Kari Smith Band

Kari Smith at the Tobacco Company
The Richmond singer-songwriter has decided to seek her fortunes down Nashville way, and she’s packing up the piano and the smooth lilt of her voice for her imminent departure. Before she dives into that sea of countrified hipsters, though, she’ll play a show Thursday, Aug. 31, at 8 p.m. to celebrate her first full-length CD, which should help her swim once she gets there. Free. 270-1461. S
- Style Weekly, Richmond, VA

(The Richmond Buzz) So when did you decide music was going to be a significant part of your life?

(Kari) I've always loved music, but it became a career for me about a year and a half ago.

(The Richmond Buzz) How old were you when you picked up your first instrument?

(Kari) My mom tells me I was three when I first started playing the piano. (laughs) I don't remember, but that's what she tells me.

(The Richmond Buzz) Growing up, who were your musical influences? Were you inspired by anyone in your personal life or someone perhaps famous that may have inspired you to get into music?

(Kari) Because of my parents' strict religious beliefs, I was only allowed to listen to gospel music and classical music growing up. I first listened to a country song when I was 14. Since my sister had asked me to sing in her wedding, I was allowed to learn a George Strait song. I've been a country music fan and especially a George Strait fan to this day.

(The Richmond Buzz) For someone who has never been to one of your shows, what can they expect from you?

(Kari) They can expect a lot of variety, because I both play the guitar and the piano. And although I do a lot of original songs, I also sing covers, ranging from Sam Cooke, Van Morrison, Sarah McLachlan, Norah Jones, the Eagles - it depends on what people want to hear.

(The Richmond Buzz) Describe what the life of a musician is like. What are the highs and what are the lows?

(Kari) The biggest high is being able to do what I love to do and am passionate about. Also, I love being able to express myself, and reach audiences in a way that will make them feel good. As far as the lows, it's difficult to make it financially as a full-time musician, and especially as a solo acoustic musician. The other lows are typical 'starving artist' points, like not having insurance, not having steady income, etc. It's a difficult balance sometimes - you love it and you want to enjoy it, but you still have to pay your bills.

(The Richmond Buzz) What other talents do you have besides singing?

(Kari) I sing and play the piano and guitar, as well as the clarinet and a little fiddle. Outside of music, I love riding horses, and also writing. I do a little bit of everything. (laughs)

(The Richmond Buzz) What's the best form of flattery a fan can say or do toward a musician?

(Kari) The first thing I think of is tears. When I perform a song that is so touching that it brings tears to someone's eyes, that is a big deal to me. It's really special when kids come up and talk to me about what I'm doing. I love kids, and I hope that I can influence them to become involved in music while they're young and it's easier to learn. I really like when people realize that I'm on their level. Just because I'm in front of the room, or on a stage does not make me any better than they are, so I appreciate it when someone approaches me and talks to me as a peer. And I love it when people give me feedback about specific songs. It lets me know that they were really listening, and that¡¦s always appreciated.

(The Richmond Buzz) When it comes to writing songs, tell me a little bit about your creative process.

(Kari) Unlike most writers, I write the lyrics and the melody to a new song at the same time, rather than one after the other. Usually, I'll get an idea and it will be a lyric along with the melody line and I'll just create it from there. Obviously, any writer is going to draw on their personal life and experiences for writing. For someone who wants to be a writer, the main thing is to write, write, write. For this last record, my producer asked for at least 40 songs from which to pick 10. Major label artists listen to thousands of songs before deciding the 10 to 12 songs that they'll use.

(The Richmond Buzz) Have you ever collaborated with anybody in previous songs?

(Kari) I have not. It's something that I'm interested in doing, and one of major reasons I've moved to Nashville - there are so many talented writers there.

(The Richmond Buzz) How many gigs a week do you usually perform?

(Kari) On average, 3 or 4 gigs a week. And it's just me performing solo, so the ol' voice gets tired sometimes. (laughs) Now that I'm in Nashville, it will take me more time to build up my show schedule again, but I'm still coming back to Richmond once a month to do a week or so of shows. It's harder to schedule shows in Nashville, and you don't make nearly as much money!

(The Richmond Buzz) What is the best advice someone has given you that you could share in regards in pursuit of a successful music career?

(Kari) One of my friends, mentors, and the producer of my last CD is Matt Roberts. He is now a local entertainment attorney, but he has a ton of experience and education in the music business, as a performer, a singer / songwriter, and a producer. One of the best pieces of advice that he gave me was that sometimes as an artist, you might be forced into a "gray area" where you're doing something that you're not quite sure about. He advised me that when this happens, don't forget "where you put your soul." Sometimes you have to set aside your current views long enough to try to figure something out, and that's okay. But at the end of the day, you need to remember what is important, so you don't lose who you really are.

