Mindy Smith

Good things, it’s often said, come to those who wait. And yet, as one of the great poets of our time also famously observed, the waiting is the hardest part.

Both truths have been proven once again on the journey to singer-songwriter Mindy Smith’s sixth studio album Quiet Town, which brings a treasured musical voice back into the spotlight.

In the dozen years since her previous full-length album, Mindy Smith, the Long Island-reared, longtime Nashville resident, has been anything but idle: she’s immersed herself in numerous other projects and continued writing, both on her own and with a variety of collaborators.

But it was the 2023 release of her song “Little Wings,” written a couple of years prior, that she cites as the trigger for moving ahead to assemble, in some cases finish, and then record the 11 songs that make Quiet Town both the logical successor to and extension of the creative path she’s charted over the past two decades since her widely acclaimed debut album One Moment More in 2004.

That’s when Vanguard Records, the esteemed folk-country-Americana label, won out over the Nashville major-label bidding war signing her on the strength of a four-song demo she’d written and produced with Jason Lehning that was shared with the label’s head of A&R, Steve Buckingham. “As soon as Buckingham (“Buck”) heard the songs, he called me directly,” offers Smith, “ introduced himself and exclaimed, ‘I just listened to your music, and I am blown away! I’m on the road with Dolly so please do not sign any label deals until I get back to Nashville.’

What followed was an invitation to contribute to Just Because I’m a Woman: The Songs of Dolly Parton, a 2003 multi-artist tribute album. Still unsigned, she was sent a list of songs to choose from and chose “Jolene,” creating a new arrangement for the song to suit her guitar-playing skills. Her distinctive and deeply haunting rendition prompted Parton to declare Smith’s interpretation her favorite of that song, her own included. Shortly after, Smith chose to sign with Vanguard with the track launching her career.

In a key line from “Little Wings,” Smith sings, “If I could just remember how to use these things/I might not feel so useless in my little wings.”

That disarmingly honest and confessional sentiment grew to some extent out of the sense of self-doubt. “The song is about all the second-guessing I was doing,” says Smith, “and how it looked from my point of view, that other folks were out there doing the things I wished I was doing but I was held back by questioning my worth.”

Others might struggle against or dismiss such thoughts and feelings, but Smith has built a career out of expressing the most human of vulnerabilities. In doing so, she lets listeners know it’s normal, and even healthy, to fully experience such fundamentally human feelings.

“If I'm being honest,” she says, “and this sounds weird to say it the way I'm going to say it, but … it is kind of on-brand for me to be completely vulnerable in a song. So, I've kind of set myself up to maneuver a certain very vulnerable thing, and that’s how I work through things.

“I started writing a few other songs, and I had a lot of songs I had written over the years that felt like they were still relevant to me that I needed to share with other people. That’s when I sat down with Neilson Hubbard [album producer], Dylan Alldredge [engineer], Heather [Moody, her manager], and the TVX Group and made it happen.”

Quiet Town is as emotionally wide-ranging as “Jericho,” which she wrote with esteemed artist and Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame songwriter Matraca Berg, giving voice to anticipation of impending life changes of monumental import, to the gently reflective title track, which is part lament and part prayer of gratitude for things gone by.

There’s her plea for compassion and connection in ”I’d Rather Be a Bridge,” which offers a salve to an often-contentious world: “Bridges always lead us somewhere/Walls keep us apart/Is there a way you’d open up/And let me in your heart?

The spiritual foundation and yearning that’s frequently been at the heart of her work shines through in many of Quiet Town’s songs, among them “Peace Eludes Me,” which she wrote with Nini Camps and Peter Groenwald:

A defining element of her music has always been the powerful simplicity of her straight-to-the-heart vocals, rejecting so much fussiness that often characterizes so much of pop music, whether country, pop, R&B, or rock. Tellingly, she has cited jazz singer Sarah Vaughan as her favorite vocalist.

