Shane Smith and the Saints are a vibrant, dynamic band known for blending a diverse range of genres into their soul-stirring sound. Formed in Austin, Texas, this five-piece ensemble has been captivating audiences with their heartfelt lyrics and high-energy performances for a decade now. Rooted in folk, rock, country, and americana influences, Shane Smith and the Saints have crafted a unique musical identity that defies easy categorisation. Their music tells stories of love, loss, and life’s adventures, often infused with a sense of spirituality and introspection and new album, ‘Norther’, out Friday March 1st, is their best yet!
We were thrilled to catch up with frontman, band leader and creative force, Shane Smith, to talk all about it. Read our five star review of ‘Norther’ right here.
Thanks for giving us your time today, Shane, it’s lovely to catch up with you again.
Absolutely, man, I appreciate it too. How are you?
Good, thank you. All the better for having a new Shane Smith and the Saints album out in the world! (It comes out Friday March 1st)
I hope you are enjoying it! It’s been a few years since we put out a full studio release and since that album, ‘Hail Mary’ (2019) came out it’s been since the majority of our success has happened so we’re a bit nervous and excited at the same time.
We last spoke at the Long Road festival here in the UK last August. What a great show you put on. Did you enjoy the show and the trip or was the whole process just a blur?
It was amazing. You’ve got the chaos and the blur, no matter what, doing what we do! (laughing) It’s what we signed ourselves up for, right? We put ourselves into a lot of those situations when we go out on tour!
It was an incredible few days and was a really cool experience getting to come over and perform in front of so many folks who are seeing us live for the first time. I’ve always had this feedback but we get told that our studio recordings don’t necessarily do us justice as a band as our live shows are so different! My voice has changed so much over the years too – it sounds bad – but from scar tissue and damage (laughing) and so we’re a different sounding band live to anything that you could hear on Spotify so it’s always cool being able to play for folks and watch them react to us as a band, especially for the first time.
What that tells me is that in 18 months time when the ‘Norther’ cycle is done you need to release a live album then!
Yeah, for sure. We’ve got that in the works, actually! We got to headline Red Rocks for the first time, back in May and we recorded and filmed the entire show so there might be an announcement for something like that before too long.
Let’s dig into ‘Norther’ a little. I told you last time that I thought ‘Hail Mary’ was a superb, cinematic album but I think ‘Norther’ surpasses it.
Thank you. I agree with you. Of all the things we’ve put out so far, this is by far the best record of them all. I also feel like it’s the most accessible album we’ve ever released. A lot of our stuff has been a bit out there and a bit different at times but I feel like this body of work can be appreciated as a whole, no matter what genre or kind of music you listen to.
For those of us on this side of the Atlantic can you elaborate on what a ‘Norther’ is and why you chose it as the title of the album?
So, a ‘Norther’ is a massive storm front that blows in from the north. We see them all the time in places like Texas and in Oklahoma. Check out Chris LeDoux – he mentions a blue norther which is a dark, blue and grey storm front that just looks like a wall.
It’s kind of scary being out in a field and seeing a norther heading towards your way – you 100% realise that nothing is going to stop that thing! It’s pretty intimidating but it’s also something that is beautiful and incredible at the same time. It brings a lot of change and brings water to farmers that need it, so there’s two sides to them, just like lots of things in life so it seemed like an impactful and appropriate name for our record and where we are in our career right now.
The artwork is superb. I’ve got the vinyl on pre-order and I can’t wait to get the cover up on my wall, which I do for the most impactful of covers that move me.
A good friend of mine, Teal Blake, who lives in Fort Worth, Texas did the cover. He paints western imagery and he’s incredible. I’d reached out to him about doing the poster for the Red Rocks show and he did an incredible job on that so I asked him to do the record and he knocked it out of the park.
The album is sequenced beautifully, from ‘Book of Joe’ to ‘Fire in the Ocean’ – it takes the listener on such a journey. Did you put a lot of effort into the sequencing or has streaming rendered that a forgotten art?
I really did think a lot and put a lot of effort into where the songs went. Not many people listen to records from start to finish anymore but it is such a magical journey when you do and the artist gets it right.
