the low-fi covers of linda smith by chelsea spear

I found Linda Smith’s music when I was at a crossroads in my own work. When I decided to make my first record at home, I found comfort and companionship in Till Another Time, Captured Tracks’ compilation of the finest selections from Smith’s extensive avocation as a home-recording pioneer. Since I've always been more interested in power-pop jangle and the eerie moods of post-punk, the rich melodies, catchy hooks, and trebly drum machines of Smith’s music guided me on a path to the music I wanted to make. The imperfections in her recordings—the minimalist production and the slight crack in her voice on the song “All I Did Was Cry"—made home recording seem less daunting and more aspirational than I previously thought.
After listening to Till Another Time several times through, I searched YouTube for the rest of the songs from her tapes. Her cover of Burt Bachrach’s “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” stopped me in my tracks. Smith stripped away the brass-driven arrangement and sprightly rhythm of Dionne Warwick’s definitive version to draw focus to her contemplative singing, revealing the longing in the lyrics. By working with a spare arrangement of wiry guitar strums and long, sustained synthesizer notes, Smith makes the song her own, and it fits in well with the original songs on her second tape release, Do You Know the Way…? 
Trained as a visual artist, Smith learned to play the guitar as an adult. “I don't think I ever really learned in the usual sense,” she said in an email interview about learning to play music. “The basic chords (are) about it, nothing complex.” Her lack of formal training gives her work an interesting complexity. Her song “In This” uses chromatic chords in the bridge, and the walking bassline makes it hard to tell what key the song is in. This gives a complexity to a sunny two-minute single and draws out the hard-won optimism in the lyrics.
This non-standard approach to playing and songwriting carried over to her cover songs. Including one cover on her tapes “to fill out the song list”, she made these songs her own by “never try(ing) to find the exact chords or to sing the correct melody.” This makes her personal interpretations of the songs that much more idiosyncratic. Her organ-driven cover of the Raincoats’ “In Love” reflects her aim to “get to the point without too much fuss.” By simplifying the arrangement from its ramshackle, dub-influenced original to a solemn, organ-driven song, she sounds like she’s trying to understand and gain control over her feelings. 
In a 2011 interview with The Living Archive of Underground Music, Smith cited 1960s AM radio as a formative influence, “especially as I grew up listening to it on a small transistor radio.” This influence came through in her covers of songwriters like Jackie DeShannon and Burt Bachrach, whose song “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” Smith loved so much that she named two of her tapes after lines from the song. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, songwriters like Bachrach and DeShannon were seen as relics of an earlier time, but “they had never fallen out of fashion  with me,” she observed. “They were as fresh as anything new at the time.” As with her Raincoats cover, the minimalist version of “San Jose” brought out a more melancholy tone to its lyrics. This tone was reflective of where Smith was, both emotionally and geographically, when she recorded it. “I’d just moved back to Baltimore after living in New York for a few years,” she told Don Campeau of the Living Archive of Underground Music. “San Jose was a stand-in for Baltimore, and LA represented New York...I never really appreciated Baltimore until I lived in New York and the song suggests this feeling, too.”
After recording her 2001 tape Emily’s House, Smith went back to school and got her MFA in painting, mostly leaving music in her past. “I don’t see this changing,” she said in 2011. “Painting is what I want to do now.” The world of home recording, however, didn’t forget her contributions to the medium. In 2018, Seattle cassette label Lost Sound Tapes released a tribute album called This Reminds Me. “A couple of friends had recorded a few covers on their own and the idea of a tribute album seemed possible as a cassette release,” Smith said in a recent email interview. The covers share Smith’s idiosyncratic approach to others’ songs, with opera singers, grunge bands, and solo singer/songwriters reinterpreting her music in their unique styles. “I really love all the different versions and the fact that each artist put their own spin on it,” she said. “The songs were really ‘reimagined’.” These reimaginings parallel Smith’s inventive approach to her own covers; just as she brought the melancholy in “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” to the fore, these covers find anger and frustration in Smith’s wistful compositions. 
The release of Till Another Time has brought more attention to Linda Smith’s home recording career, and the success of the compilation could lead to a wider release of her 1990s cassette output. (Earlier this year, she released an album of original instrumental songs called Untitled 1-10 +1, for which she handpainted the vinyl sleeves.) While releasing the covers has been challenging due to licensing issues, a few of Smith’s covers have surfaced on YouTube. Fans of classic pop songwriting and bedroom recording would do well to check these out; they could make you listen to your favorite song in a new way. 

Chelsea Spear’s byline appears frequently at the Arts Fuse, Crooked Marquee, and Early Bird Books, and she’s also written for Mental Floss, Nashville Scene, and Scalawag. [twitter]