The lights are up at The Wiltern in Los Angeles. The smell of stale beer hangs around the iconic art deco venue and Caroline Smith, now better known as Your Smith, is on stage setting up her equipment. While a self-sufficient sound check is standard for opening acts, today Smith is greeted with the crowded view of fans who shelled out extra to meet (and, of course, greet) the night’s headliner—K. Flay. Instead of playing pieces of tracks to an empty house, Smith watches concertgoers fawn over someone else. This curveball doesn’t shake her.
“I think challenging myself has kept me really engaged with touring,” says the 31-year-old artist from her dressing room. “There’s always room to improve.” She seems at home in a worn-in Bonnie Raitt T-shirt, curled up on a couch. She tousles her blonde pixie cut, diving deeper into her quest for live perfection. “After every show I’m just thinking about what I could have done better. Like, where I lost the audience and where I could keep them, you know?” While Smith knows that she’s not the main event right now, she’s not ruling out the step-and-repeat moments of musical fame. “I sell my own merch at the end of the night, so I get a little bit of that [interaction] now,” Smith says. “I have fans that started listening to me when I was 18 or 19. They keep showing up and I know them by name!”
If you’re doing the math, having fans for over a decade doesn’t make sense for an artist whose discography only features a handful of singles and two EPs from 2018 on. However, Smith’s trajectory in the music industry isn’t a typical one. She first caught the attention of the music industry in 2008 as the frontwoman for Minneapolis’s folk-pop outfit, Caroline Smith and the Good Night Sleeps. Under her given name and chosen band, Smith released three full-length albums, but being the “Caroline Smith” who wore heels and had big, styled hair was exhausting. “I thought, that’s what Beyoncé does, so that’s what Caroline does, right?” the songstress laughs. It was time for her to shift gears.
“I created Your Smith because Caroline needed a break,” says Smith, comfortable with referring to her past self in the third person. “Caroline has a really hard time saying no, but sometimes I personify Your Smith and it’s easier to say no. Your Smith cares a little bit less; she’s a little bit bossier, she’s a little bit more unapologetic. So, sometimes I’m like ‘You’re not Caroline right now, you’re Your Smith.’ You have your uniform on, you can say no.” Beyond gaining the confidence to speak up for herself through her stage name, Smith gained a better understanding of her personal identity.
“For some reason, I just feel like Caroline Smith, the name, does not represent me all the time,” she says. “When I think about [the name] it’s feminine, it’s very soft. It’s my great aunt’s name and my grandmother’s name [and] it evokes that in me, you know? They’re very amazing women, but sometimes I just want to like separate myself from the history.” In shedding her familial history and her folky musical past, Smith got something she sincerely coveted: “I wanted a fresh Google search.”
I am a personal testament to how important it is that people speak out about being themselves, claiming their identity.
While Smith’s second act has afforded her the ability to expand her sound to include catchy pop-adjacent tendencies and more, this second go-around within the industry has provided more insights and wisdom than she could imagine. “[Your Smith] has definitely given me the permission that maybe could wear what I want to wear and be the person that I want to be,” says the singer-songwriter. “I’m a lot of things: I feel femme sometimes, I don’t feel femme sometimes, and I think that’s the biggest thing that I’ve learned through Your Smith. And also from this amazing moment that has gone on. I am a personal testament to how important it is that people speak out about being themselves, claiming their identity. It has affected me greatly and it has given me the bravery to be like I want to be this way as well. I think Your Smith has kind of freed that in me, which is beautiful.” Smith pauses to collect her thoughts, “You just feel better as a person when you can really show who you want to be.”
You can hear the culmination of this soul searching and rigorous training on Smith’s latest EP, Wild, Wild Woman. Her second under the Your Smith moniker, Wild, Wild Woman is only 16 minutes long, but jam-packed with the themes of expectations versus identity, womanhood, new beginnings and more. “Before my songs felt…non-committal, whereas Your Smith feels very focused. I know what I want to do, I know how I want to make people feel and I know that I like real instruments… I love Rihanna, but I’m not that artist and I had to come to terms with that. I want to write songs that people feel enveloped by.”
This dedication to releasing songs versus albums is deliberate, even though Smith is willing to admit that she’s got a deep bench of material ready to go: “I am trying to accept that the music industry is not what the music industry was even five years ago, even one year ago, it’s crazy.” The seasoned professional side of Smith briefly overtakes the room. “But I live in like the world of albums being really important… It doesn’t work like that anymore.” She points out that the rate in which people consume music has exploded thanks to widespread new technology. “I just don’t feel like I’m afforded the luxury yet—as Your Smith—to be able to drop an album. Albums are so important to me; they take a lot of time, they take a lot of deliberation and a lot of creating and honing and editing. And right now, I know if I dropped an album it would be forgotten so fast. It would be just a blip and I want to do my music a bit more justice than that.”
While we wait for Your Smith’s full-length debut, the recent southern California resident has been honing her craft with the help of LA’s blossoming music community—including collaborating with rising artists like Miya Folick and LPX. “There are a lot of women making music that is really fucking good and boundary pushing and honest and amazing right now. And we’re all friends and I love that!”
Smith’s also still working on connecting with herself: “What I’ve been going through lately and really working on in therapy—Therapy’s great, everyone should do it and it serves everyone—my therapist wrote down a list of affirmations to say to myself and the top one (the most important one) is that not everyone has to like you. And I think that helps me a lot as my armor. I want to wear slacks, I want to wear a dress sometimes. I’m still exploring what that means to me and I don’t have the answers, but it’s okay that I’m doing that and that I’m exploring that because not everyone has to like you. And you’re allowed to take time to figure things out for yourself and you don’t need an answer for everything because not everyone has to like you.”
As Smith continues to find her own answers through her journey, she’s walking that fine line between where Caroline Smith the individual starts and Your Smith the artist ends. She knows that the only thing that’s constant in life is change. “So, I think Your Smith is here to stay,” Smith says. She lets that linger before shaking her head with a laugh. “But, as I said earlier, you can never make the call now!”
BAILEY PENNICK 