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Name: Lehmann B Smith

Nationality: Australian

Occupation: Composer, singer, songwriter, producer
Current Release: Lehmann B Smith and Lucy Roleff's Dark Green is out via Youngbloods.
Recommendations: For anyone who likes our music, I would put it down for a minute and put on Haitian Dances by Frantz Casseus.
Reading these Big Questions has got me all lofty, so for a book I would recommend Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon.

[Read our Lucy Roleff interview]

If you enjoyed this interview with Lehmann B Smith and would like to know more, visit him on Instagram, Facebook, and bandcamp.



When did you start writing/producing/playing music and what or who were your early passions and influences? What was it about music and/or sound that drew you to it?

My first instrument was clarinet, which I played poorly in the school band from 10 to 13. Then at 13 I found an old guitar in the garage and got it restrung, bought a few ‘how to play guitar’ magazines from the newsagent and started learning riffs. A lot of my earliest memories are listening to the Beatles, around 2 or 3 years old, and I was always obsessed with them, but didn’t learn their songs, so as not to spoil the magic of the music.

Around the same time I started playing guitar I became fascinated with the guitar solo of “Hey Joe” by Jimi Hendrix, and “I Could Have Lied” by Red Hot Chilli Peppers. The warmth and aria-like quality of those solos had this sort of architecture to it. I couldn’t really comprehend what it is was about the sound of those guitars, the shape of those melodies.



I started writing music around 14. It’s sort of embarrassing to list my favourite albums from that time but OK Computer, Five Leaves Left, then Grace, the Alan Lomax field recordings, Astral Weeks. I think they were the big influences on me when I was starting to take music seriously.



When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening and how does it influence your approach to creativity?


For me most music implies a range of colours – one thing might be dark blue, light blue and silver. Another thing might be leafy colours, ochre. I don’t usually spend much time thinking about these extra-musical sensations when listening to other people’s music. But they’re very useful when making your own work – titling instrumental pieces, writing lyrics, making music videos, all rely on this ability of music to stir up imagined sensations.

In my body … I don’t dance all that gracefully, but I’ve cried to music many times and that’s always one of its more surprising powers.

How would you describe your development as an artist in terms of interests and challenges, searching for a personal voice, as well as breakthroughs?

When I was 16 or 17 I was having problems with writing music … I was very precociously writer’s blocked. I asked Karl Scullin (Kes) if he ever had writer’s block and he said never – it was just finding the time to do the work. That sort of snapped me out of it. I was taking it too seriously – worrying too much about sounding a certain way – having my music be MEANINGFUL and sort of stately in a way.



So after that I opened myself up to just writing whatever. Then later I realised that songs of mine that people liked were usually the ones I was least impressed with. This happen with every album I make. So once I realised that, I just started carrying everything I could to its conclusion – if I had what I thought was a dumb idea, I’d finish it, record it, put it on an album. I thought better to put something out and one person like it, than to junk it in anticipation. Maybe that wasn’t the greatest idea, looking back.

I don’t think of having a personal voice, at least not in a restrictive way. I take a lot of my songs seriously, and they come from that place, but then I’m also goofy and like to joke around, so I have a lot of goofy music that I make too.

I feel that musicians are meant to occupy a certain framework of feeling, a framework of style, and never move from that. Audiences tend to want their artists to stick to the tone the artist has established, and if the artist strays from that, it somehow makes all their work seem less sincere, less true to who they portrayed themselves as initially.

Which ironically is less sincere, because I don’t feel just one way. It wasn’t just Walt Whitman who contained multitudes.

Tell me a bit about your sense of identity and how it influences both your preferences as a listener and your creativity as an artist, please.

I don’t really think of myself having a particular identity. And anything I’m interested in I’ve always shuddered to be identified as. Being called a ‘musician’, for example, has always made me very embarrassed.

But I do like old things, and my interest in pretty much everything, in books music, poems, art, has been confined to the ancient world, or 1600s to the 1970s. Which also embarrasses me to admit.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and art?

I don’t have any overarching ideas. Thoughts come to you. You refine them. You group them with ideas that are similar, or that play off each other. From there things snowball. You whittle away, sand off the edges. You have the finished thing.

About 6 years ago I figured to myself that I should try and ideally make things that only I could, or that only I would, make. It seemed like there was enough art in the world, that if I was going to add to it, it should be something that wouldn’t have been made otherwise.

How would you describe your views on topics like originality and innovation versus perfection and timelessness in music? Are you interested in a “music of the future” or “continuing a tradition”?

I like music of the recent and deep past, so I guess I’d prefer to continue a tradition and carve my claim out of that. I think there are diminishing returns, in some way, when being modern, or deconstructing too ruthlessly.

Maybe I’ll try to have it both ways … I like ‘music of the future’ that ‘continues a tradition’.

I was listening to Captain Beefheart yesterday. I would say he fits that bill. An idiosyncratic voice that speaks a recognisable language.



Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools - and what are the most promising strategies for working with them?


The TV and the car have been important in my writing. Having your mind distracted enough to not get frustrated when ideas don’t come, to switch off and let your subconscious bleed through your fingers or your mouth and find a new song that way. Otherwise it’s playing instruments you don’t know how to play, when your own instrument becomes too familiar to you.

