Songwriter, Musician, Producer Shares His Process

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Fantano tweet and I said, ‘Fuck you, look at me!’ And then he followed me.” While Smith didn’t notice an uptick in listeners, he was happy with “all the positive feedback. People telling me they really liked [my music]. That means more than any amount of plays.”

But Smith says he doesn’t do it for the recognition. “I don’t make songs for other people to like, but I do make songs and I would like to be heard,” he said. Above all else, Smith is grateful for all the support he gets, maintaining a humility and self-awareness that stood out to me. “I receive positive feedback, and it feels like I did something right. I’ll just bite the bullet when I receive negative feedback. I always take it into account, because I want my own expression of myself to be as good as it can be.”

Smith takes this negative feedback seriously, and is always searching for problems within his own music. “I critique myself a lot. I will listen to a song I made that day [for the rest of the] day, and the following four days, literally the only thing I’ll listen to and I’ll keep tweaking it.

It’s a really arduous process but I enjoy it,” he explained. He also holds in high regard the opinions of his close friends, specifically referencing his friend Ryan, a “snob” who’s also “really shy. He doesn’t know what advice to give that’s positive, he only ends up giving negative advice.”

Putting this feedback to good use, Smith has developed an intentional approach to making songs and producing entire projects. He likes to gather ideas for a song, basic sonic cues like bass lines, drums, and melodies that he loops. He continues with improvisation over the loops until he finds something that feels right. To me, this technique makes his recordings and their subsequent live performances feel like bolts of lightning captured in a bottle, small moments of time that represent immediate events yet paradoxically feel so timeless.

“It works itself out because the timing in which I made [these songs] is how I was feeling for that period of time,” he said. “It’s a genuine reflection of myself. I make music in bursts or a very long continuous lot of songs.”

At the time of this interview, Smith has released one project so