John Smith has released ‘Hold On’, a collaboration with The Staves’ Jessica Staveley-Taylor.
The beautiful, uplifting new track embodies a thread of hopefulness in a blanket of bad news; a thread that runs through his upcoming new album ‘The Fray’ which will be released on 26th March via Thirty Tigers.
Smith found himself facing personal and unrelenting change. In the Spring, Smith and his wife lost a pregnancy, and his mother was diagnosed with cancer. With his touring schedule of two hundred days a year on the road suddenly on indefinite hiatus, for the first time in over a decade, Smith was home.
“With newfound pain coming from so many directions, dealing with the uncertainty it brings, I closed the curtains and picked up the pen, turning to song-writing as a lifeline” explains Smith.
Smith co-produced The Fray with producer Sam Lakeman. They recorded it at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studio.