SmithField formed in 2011, drawing upon their shared family history and diverse musical influences. From the start, their music was a mix of contemporary and classic, blurring boundaries between country, pop, and rock.
Moving to Nashville in 2012, they carried the torch for country music’s rich legacy of male-female duets into the 21st century, achieving success with hits like ‘Hey Whiskey’ and ‘We’ll Figure It Out.’ With over 100 million digital streams and praise from Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Forbes, Smithfield are finally releasing their debut album, ‘Country With Heart (Part 1)’
The album is a compelling blend of modern country sounds and heartfelt storytelling which finds the duo masterfully intertwining their voices and emotions, creating an album that resonates deeply with listeners. Each track showcases their signature harmonies and poignant lyrical phrasing, making it a standout addition to the contemporary country music scene. We were thrilled to catch up with Trey and Jenn to talk all about it.
Thank you for your time today guys, we love the new album but before we talk about that, let's touch base on your visit to London in 2023 for the C2C festival. Did we leave you with fond memories?
Jenn: Y'all were insane, we loved every minute of it. The fans were incredible and they seemed to really appreciate what we did, I hear that across the board. Hopefully we will be back next year, we've already had talks about it.
Trey: We will be back as soon as is humanely possible. My wife is a huge Harry Potter fan so we went and did the studio tour there. We checked out some cool restaurants, we're huge foodies so we're always trying to find the best food and coffee.
‘Country With Heart' is out this week, have you got anything special planned?
Jenn: We have a big release show Thursday night in Nashville. We'll stay up till midnight and celebrate and see where it lands on the charts too.
Your 2021 EP ‘New Town' was crowdfunded by a Kickstarter campaign. Was ‘Country With Heart' funded in a similar way?
Trey: Being an independent artist you have to do everything yourself and over the past decade we've managed to build our career to a point where we were able to self fund the recording of this album. Thanks to our fans and the the people that have supported us we were able to self-fund this album.
A lot of people don't understand the challenges of what being independent means. What have you learned about yourselves and the industry over the past ten years?
Jenn: We've learned that we have a resilience that we didn't know we had within us! Our first record label folded after we had just made an album that never saw the light of day and at that point we could have quit and gone back home to Texas but we didn't! We decided to go independent and then we got a second deal where the partnership just fell apart and we could have quit then but we kept going! We've learned how to persevere and we've stayed true to who we are along the way. We've learned who Smithfield is and I think our music is better because of that.
Has those experiences made you wary of record labels now?
Trey: I think it's made us more careful and taught us to value what we do. When you are new or new to Nashville I think you forget what you have has value and as you grow your career you start to see that value more. At some point you don't want to give that value away for free and you need to be smart about who you partner with, which is where we are now. It hasn't made us wary of labels but it has made us smarter with the partnerships we enter into.
Jenn: We'd be open to working with a label again but they should be onboard as a team mate, right? Just like how Trey is to me is how I'd like a label to be to us. It shouldn't be a dictatorship that tells you how to act, sing or look. If we find something like that again, we'd be open to it if it was right.
Retaining creative control, producing albums like ‘Country With Heart' and not having to chase a sound or style must be very self-satisfying?
Trey: We always say we want to make people feel something with our music and everything that we sing or record has some heart to it, which is why we named the album as we did. I think this is the most authentically ‘us' project we've done in terms of the songs we are singing. I even produced this project myself so even the sound you are hearing is Smithfield.
I'd be tempted to call the album ‘Country With a Broken Heart!' There's a lot of loss on this album. Was that the headspace you were in whilst writing it?
Trey (laughing): We start it off with all the heartbreak but wrap it up in a nice bow at the end with ‘What I Got.' I don't want to speak out of turn here but that could allude a little bit to what part two of the album might be about!
You wrote with some very talented writers on this project. Have you got a safe, trusted writer that you take your best ideas to or do you enjoy writing with a varied set of people?
Jenn: When we first moved to town we would write with anybody and everybody to see who we had a connection with. Over time the people who get what you do begin to emerge and that becomes a safe space to share the big ideas – we have that person in Adam Wood. He produced our first record and has been on every Smithfield EP and a lot of singles ever since. He knows our hearts and knows us as friends and as creatives. A lot of the same writers on this album were on the ‘New Town' EP as well.
Trannie Anderson seems to be a writer on the rise right now. She's a fellow Texan which is why you might have got a connection with her!
Trey: She actually comes from one of the towns I grew up in! Back in the day she came to us and told us how big of a fan she was of our music and wanted to co-write with us. She became an obvious and trusted collaborator with us. She sort of always knows what we want to say before we say it.