And I am thankful to be born in a time of computers and having the ability to make as many albums as I want without any repercussion for how unsuccessful or ignored they’ll be.

Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.

Lucy turned me onto this book Daily Rituals. It’s famous writers, artists, musicians, etc, and what they get up to of a day. It’s a sort of trash read but I love it. And it’s made me realise how little ritual I have in my life.

When I do have my own time I’m very capricious with it. In terms of projects, I just flit from one to another as soon as I get bored, and I stop working entirely as soon as the feeling dims.

About the only ritual is in the morning I like to have tea, then coffee. And start drinking no later than 5pm.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?

The albums of mine I'm most sympathetic to are the ones that weren't planned and that were, through some abrupt shift in my thinking or my life, sort of dropped on me out of nowhere.

There was one instrumental album I made using the same synth sound for the whole thing, no other instrument. I wrote and recorded it in 2 weeks, maybe sitting down at the keyboard 5 times, and the music came out really easily and was very meaningful to me at the time.

So, in a very slovenly way, I like the work that takes no work.

Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?

I've made music with a lot of different people, as simple as coming up with bass parts, or more fully arranging songs. And I have people play with me now and again, who sometimes come up with their own parts. But I don't collaborate all that often, I think mostly because I have a pretty clear idea of what I want, so it's just quicker to go there without fart-arsing around.

This album with Lucy is probably the closest I've collaborated, in that I didn't have total carte blanche to steer the ship. And this album was such a delicate thing to make, to not work against the grain of the wood of it.

I'm often trying to push myself to collaborate more because invariably the ideas that come from someone else turn out to be your favourite parts. They don't have the stink of yourself on them.

How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?

There's that line, something like "music makes you feel feelings, words make you think thoughts, songs make you feel thoughts." And I think music is a good glue for people.

But music doesn't have to be explicitly useful in any way. There’s enough pleasure in it being interesting in itself, or for its power to give you a bodily reaction, to dance or cry or feel tingles down your neck.

I think it definitely can be a powerful tool to express your concerns in a graceful way. But then protest music can be some of the most graceless music there is. So yeah I sometimes like to write protest music.

Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?

I've found music can make transcendental feelings feel more transcendental, can make love more lovely, nature more joyful. And it can also dull the sharp burn of losing something.

Some sorts of loss can be too sad for music too. A friend of mine died last year and I had to wean myself back onto music, because I knew I needed to listen to it to grow out of where I was, but it didn't feel right.

It's lame to say but I made a mix of only the adagios of Beethoven string quartets and that's what I listened to for a few months. Helped a lot if I remember right.



How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?  


I read the first couple chapters of Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia and it seems like music can help us get a bit more of a grip on the way our brain works, what's going on in the folds, how they're folded over. And many years ago I heard about the way music can pull people out of comas.

So I think there’s some room for music to explain how our brains are composed at least. And birdsong, whalesong, howling, musical vocalisations of animals are probably useful for us to hold a candle to the society of the animal world.

Going the other way -- science revealing things about music -- I guess it’s the same. Music isn’t something unto itself. Science can reveal aspects of sound, but I think whatever it can reveal about music is really just revealing things about us.

I just want to know why dogs act so weird about harmonicas.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

Music is alive forever, as long as someone remembers it. So I take more care in music than I do in anything else. I don’t mind making a bad coffee. If I’m cleaning the toilet I’d like to do it well. If I’m making dinner I’d like to do it well. But I don’t really mind so much. Mundane tasks have the kindness of repetition to them. You’ll do it again eventually, and maybe next time it will be better.

I don’t play live anymore, and so a song is an unchangeable artefact. I like to get it as right as possible. And in that process of writing and recording there’s so many opportunities to fix things along the way. So you can be very judicious, but still sort of casual all the way down the line until you decide ‘this is it’.

A bad coffee is forgotten about. A bad song is forgotten about, which is much worse.

Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?

I think sound is vibration in the air and the ear drum, and music is vibration in the mind. The creator and the listener both put the work in to make sound into music. It takes at least one person to say 4’33” is music. And if you hear new terrible song at the supermarket, it doesn’t feel too weird to say “urgh, that’s not music”. So I guess music depends on the meaning we put in it. It’s predicated on meaning being injected into it at its creation and its reception.

I heard recently that we apparently like music because it leads into our natural enjoyment of pattern recognition, and that music plays on pre-existing patterns, or plays against them, and we enjoy both. It’s sort of titillating either way. And since music happens in time I guess we run along beside it, enjoying how it follows or breaks the rules, and when. And I think there’s some truth to that.

But maybe that doesn’t explain why you can know nothing about music, you can be a little baby, just able to stand, and there’s someone steadying you by the hands, you’re holding onto their fingers, and you’re bopping along to the beat. Or you can hear music that is totally foreign to you – maybe it’s from another part of the world, or using instruments you’ve never heard, or it’s from the past, or from the present but it’s a newly invented approach – and it means something to you.

It might not be the right thing. You might be feeling at-one-with-all-people listening to a war chant in another language. But it probably doesn’t matter. It’s not often you get to feel at-one-with-all-people, so soak it up!