(The Richmond Buzz) Now you've worked with other bands, such as southern rock groups like Sin City Revival, what is your take on being a solo artist vs. being in a group?

(Kari) As a solo artist, you don't have to depend on anyone else, for example - scheduling practices or wondering if someone's going to show up for a gig. But that can be a con as well, because you're responsible for everything. If you make a mistake, there's no one there to cover you. In a band, you're on stage with a team and it's fun to collaborate, whereas a solo artist can interact only with the crowd, which stinks if there's not much of an audience, or they are not paying much attention. Solo artists do sometimes make more money though, whereas bands split it among usually 4 or 5 players. That's one reason I started performing solo, rather than as a duo or trio.

(The Richmond Buzz) How would you classify the genre of music that you write?

(Kari) My original music is classified as alternative country or Americana. I love a variety of instruments such as steel guitar, fiddle, banjo, and harmonica. But I wouldn't call my music straight-up country. The writing is a little deeper than your typical country song, and I like to get a little more creative than the simplicity of many country songs you hear - they get a little boring. (laughs)

(The Richmond Buzz) Sure. (laughs) Who would you say are some artists you look up to, whether it's country or something else?

(Kari) I'm a big Sheryl Crow fan. I think she has a lot of strength on and off stage. I appreciate that she writes her music and that she plays an instrument. Not that there's anything wrong with someone who only sings, but it's much more of an experience for me as a listener when someone sings, plays, and writes their music. Same thing with Sarah McLachlan - she's got an amazing voice, she writes, and she plays the piano and the guitar. She's got a huge, huge amount of talent. Norah Jones - I love her husky voice, her mellow writing style, and her simple piano licks. Gavin McGraw has an amazing soulful voice, writes great songs, and plays the piano. He has great charisma, but still is a very real person and his songs - you know, you feel them.

(The Richmond Buzz) For sure. Now, you've opened up for some national acts like Sugar Ray, Huey Lewis and The News, and Switchfoot. What were those experiences like?

(Kari) Singing in front of thousands of people was different than anything I'd ever experienced. I've sang the National Anthem for 3 Richmond Braves games, for an Ultimate Fighting event at the Richmond Colieum, and opening for several major label artists. My first big experience was singing the National Anthem at the open of a Huey Lewis and The News show. Strangely enough, when I walked out on stage, even though I'd never been on a stage that big, or sang in front of that that many people, I looked at the flag, and all I could think of was the meaning of the National Anthem to me, and I wasn't nervous at all. But, as soon as I finished singing and I heard all of those people screaming, I was just completely overwhelmed to realize that many people were listening to me and looking at me. It's fun to have the attention and the recognition, but it's also a huge feeling of responsibility. When you make a mistake in front of that many people, everybody hears it. (laughs)

(The Richmond Buzz) Now the Richmond area certainly misses you since you've moved to Nashville. What do you hope moving to Tennessee will bring toward your success in your career?

(Kari) One of the things that I would like to accomplish is becoming a published songwriter, and that's difficult - if not impossible - to do in the Richmond area. I will always be a musician, but I do also eventually want to be a wife and a mommy, and you can't do that if you're performing until 1am and getting to sleep at 4am every morning. I'd guess that would be a hard life for a parent and their child. Being a performer can be hard on you, physically and mentally. I also wanted to surround myself with like-minded musicians and writers, and there are a lot of them there. I was surrounded by like-minded people in the West End of Richmond as long as I was working in the corporate world, but being an artist is quite different. We march to the beat of a different drummer, I guess. (laughs)

(The Richmond Buzz) What do you miss about Richmond?

(Kari) I miss my family, of course, and the familiarity of people that I know. In Richmond, it's easy to be a big fish in a small sea, and a new musician in Nashville is a very small fish in a very big sea. I know that, and I'm totally okay with that. In Nashville, it is easy to find people who can sing, write, and play an instrument, so suddenly you've been pushed down to the same level that everyone else is on. It'll be harder work to get recognition. But the people in Nashville are great.

(The Richmond Buzz) (laughs) Where can you purchase your CDs?

(Kari) I have two CDs out - an EP-length CD with 6 songs called "go with you", and a full-length self-titled CD, "Kari". You can purchase it on my website, www.musickari.com, at CDBaby.com, or through iTunes. You can also purchase them at shows.

(The Richmond Buzz) Is there anything I missed that you would like to mention?