It’s what drew country superstar Kenny Chesney to bring her in as his singing partner on the 2018 single “Better Boat,” a song written by Nashville veterans Travis Meadows and Liz Rose. Recorded and released by Chesney in response to the destruction wreaked the previous year by Hurricane Irma in the Caribbean, in particular in the Virgin Islands and a favorite spot of Chesney’s, the island of St. John.  The proceeds went to Chesney’s Love for Love City Foundation’s hurricane relief efforts.

“What’s great about having Mindy on this song,” Chesney said at the time, “if you just close your eyes and listen to her voice -- I’m speaking for me --she brings calm, she brings a sense that it’s all going to be all right. [T]o me, when I hear her voice, it’s like an angel, her voice is so--what’s the word?—‘genre-less.’ It’s bigger than all of us.”

Indeed, Smith has carved out a niche as both torchbearer and guiding light for the walking wounded, finding acceptance, even strength, in loss. It’s been a hallmark of her career going back to the title track of One Moment More, in which she voiced a yearning for even a little more time with a departed loved one. And she anticipated Chesney’s compliment about her special gift for providing emotional solace in her 2012 song “Everything Here Will Be Fine,” a prayer of release offered to a loved one.

Another significant event for Smith during the period between albums was one that brought her a measure of peace in a different way: She located and met with members of the birth family she had never known after being placed for adoption as an infant.

Most longtime fans know she was raised on Long Island by her adoptive parents: her non-denominational minister father and her mother, the choir director at their church. After her mother died of cancer when Mindy was a teen, she attended multiple community colleges for a couple of years. In 1994, she dropped out and rejoined her father, who had moved to Knoxville, TN. There, she picked up a guitar, taught herself to play, wrote her first song and became more fully immersed in Americana, folk and bluegrass music, sparking her relocation to Nashville in 1998 to pursue a music career. Too nervous and new to guitar playing, Smith would often hold the guitar and opt to sing acapella.

Acclaim came relatively quickly.

Of her 2004 debut, the Los Angeles Times raved, “Her voice exudes the gentility and grace of [Alison] Krauss, while musically she can evoke an electronics-drenched moodiness of latter-day Emmylou Harris, which can indeed leave a listener yearning for one moment more.”

Flash forward to 2014, when she discovered her birth family in Southwest Virginia in the Blue Ridge Mountains. She soon learned that many members of her biological family also were also musically inclined – information that helped her make sense of her innate attraction to Americana music.

“Nobody in my adoptive family plays guitar or wrote songs,” she says. Her adopted mother, Sharron, was a trained vocalist and choir/choral director, who had a full scholarship to Juilliard but chose to study and pursue an education and life in ministry. “She [Sharron] is my biggest musical influence, but I found out that playing guitar and writing songs was a very common occurrence for my biological family, so that’s interesting. And they would build and sell their instruments and play just about anything. So that was a really cool thing to find out, and then to meet them and learn that I have this connection to Americana music in a way that I didn’t realize and that maybe there is something in the blood, to have a deep-seated connection to a sound or a type of music.

That experience informs several of the songs on Quiet Town.

“I did meet Christine, my birth mother, just a few years before she would pass on,” Smith says. “It took me a long time to do that, but I’m so thankful that I did. It gave me a deeper understanding of the limitless love she had for me. That during a very vulnerable chapter in her life, she would choose my parents to raise me. They made sure to tell me I was theirs and they loved me, but it was hard, as a child, not to have felt unwanted. That ache was eased indefinitely having met Christine. I was wanted and loved by her and  my parents.”

It's easy to pick up on that sense of gratitude Smith invests and the reassurance she offers in “Hour of My Departure,” emotions that aren’t always in play for adopted children, their birth parents or adoptive families.

A departure of a different kind also figured into the space between Mindy Smith in 2012 and Quiet Town: she left her home at Vanguard Records to establish her own Giant Leap record label and publishing company to assume more control over her music, in partnership with Heather Moody and TVX Group Records, who licensed the record for distribution and release.

