A MESSAGE FROM COREY ABOUT KEEPING UP WITH THE JONESES...
I'm not very good at writing prose. I scrutinize my words too carefully and always fail to simply write whatever pops into my head. Too fond of the delete key, I am constantly censoring myself, making sure that my statements hold up against the rules of grammar, syntax, and logic. For this reason, essays, letters, even e-mails are painstaking endeavors I do not enjoy.
However, today I will try to overcome my disdain for prose, my tendency to be overly self-critical, and share a snapshot of the contents of my soul at this important juncture of my career. It may not be worthy of a literary magazine, fraught with misused comas and run-on sentences, but it will be honest -- painfully honest.
Making an album is a harrowing ordeal. It involves a tremendous amount of time, energy, and for the ruggedly independent artist, savings. More importantly, it involves wrestling with ideas, struggling through internal conflicts, becoming nakedly vulnerable. Similar to the journalist who is responsible for objectively reporting the goings-on of the outer world (the political, social, economic, cultural), the artist is responsible for authentically reporting on the inner world (the psychological, spiritual, emotional). For me, this means creating music that conveys my deepest hopes and desires, while paying respects to the doubts and fears that are constantly working to crush them. It means mustering up the courage to be honest about how I feel and what I think, in hopes that I am not alone; in hopes that my work will resonate within others and thus, verify that I am normal.
Keeping Up with the Joneses will be released Tuesday (Nov 17) and, as I bounce towards New York City, I find myself anticipating, worrying, dreaming, doubting. Perhaps this is how it must be? I suppose any roll of the dice is accompanied by such feelings, and like all my records, this album is certainly a roll of the dice. However, the stakes are higher than ever before, with a larger audience, higher expectation and more resources on the line. Jesus, what have I gotten myself into?
Throughout the process of writing and producing Keeping Up with the Joneses, I made a conscious effort to avoid thinking about what other people would think. Now that it is done, I can't seem to think about anything else. Oddly, I am learning there is no escaping my egoistic desire to be accepted. In fact, I now realize that it lies at the core of this album. The individual songs deal largely with love and redemption, but Keeping Up with the Joneses is essentially a result of my struggle for legitimacy, my longing to be accepted. Compared to my earlier work, it is more refined, complex, and commercially palatable. It reflects my desire to be accepted by a wider audience and acknowledged as a legitimate artist, despite not being plugged into the Nashville mainstream. There. I said it.
Some fans will be caught off guard by my new, more mainstream sound, while others are likely to expect it as a natural next step in my artistic growth. Either way, I hope each listener will hear beyond the polished production and thicker instrumentation and recognize a fellow human, wrought with imperfections, trying to be heard.
I'm going to stop typing now. We are almost in the city and I don't feel like being honest anymore.
Thank you all for allowing me to continue writing. I remain honored and privileged to be on this journey with you. May my desire to be liked never overpower my responsibility to be authentic.
Corey Smith
11/15/09
