Tones Behind The Tracks

Celebrating 20 years as a pro musician, singer-songwriter John Smith reimagines personal- and fan-favourite songs for his latest album

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The reasoning behind John Smith's new album is really quite straightforward.

After 20 years in the business, he decided it was time to celebrate by looking back to his early albums and selecting some songs that he feels have taken off in new directions after playing them for so long on the road. To embellish things still further, he enlisted the help of some of the top folk artists on the circuit today, including The Staves, Siobhan Miller, John McCusker and Lisa Hannigan. The result is a wonderful revisiting of some of John's early repertoire.

What inspired the idea behind Gatherings?

“I thought it'd be nice just to actually celebrate and reflect on the songs from the first three albums that I feel maybe have changed shape so much that I hear them completely differently now. Or perhaps the first time around they weren't quite ready to be recorded and I didn't do them justice. I got playing and thinking about these songs and I realised, actually, that there was quite good ground there for exploration. So I dug into songs from The Fox And The Monk, Map Or Direction and Great Lakes, and recorded 10 songs for this album.”

What was it like going back and reviewing your back catalogue in that way?

“When you hear songs you've written that don't quite stand up to the standard you might hold 20 years later, then that can be a little painful - but mostly it was very enjoyable. I found myself kind of falling in love with some of these ideas all over again and getting excited about digging into them as though they were new songs. It was more about capturing them as I hear them now. You know, 'If I were to walk out onto a stage tonight, how would I play something compared with how I played it in 2005?' It's quite different, so I wanted to just get a sense of that.”

How did you go about picking the tracks?