 Sonny Smith Sonny Smith was born in San Francisco, 1972. At seventeen he moved to the Colorado mountain town of Gunnison and started playing blues piano in local bars and clubs. Two years later he moved to Denver and entertained weekly at the Mercury Café and Muddy's Coffee House playing four and five-hour sets till closing at 3am. Unable to stay too long in one place, Sonny traveled to the jungles of Costa Rica, where he found himself living on an organic farm just a few miles from the Caribbean. It was here he first began to write songs, as well as plays, screenplays, and short stories. He met two other musicians with whom he busked up and down the tropical coast, playing tunes wherever invited. In 1996, Sonny returned to San Francisco where he landed a gig at the Rite Spot playing blues piano. The piano was so badly out of tune, he began facing the audience to perform his own songs playing guitar and harmonica. He eventually abandoned the piano entirely to develop his own style of folk music and long-winded storytelling with improvisational lyrics. This launched him into the San Francisco club circuit, where he leads an ever- revolving cast of local musicians. He recently toured the Southwest with Neko Case in 2006. Sonny’s early CDs include This Is My Story, This Is My Song, released in 2002, followed the next year by Sordid Tales of Love and Woe, Sweet Lorraine featuring Jolie Holland on harmonies. In 2005, Watchword Literary Magazine commissioned Sonny to produce One Act Plays, a CD that includes Edith Frost, Neko Case, Miranda July, Jolie Holland, Andy Cabic, Virgil Shaw, Mark Eitzel, and John Dwire, Rico Bell, among other talented artists. This year (2007) sees the release of Fruitvale, a collaboration with Chicago musicians Leroy Bach, Kelly Hogan, and Graeme Gibson, that features songs Sonny wrote about his old neighborhood in Oakland. Creative writing, including theatre and screenplay production, also ranks high among Sonny's artistic endeavers. In 2000, he wrote and directed his first short movie "Kid Gus Man." In 2005, he garnered a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts to write and perform the play The Dangerous Stranger, and received a residency in 2006 from the LAB in San Francisco to produce part two of the saga, “Stranger Danger!" Since 2000, Sonny has penned "Steppin' Out," a column for the New Mission Newspaper, in addition to publishing stories in the New York literary magazine Si Senor.  Virgil Shaw Review from All Muisic Guide- Quad Cities was loaded with amazingly rich, evocative songwriting, and so too is Still Falling; however, Virgil Shaw's second solo outing is quite a different narrative from his first even if it tells much the same tale. "Stunning" seems to be the word that has most attached itself to Still Falling, and with excellent reason. Eschewing the stark hollerin' blues and sometimes devastating bleakness of the debut (but not its soulful, almost gospel fervor), the album has a swooning, stardust lushness missing on its predecessor. Employing many of the same players, it nevertheless is much more exquisitely produced. Beds of vibes, horns, and keyboards wrap themselves around bridges and refrains before fading back into the darkness, only to reappear again when the mood runs high. Country music has always been but a few liquor benders and a few bad breakups (and perhaps a nudge and a wink) from R&B, and Still Falling, with its almost inarticulate depths of emotion and the fervor with which both its despair and jubilation are conveyed, could often pass for either genre depending on which bar you happen to be hearing the music in. This is true on such songs as the raucously cynical "Clock on the Wall," the crestfallen title track, and the woefully poignant and noble character study "Owner Operator." And nowhere is it more evident than on "Sing Me Back Home," which even displays some of Willie Nelson's jazzy sense of rhythm. Shaw's half-there, half out-to-lunch slur of a drawl, though, is as country as it gets, often missing the high notes by a couple miles and barely scraping the underside of some of the mid-range ones, but he wrestles and wrangles with every tune with such undeniable passion and fire that it always comes out sounding just right. Full of ballads as mortally anguished as a howl at the moon and spot-on evocations of the sort of blindly fumbling and sloppily groping sentimentality to which we all, at times, fall prey (even if we have trouble admitting it), Still Falling couldn't be any more beautifully broken if filled up the bottom of George Jones' bourbon flask. |
