No, you haven’t stumbled across the world’s lone Jim Croce lookalike. It’s actually 22-year-old Jake Smith, known to Nashvillians as “Legit Smitty.”
Being raised in Lexington, South Carolina and currently residing in Nashville, Tennessee would no doubt leave anyone with a bit of whiplash. Lexington’s population is around 24,000, small potatoes compared to 700,000 and counting residents in Music City all vying to see their names in the neon on Broadway.
For Smitty, that exhaustion with what feels like a constant performance is made audibly evident on his newest record, “Medicine Songs.” Smitty more or less spends the half-hour playtime of this project crooning solitary reflection over an arrangement filled with the whispers of the outside world. Birds are chirping, the creek is running, yet Smitty is all alone. Or rather, he’s being willfully ignorant of his surroundings for the sake of being in tune with what’s right in front of him.
Smitty wrote and produced most of his newest record with little to no outside creative help.
“To be honest, I’m most inspired by my friends who are not traditionally creative, I would say people who just read a lot of books,” Smitty said. “People who are good listeners inspire me a lot, because it makes me think of what I could be listening for better. I think things most people consider ‘normal’ inspire me more than most other things, just because normalcy feels like something I strive for, living in Nashville.”
Where most in Smitty’s arena seemed to be concerned with inspiration coming in the form of immaculacy, being derivative of normalcy is the bread and butter of the man himself.
Again, no real surprise here. Smitty undoubtedly sells the uber-grounded persona given the tint his lens of life seems to have equipped. He’s a self-described “low budget romantic comedy,” and his journey certainly fits the bill.
“This project has pretty much been a DIY adventure, I’ve recorded everything at least in some way on my own, and then the romantic part is pretty much the majority of my songwriting or lack thereof, and then the comedy part is where I take a step back and kinda go ‘oh this is actually really funny’, just about life in general,” Smitty said.
Smitty now has three EPs and two full-length projects under his belt.
As heavy-handed as Smitty gets at times, his keen sense of feeling never seems to push him to desperation. Rather, it advocates for an even more romanticized worldview. The guy wrote a ballad for his old pair of boots, how much more plainly poetic can you get?
Smitty is an exceptionally endearing soul. Beyond songwriting, beauty in the ordinary is something he chooses to put on display as reminders to his listeners, but maybe also to himself as well. The cover of “Medicine Songs,” a far-off shot of Smitty engrossed in forestry, was taken on the edges of Pisgah National Forest while visiting with his family this past Thanksgiving. His sister, Becca, was the photographer.
“I wanted it to be casual, like I was just wearing the clothes I had on that day,” Smitty said. “I was like, ‘alright, Becca, I’m gonna walk this way and just take a picture.’”
As time has marched on, Smitty’s begun to place more and more value on simplicity. While this is already evident in his prose, it’s also led to changes in his lifestyle as a causation. For Smitty, the “artist life” doesn’t have to be all-encompassing, nor should it be. Is it really time wasted if you enjoyed yourself doing it?
“Nashville can be really unfulfilling if you do it the wrong way,” Smitty said. “Like you have your friends, but it’s usually the people you make music with or they’re profitable in some way. And recently, I’ve kinda taken a step back and been like ‘no’ and recognized that I can say that.
“I love skateboarding, and like normal, non-creative stuff like walking through the woods. I’ve just been trying to prioritize cooking good meals, going to the movies, just not being so work oriented. And I wanna do that with people I love simply because I love them, not because of some value we may bring to each other.”
With a catalog as deep and a heart as big as Smitty’s, it becomes clear who folk music’s new everyman could soon become. There’s no grandiose sense of importance he attaches to himself, no wheels that need reinventing. Just a boy, his guitar and an old pair of boots.
“Legit Smitty has always been for me to share my heart as bluntly as I can, and to tell my truth and stories as well as I can to help someone feel more comfortable in their own skin,” Smitty said.
Regardless of where his career goes from here, Legit Smitty’s insanely pure approach to just about everything is one that needs to be taken note of. In a world so goal-driven we’ll make up tasks for the satisfaction of checking them off, purely existing is oftentimes looked upon as an oddity. For Smitty, and hopefully for his audience, being “boring” might just be what makes us happiest in the end.
