By: Steve Wildsmith
The best songs, the thinking goes, are the ones written from real-life experiences, but those experiences sometimes exact a heavy toll.
Josh Smith, the singer and songwriter for Handsome and the Humbles, knows that all too well. “Alt-Country,” the new album by the Knoxville-based Americana outfit, is built on a foundation of loss that knocked the gregarious and affable frontman to his knees … but in so doing, gifted him with a record that smolders like the orange coals of a once mighty conflagration.
“None of these songs are really about my dad, but the sadness I experienced from his death, as well as the loss of my marriage, is pretty much the foundation of this album,” Smith says.
It’s a profoundly intimate affair, evolving from the skeletal framework of scribbled lyrics in the dead of night and rudimentary chords on an acoustic guitar. Upon those bones, Smith and guitarist Josh Hutson began to bring the record to life in Hutson’s garage (affectionately nicknamed “The Ding Don Den”) using an iPhone interface to record everything but drum tracks on three songs.
“I’d lay down an acoustic track, he’d do electric, then I’d do bass and vocals, and we’d go back and do background vocals,” Smith says. “They started sounding better than we anticipated, so we just decided that since it’s so hard to get everyone together, we’d just release what we have.”
Along the way, they migrated to professional studios and recording spaces, adding band members (guitarist Marcus Balanky, former-and-sometimes-fill-in drummer Lauryl Brisson) and friends (drummer Kris “Tugboat” Killingsworth, organist Matt Coker) to sculpt the tracks into a fully realized new record.
The finished creation is both warm and familiar and a startling departure, made evident by the opening track “Be Around.” Ruminations on friendships during those dark times buoyed his spirits and inspired the shimmering ambiance that owes as much to the Flaming Lips as it does to any alt-country touchstones to which Handsome and the Humbles compare.
And yet those touchstones remain … polished in ways that are a direct result of the musical intimacy shared between friends who first shared a stage together as teenagers. On “Now I Know,” Hutson plays a guitar-slinging foil every bit as adept as Nels Cline to Smith’s Jeff Tweedy, stomping through a swirling maelstrom of regret over the end of the latter’s marriage: “When everything means so much, nothing means anything,” he sings, bone-tired weariness hanging on every syllable, regret tinging every chord.
That regret lingers on “Nice Things” – “you’d think by now I’d be better than this” are the words of a man still coming to terms with a profoundly life-changing experience, and once again Hutson’s fretwork serves as Smith’s North Star through the foggy remnants of remorse.
Here’s the thing about “Alt-Country,” though: Smith’s stories might burn like straight whiskey, but the music is the sweet fire of bliss that follows. Whether it’s Brisson on
sticks giving “Fades Away” a “D’yer Mak’er”-style groove or Coker coaxing “Exile”-era Stones juju on a song like “You Walked Away,” there’s joy to be found in this collection, if for nothing else than the simple fact that pain fades and the sun always rises.
Light, Smith has learned over time, is always on the horizon, somewhere in the distance, guiding a path through the darkness. That’s a theme that Handsome and the Humbles have championed since the band came together around an EP titled “Hallelujah, Alright,” the capstone of which, “Knoxville Lights,” was a shambling rock ‘n’ roll homage to the cityscape as seen from a weary traveler crossing the mountains. Two full-length records followed — “Have Mercy” and “We’re All the Same,” along with another EP (“400 Cigarettes”) a couple of years ago.
“Alt-Country” is a continuation of the band’s journey to places “both frightening and stunning,” as Smith croons on the new record’s final track, “Returning to You.” And as that song fades, he assures us: “When I’m alone, my heart keeps returning to you.”
It seems natural to assume he’s talking about the loved ones he’s lost along the way, but there are greater forces at work here, made evident in the beauty carved from the granite face of pain:
He’s returning to the light, and the fans and bandmates and opportunities that music has always provided, and we are all the better for it.