(Kari) Any musician that is considering a career as a professional musician should try it - even if only for a little while. It's a lot of work, but it has been so worth it for me. If your music is just a hobby to you, treat it as such; if your music is your business, treat it as such. Do what is necessary to make it work, but don't lose the fun or the passion. Let the passion and the fun and the enjoyment fuel the desire to make it work as a business. I never thought I could've done it. Honestly, I gave myself a trial period of three months, and it worked so well, that I gave myself 6 months, then a year. I am so glad that I pushed myself, because it's been the most rewarding thing I've ever done in my life. - The Richmond Buzz

Native returns with new CD, several shows

When Kari Smith performs in the Richmond area, she isn’t just sharing her musical stylings with just anyone — she’s showing the folks at home how she is making a name for herself with her talents

Published: March 18, 2009
By Melody Kinser
mkinser@mechlocal.com

When Kari Smith performs in the Richmond area, she isn’t just sharing her musical stylings with just anyone — she’s showing the folks at home how she is making a name for herself with her talents.
She opened on Friday, with eight shows scheduled over a two-and-a-half-week period.
In a recent telephone interview from her home in Nashville, she said she comes back “to Richmond about once every two or three months. I’ll come home for two weeks and play six or seven shows.”

For this trip home, she added New Kent and Mattaponi. “These are venues I haven’t played yet.”

Kari brings with her a new CD entitled “Gypsy of Love,” which was just recently released. She did say coming home to perform is centered around the CD release. “Gypsy of Love” is now available at Plan 9 in the Carytown and Williamsburg locations. It also can be purchased online at http://www.karismithmusic.com and http://www.myspace.com/karismith.

With three CDs “under her belt,” she said it is “really interesting to look back through the first and second CDs and hear how things have moved forward.”

“Especially noticeable in this CD,” she said, “is such a huge amount of talent in Nashville.” She said she was fortunate to have “top-notch music, a keyboard player who had performed on all of Alan Jackson’s CDS and a bass player who worked with Hank Williams Jr.” Kari also boasts a fiddler player that “has a Grammy from work with Shania Twain. It’s just an amazing list of talent.”

In addition to her vocal talents, Kari said she also writes “all the songs on my CD.” She also plays the guitar and piano. “A little bit of diversity opens up more opportunities for you — you have people needing you for different things.”

“It’s great to come home because I played there for about two years before I moved to Nashville. I have a little bit of a fan base built up there and they’re just so, so supportive, and it feels like coming home just to have those people there..” She said they are “always supportive.”

Before heading to the country music capital in Tennessee, Kari spent her early years in Mechanicsville, making her home with her family in the Cherrydale subdivision. “After a few years of working at Ukrop’s in Mechanicsville, and a five-year stint at Capital One that ended in a layoff, I began performing in local venues in the Richmond and surrounding areas for a couple years until I followed my dream to Nashville in 2006,” Kari said.

She was laid off in 2005 and decided to follow her heart in the music field. She started out by playing “mostly in the Richmond area, and as far west as Charlottesville and as far east as Hampton Roads.”

“I moved to Nashville in 2006, after taking a trip to Austin, Texas, and Nashville, Tennessee, to see where I wanted to end up.”

Her parents, Leigh and Linda Smith, still live in Mechanicsville, as does one of her sisters, Karen Smith-Will. Her other sisters are Kasi Grosvenor of Glen Allen, Shari Piecy of Seaford and Sharen Hickman of Fort Rucker, Ala.
Kari’s grandmother, Blanche Batkins and aunt, Willie Hobson, as well as several cousins, also live in Mechanicsville.

Kari is candid about the competition in Nashville.
As for pursuing her dream, she said, “Basically, it seems like it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but you don’t make a lot of money in Nashville at all. There are so many musicians.”
Kari is a graduate of Landmark Christian School in Richmond. She then received an associate degree in liberal arts from Tidewater Community College and is in her junior year at Old Dominion University, where she is working toward a bachelor’s degree.

She said her education has “been put on hold for now while I pursue my music career. I have also taken coursework in the music program at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College.”

Photos courtesy of Kari Smith
Mechanicsville

Native Kari Smith has been performing in the Greater Richmond area since Friday, with more shows planned through the month. Her latest CD, “Gypsy of Love,” is now on sale. - The Mechanicsville Local

CHOICES
November / December 2009

We all make choices every day. Some carry greater risks, but, at the same time, offer greater rewards. Some of us are less willing to take the risks, and often that results in missed opportunities. However, at times, the consequences are not that for which we had hoped. Whatever the case, there are choices we have made and will continue to make, that could impact us for years to come if not for the rest of our lives. With this issue, we begin a series of exploration. We will be asking persons from all walks of life to tell us about the most important choice they have ever made and how it turned out.