It’s a game changer for an album if you can get the sequencing right and we did put a ton of thought into it. There were other versions of the album that we listened to until we felt like we got the flow and the order right, it was absolutely a process! I’m stoked to hear you say that it takes you for a ride – there are a lot of peaks, valleys and points of high energy in between as you listen to it.
The most impactful point comes at track 7 with ‘Wheels’ to me. There’s a run of really intense songs and then ‘Wheels’ comes on – it resets the album ready for the second half and it feels very much like a palette cleanser too as you sing about life on the road.
That was completely intentional. You get through a run of heavier songs with real intensity and then ‘Wheels’ asks you to breathe and reflect. The song is about the dog days of our touring because we ran the band for many years without any kind of break or success and if you listen to the lyrics, some of them are pretty dumb and funny – life in our 20s, right? But it’s a great palette cleanser and a chance to look back and reflect too.
‘Field of Heather’ feels like quite a spiritual song. Do you consider yourself a spiritual person and what format does that take in your everyday life?
Yeah. I do see myself as a spiritual person. My mother’s cousin was a very successful Christian musician and pastor. His band was called Phillips Craig and Dean – they were successful in contemporary Christian music in the 90s and they have spoken with me about doing an interview with us at church. I always say that I appreciate that but I don’t consider myself as much of a leader on that front, to be out in front of everybody, talking.
I do subconsciously mention spiritual imagery in my lyrics I think, a lot. My goal is not to bombard people with opinions or ideas at all – I don’t think that’s the job of a musician, our job is to give people an escape from the heaviness and weight of the world. I like to think that I write hopeful lyrics with a nod to understanding that there might be something greater than us at play in our world. That can be a powerful thing and it can connect people, no matter where they live or what their circumstances are.
‘All the Way’ and ‘Everything and More’ are such beautiful ballads on ‘Norther’. Tell me a little more about the stories and inspirations behind them.
‘All the Way’ was co-written with my wife. We write a lot of lyrics together and, historically, she’s one of the few people I’ve ever co-written with. We had both been travelling a ton for work and had flown in and wanted to go and get some dinner and wind down and wash away the road – we didn’t have any intention of writing something.
We sat down and she started talking about Johnny Cash’s last record before he passed. The one with the cover of Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Hurt.’ The songs on that record are so raw and my wife started talking about how cool it would be to do a song in that vein. A love song with that baritone, almost Gospel style of piano sound to it and that lead us down a rabbit hole where 20 minutes later we had a chorus!!
We wanted to write a song about love, commitment and that journey of a relationship, from beginning to end. We intentionally wanted it to be just vocal and piano but the sound of someone who almost doesn’t really know how to play piano, if that makes sense! (laughing) If you listen to it, it is so simple. Fast forward 9 months and we had a studio session booked late night and we sat down around midnight and we did about 30 takes of that song with me and my producer and we played and played and played it over and over again and then sent it off to be mixed. When we got it back there was something weird about it that I just couldn’t put my finger on until we realised all the breaths and the incidental sounds of me moving around had been taken out so we put them all back in again – you can even hear a creak in the bench of the piano stool at one point – and the second we did that we realised we had something perfect.
You could add a string section or even pedal steel guitar into it but we wanted this first version of it to just be completely raw.
‘Everything and More’ was a song I’d been working on for several years, off and on. It’s kinda about falling back to the things that truly matter to you when everything around you is falling apart. That’s something that everybody can relate to, I think. The chorus is so powerful – if all this falls apart, you are all that matters to me. It wasn’t getting a bunch of attention going into the making of the album until our producer heard it and and thought it was amazing. It’s now in a format where it has been produced way more than I was expecting it to be but I think it offers a really cool experience and moment on the album that is needed.
You are going to have a problem leaving some of these songs out of your live set because I could see an argument for every song on ‘Norther’ needing to be played live. Maybe you should play the album in its entirety?
Yeah, I honestly feel the same way. We’ve been talking about what to do with our live shows because there is just a lot of really cool music on this album and the songs sound so good live. I feel like this record has a really great sonic spectrum to it that is going to work incredibly well in the live format! We do have some decisions to make about our setlists, that’s for sure! (laughing)
Shane Smith & the Saints – ‘Norther’ is out on Friday March 1st. It’s our album of the year so far and will be gaining (spoiler alert) my first five star review of the year. Check back here on the site on Friday for the full review. Pre-order the album here in the UK.
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