She issued Mindy Smith on Giant Leap and has used it for subsequent releases, including her 2013 holiday EP Snowed In—a follow-up to her acclaimed 2007 Christmas album My Holiday—the “Little Wings” single in 2023, and now Quiet Town. Giant Leap and TVX Records have licensed Quiet Town to esteemed Nashville-based Compass Records, described by Billboard Magazine as “one of the leading independent labels” to create a trifecta of power.

A succeeding generation of cutting-edge country artists, including Kacey Musgraves and Maren Morris, have noted her as a musical influence. “That is very sweet and humbling to me,” she says. “I looked up to folks like John Prine and Nanci Griffith. To be given respect  from the younger generation of amazing artists and writers means the world to me.”

“I'm thankful to have the ownership of the work,” she says. “I mean, there's something to that because you feel more empowered, I guess, [but] you also have to depend on  your own sensibilities a little bit more.”

For Quiet Town, she reconnected with producer and musician Hubbard, of whom she says, “He’s so great to work with because he’s truly about the art and a master at creating a tone and sound that works for what you want, and not because he wants it to sound a certain way or thinks this or that. He really makes sure it’s about you and the music versus what he wants for it, even though he is helping guide the ship.”

Hubbard also handled drums and percussion on the recording sessions as part of a core band that also includes guitarists Will Kimbrough, Megan McCormick, and Juan Solorzano, bassist Lex Price, keyboardist and horns Danny Mitchell, and a host of acclaimed vocalists that added background and harmony vocals, including Maureen Murphy, Nickie Conley, Jodi Seyfried, Matraca Berg, and many more.  

“After Neilson and I initially met over the songs I had and picked the songs [for the album],” she says, “I got so excited, I sat down and wrote this song, ‘Light of Mine.’ I told him ‘I’m sorry, but this song has to go on the record because the record inspired it,’ and he was totally on board with it.”

She had previously worked with Hubbard on the 2014 benefit compilation album Songs for Shelter Me, for which Smith tapped nearly a dozen other indie artists to contribute songs reflecting the mission of the PBS TV series “Shelter Me,” which focuses on animal rescues and adoption.

The show’s producer, Steven Latham, sought out Smith to write a theme song for the series, which she did, and then wrote another, “Who Saved Who,” with frequent collaborator, esteemed artist, and songwriter Matthew Perryman Jones.

“I was so excited about it that literally when I got off the phone with him, I wrote a song with the title ‘Shelter Me,’ because my first dog was from a shelter, and she was probably the best thing that could have ever happened to me. She became my best friend; she was in a couple of my videos; she met Dolly Parton. I would often say to her, ‘Who saved who?’, a question she and Jones used as the basis for their collaboration.

With Quiet Town, she’s included a couple of songs that are as close to political statements as she’s recorded. However, as with most of her material, they leave themselves open to metaphorical and literal interpretations: “I’d Rather Be a Bridge,” a collaboration with songwriter K.S. Rhoads, and “Jericho,” her co-write with Matraca Berg.

Both, she says, came “very much from a place of watching things going on in the world around us. I'm going ‘Where is our humanity? Where do we align ourselves with, you know, love and compassion?’ I was looking at how's that gone missing in so many ways. Thankfully, I get to write songs, work through it, and write with people who are like-minded and approach life in the similar way.”

That’s the note on which she concludes the album with the song “I Always Will,” which holds out the promise of an abiding love that can transcend whatever troubles life may bring: “When morning comes up over the hill/And brings you a new day on your windowsill/Know I love you still/Ooh and I always will.”

And even though one of the lessons she’s come to embrace over time is trusting in the creative process—the knowledge that a song will reveal itself when the time and circumstances are right for it—she says she has yet to solve the central mystery of her artistry: “I write for one purpose,” she’s been quoted as saying, “and that’s to figure out how to live in the world I am in.”

“I hope I never do figure that out,” she says, responding to her own comment from years past with a laugh, “because if I did, I don’t think I’d know what I’d write about.”