“Security has always been a big thing for me,” says Kari Smith, a Richmond native who grew up in Mechanicsville. “I had a 401k when I was twenty-one.”
By the time Smith, a soft-spoken young woman, was in her mid-twenties, she also was on her way to what appeared to be a lifelong career with Capital One. She owned her own home, had an Associate’s degree in Liberal Arts, and was pursuing a degree in Business Management from ODU.
She also had two passions...horses and music. Following an injury from a horseback accident, she changed gears and began to sing karaoke, and was soon operating the karaoke at a local nightspot. Her musical exposure had been limited to religious and classical music, and singing in school and church. “It (sacred and classical music) was the only thing I was allowed to listen to while growing up,” Smith says. Her entire primary education, kindergarten through her senior year in high school, had been in a local Christian school.
While she enjoyed singing, she says she never considered making that a career. Never, that is until something happened in 2005 that forced her to reconsider her career path. In September of that year, she was laid off from her job. “It was quite a surprise,” Smith admits. “We knew layoffs were coming, but my manager felt it wouldn't affect our team. When you've never gone through that experience, you don't know what to expect,” she says. “You know it's not a personal thing, when you're part of a large group, but, still, you take it personally. You work hard and when your job ends, you feel that you somehow didn't do well enough.”
While dealing with those feelings, Smith also began to deal with the realities of life after Capital One. She had been singing professionally on a part-time basis with some local bands, but she felt that there was no way an entertainment career could pay the bills. But, she continues, “After a month of putting in applications at other businesses, I began to wonder, what if this (a career in music) could work?”
So as Smith says, “I started to do the math. I knew I'd have severance pay for a short time. I decided that if I got a roommate perhaps I could do it.”
She continues, “The numbers were tight, but they did work out.” She also had other sacrifices to make. “I drove a big diesel truck that I had bought to eventually pull a horse trailer,” she says. “I loved horses. I wanted to have horses, but I decided that if I was going to pursue music, I couldn’t afford to keep the truck and it wasn’t practical for traveling to gigs.”
By this time, Smith had begun writing music as well as performing. “It had become an outlet,” she says. So she wrote a song about her truck, aptly entitled HER TRUK, a reference to the vanity license plate on the beloved Dodge.
She began doing gigs with a local musician, Dave Tinney. “He pushed me out of the nest,” she says. “He told me, 'Now that you have experience, you need to go out and pursue this on your own.' So I went out and bought a guitar.”
The attractive, young redhead says things began to move quickly at that point. “I was making a pretty decent living, getting close to what I was making when I began working at Capital One. I had recorded my first CD”, an EP of 6 original songs entitled go with you, “and was working on my second”, a full-length album self-titled Kari.
Smith had already made some big decisions, but the biggest was ahead. She decided that if she really was going to succeed as both a performer and writer, she needed to be in Nashville, and she made that move in September 2006. In her personal journal, she revealed her thoughts about the choice she made. In the early morning hours of January 15, 2007 she wrote:

“I realized tonight that I am finally in a place in my life where I can realize things about myself. It’s this process of peeling layers back until I can figure out what’s really going on. Peel back the layers of stability, comfort, and complacency. That’s where it gets tough – pulling back the layers of expectations, approval, criticism. Even then, more layers come up, many that I didn’t even know were there..”

“I moved 600 miles away from where almost all my family and friends were to a city where I knew absolutely no one. I left behind a boyfriend, my dog, and everything else that didn’t fit in a 5x8 trailer, and had no idea what my new circumstances would be. It was terrifying.”
That sounds like the making of a country song in itself, and certainly aspects of her life continue to show up in her music. She continues to write and to perform. In order to finance her third album Gypsy of Love, this time to be recorded in Nashville with a Music Row producer and professional studio musicians, Smith sold her house. Today, she stays busy in the business. She now has her own band and says this will give her more opportunities to play larger venues.
Looking back on her choice, a choice that led from a comfortable home in Richmond to the uncertainties of a city that has seen dreams both fulfilled and destroyed, Smith says, “The most rewarding thing is looking back and seeing that I actually had the courage to do it; on an ongoing basis to know that I'm doing it. I'm living it. I'm making it happen.”
Sometimes, she says, friends and acquaintances will ask about all the sacrifices she has made. “They ask me, 'What if you never make it?'
“It's not about being famous,” she says. “It's more about being able to support myself while doing what I love.” So how does she respond to the “what if you never make it” question?
“My reply,” she says, “is 'I already did.'”
Kari tours and performs in the Virginia area often. To view her schedule, check out her website at www.karismithmusic.com or www.myspace.com/karismith or send an email to karismithmusic@gmail.com. Her albums can be purchased at Plan 9 stores in Carytown, online at www.cdbaby.com/Artist/KariSmith, or search “Kari Smith” on iTunes.
- Hanover Lifestyle Magazine