Jenn: Trannie really understands harmony. Piano is her first instrument and a lot of the songs we write are very much suited to that origin and instrument. We wrote with her before she became massive and it's been good to see her career go off in those directions.
If we are talking about heartfelt, piano-based songs, ‘Don't Know Myself' fits that bill perfectly. It should be on a blockbuster movie soundtrack to these ears!
Trey: We're hoping exactly that same if anyone out there has a synch deal going! (laughing) It started out life as a heartbreak song but since people have been hearing it it's changed into something more akin to being a song about loss and grief in terms of someone passing away. We showed up one day in the writing room with the melody and worked it up from there.
I really love ‘Last Call Summer' too. It gives me Lady A jamming with Don Henley on ‘Boys of Summer' vibes. You capture the transition of a relationship and of the seasons perfectly.
Jenn: Thank you for saying that. It's meant to feel nostalgic and reminiscent of a special time that was both beautiful and yet heartbreaking at the same time. It was inspired by a trip I took to Hawaii last year – Trey was out of town and a girlfriend called me up and suggested we go. It was kind of spontaneous and usually I would say that I couldn't go but I decided to go for it this time – that trip was life changing for me. I surfed for the first time! The last night we were there, the girls, who had become like my sisters over the trip, were all round a campfire and one of them said, ‘Can y'all believe that when we get back from this trip it's going to be fall! People are putting out pumpkins right now!' One of the other girls said, ‘I guess this is our last call summer then?' I immediately wrote that down and even wrote a melody on the plane on the way back and I took it to Trey and Adam Wood and we built this beautiful story around it.
The outlier on the album is ‘Run With It' with gives me 80s Whitney Houston or even Lionel Richie vibes! There's a definite pop-edge to it which must have been interesting to produce Trey?
Trey: You know, it's so hard to write a true uptempo song in Country music. We say uptempo but it usually means mid tempo, right? I really wanted to record an uptempo song that was a kind of ode to my old punk pop days. Back in the day I was part of a punkish, pop/rock band before I was with Jenn and I wanted to capture a little throwback to what I used to do but incorporate it into the Smithfield sound. It probably was my favourite song to produce on the new album.
It'll be a great one to play live. When you guys write songs, have you got half a mind on what you need in the live set or do you just let the song emerge as it will?
Jenn: I would say the latter. Whatever is best for the song in the moment we are writing it wins out. I'd say the same for who sings what lines too. If that particular key or melody fits Trey's voice better, that's great and I can jump on the harmonies and vice-versa. We kinda just let the song speak to us. We do have quite a lot of ballads and slower songs so we should probably have the live set in mind more often! (laughing)
Talking about who sings what, Jenn, your voice is the dominant one on album closer ‘What I Got.' Was that song particularly written for you or from a single person's perspective?
Jenn: That day, in the writing room, we just let the song speak for itself and I really connected with it from the get-go. It was inspired by some personal events. We wrote it just after the pandemic and really focused on the things that we felt were special to us at that time. Trey got married, I'm getting married this November, we've both got pups that adore us when we walk into a room and we both have closed on our first houses in Nashville now too so it felt very much like a song that we wanted to record. When it was written it felt more personal to me, which is why I ended up being the lead on it.
Trey: We wanted to end this album on a positive note.
Which then begs the question: When can we expect part two? Are the songs written and recorded for part two or are you still writing? is there a ball park ETA?
Trey: A little bit of both. We have some songs in the can and others that we are trying to process on and write too. As far as a release goes, the plan is either probably later this year or early next year.
Jenn: When you're Morgan Wallen or Taylor Swift level people want to consume and digest as much music from you, all at once, as they can. When you're a little smaller, like us, we thought we need to break up the album into a couple of releases and extend the life of the songs as much as we could. People can digest these seven songs but also know that seven more songs are coming shortly.
Trey: Doing it this way we feel like it gives each song a little moment all to themselves too.
Jenn: When the second part comes out we hope people will go back to the part one songs and listen to them all over again as well. Originally we were going to call this record ‘The Story of a Heartbreak,' and play into how that cycle goes around. You fall in love, you run with it and then bad things happen. You break up and then the healing process begins and then you go and do it all over again! We wondered whether the title would come across as a little negative whereas ‘Country With Heart' isn't – we're telling stories of life, friendships, relationships and loss and everything in between!
Check out Smithfield's brand new album ‘Country With Heart' in all the usual places now. You can read our review of it from the link at the top of the page.
