San Francisco singer-songwriter Sonny Smith has only one formal release to his name, and that disc came out back in 2003–he’s hardly a star in the Bay Area, and outside it he’s practically unknown. But earlier this year he finished what may turn out to be one of the best records of 2007. The forthcoming concept album, Fruitvale, plays like a postmodern barrio version of Our Town set to music, a series of character sketches drawn from the mostly Latino neighborhood in Oakland where he lived for three years. Smith refracts the fragile pop of Daniel Johnston, the cracked bohemian poetry of Tom Waits, and the underdog narratives of Randy Newman through his own skewed kaleidoscope.
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Most of Fruitvale was recorded in Chicago with arranger and coproducer Leroy Bach, best known from his time in Wilco, and as a result a handful of CD-R copies have been circulating in town. Smith admits he’s a poor self-promoter–he didn’t do much to push his 2003 release–but he’s the type of artist other musicians gravitate toward, and the Chicago talent on Fruitvale includes bassist Matt Lux, guitarist Emmett Kelly, and singers Kelly Hogan, Nora O’Connor, and Edith Frost. Alt-country stars Neko Case and Jolie Holland have handpicked him to open tours for them, and Green on Red guitarist Chuck Prophet has secured national distribution for his tiny Belle Sound label specifically to put out Fruitvale. “It’s great to have people like Chuck or Leroy or Neko supporting me,” says Smith. “I feel like they do it ’cause they believe in the records, which feels like a bigger achievement than anything commercial.”
Smith had also moved across the Bay to Oakland, forced out of San Francisco by rising rents, and he ended up in Fruitvale. “It’s a very strange and wild place,” he says. “I never saw a police car in Fruitvale as long as I was there, but I saw a lot of gang stuff, a lot of gunshots going off, a lot of riots whenever the Raiders would win or lose, and a lot of what they call sideshows–Friday and Saturday nights, people cruising around in their cars, peeling out and doing doughnuts. I always thought of it as a very unruly place. The main drag is a little skid rowish, kind of broken-down–it’s like the ghost of a Main Street. I liked Fruitvale a lot as a kind of a study of American fallout.”
Smith had burned a small CD-R edition of Sweet Lorraine in 2004, and that same year One Act Plays had come out in a limited run accompanying an issue of the literary magazine Watchword, but he wasn’t totally happy with either recording. Sweet Lorraine follows the life cycle of a romantic
This summer Smith’s profile got a boost from a two-week west-coast tour opening for Case, with Leroy Bach and Emmett Kelly as his backing band. He’s currently a stay-at-home dad to the two-year-old son he has with his girlfriend, but he seems ready to start treating music as more of a job. “I’ve done a bunch of stuff–written short stories in lit mags, done little plays.
