent paths.
“There was some guilt. I felt, ‘Is who I am, did that make him feel depressed?’,” Smith, 39, said. “He was smarter, more articulate, a better musician, although he didn’t have a musical career. He was the classic underachiever and I’m the classic overachiever.”
Garnett, who was 39 when he died, lived in Ohio with his partner. He managed a department store, said Smith, adding that his brother led a tough life. He recalled their first day at a new school. The boys — Smith was in third grade and Garnett was in fifth — wore freshly-pressed khakis. It rained, and on the way home from school, a bully intimidated them, splashing water on their clothes.
“For me, I learned to deal with that stuff,” said Smith, an owner of nine Moe’s Southwest Grill restaurants. “For him, things like that got worse.”
The somber tones in “Old Snakes” gives way to a muscular accompaniment from a full band. The drums hit hard, like someone banging on an unanswered door. It’s like a release of anger after wrestling with a void, an emptiness.
On “Boy Superman,” Smith attempts to explain what happened. In the song, Garnett, featured on the inside cover as a boy in a Superman costume, simply just flew away like the superhero.
“How do you tell this story to your own son? Or to your friends?” said Smith, who has a 2-year-old son, named Loudon Townes Smith in honor of songwriter/singers Loudon Wainwright and Townes Van Zandt.
“In casual conversation, you skirt around the issue,” he continued. “But one day my son will need to know. My stepdaughter will need to know. It’s being honest with them, but putting it in a nice package. It’s a better pill to swallow.”
The subject matter on “THEWAYTHEWORLdDIES” might imply a melancholy record. Certainly, there are plenty of sad passages. But the record is also spirited and buoyant, an example of how a life-alerting experience can inspire art. (And inside jokes, as on “Someone to Call Home” Smith slyly gives a nod to his recording name and thereby Nick Drake, whose song “Place to Be” is where Smith got the moniker.
The rap interlude on “Boot,” a song that samples Malcolm X, is unexpected. Musically, it’s Smith having fun. It probably took writing “Can’t Hold On to a Ghost” to get back the fun in life. He wrote it after spreading Garnett’s ashes at a waterfall near Cashiers, N.C., on his way home from getting away to Asheville.
“We have to move on. We can’t succumb to the darkness as well,” Smith said. “It’s also saying I’m never going to understand. It was a decision he had to make. He’s better for it, as difficult as it is to live with that.”
Sample tracks from Sunshone Still's THEWAYTHEWORLdDIES:
Old Snakes
Boy Superman
Can't Hold on to a Ghost
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