Screen writer, musician, and playwright Sonny Smith has recently released a new album, Fruitvale, on the Belle Sound label. A beautiful album full of astute observations and immediate characters, Fruitvale soon becomes an intimate stage, the scenery and the vehicle to evoke the San Fransisco area of Oakland the album is loosely based upon.
Smith was born in San Fransisco in 1972 and when he moved to Colorado he took up the piano, playing blues in mountain town clubs and bars. Two years later he was living in Denver, playing long sets at weekly gigs in Muddy's Coffee House and the Mercury Cafe, often late into the night, when the 11:00p.m. eyelids blink slowly and become sleepy buddies of 3:00a.m. ears, a time when atmosphere and vibe can creak and slide out of the gaps in loose floorboards, open windows, or uncorked bottles. An itchy mind and curious feet took him traveling through Central America, settling for a while at an organic farm in the jungle of Costa Rica, an easy seagull's mile from the shore of the Caribbean Sea. He hooked up with two other musicians and they busked by choice, chance or invite along the tropical coastline.
In 1996 he returned to his birth place, San Fransisco, and embarked on travel of another kind; the imagination, and the people, places, stories and situations that he conjures to life in his songs, plays, short stories, and screenplays. Smith now favoured playing the guitar whilst performing in and around the city. In 1999 he released the album Who`s The Monster? and in 2000 he wrote, directed, and acted in the short film, Kid Gus Man. His artistic output was gathering pace. Another short film, Green Chili Con Suenos, saw the light of day in 2002, as well as the album This Is My Story, This Is My Song, in the same year. A third album closely followed, Sordid Tales of Love and Woe, and Sweet Lorraine in 2003.
The following year Watchword literary magazine commissioned Smith to write ten one-act plays set to music. The plays were written as songs, with vocal parts for other singers to perform. Supported by the Headlands Center for the Arts, this imaginative project was recorded and released as simply One Act Plays.
By now his evocative writing, larger than life characters and artistic vision attracted the likes of duetting pairs Rico Bell (the Mekons) and Jolie Holland, Mark Eitzel (American Music Club) and Virgil Shaw, Peggy Honeywell, and Andy Cabic (Vetiver). Filmmaker Miranda July also contributed. That year was a pivotal one for the making of the Fruitvale album. His songs became the subject of interest by Leroy Bach (then of Wilco), who invited Sonny to Chicago to record.
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