SY SMITH FEATURE INTERVIEW
“My glasses always help me find the boogie,” says Sy Smith, or rather she types, over a-fly-on-the-wall clip providing an insight into her process as a producer. A camera on time-lapse captures Sy’s point of view as she parks up outside engineer Grant “G Nick” Nicholas’s recording facility in North Hollywood, the grey pebble-dashed walls bleached in a blanket of daylight. As Sy walks to the entrance and opens the wrought iron gated door, she proceeds through the hallway into the blackness of the studio.
“This whole album is about me pushing my own boundaries,” the text overlay continues, “as a singer, producer, writer & woman.” Sy is now in session, working on the reprise for her 5th studio project, Sometimes A Rose Will Grow In Concrete. Sat behind a keyboard in a denim top and Jackie O translucently framed shades – the aforementioned boogie glasses - her distinctive, natural afro hairstyle is tied back as she gets down to the business of finishing the album. As she lays down a synth bass line & some drums, nobody else but G-Nick is present, the room lit only by the glow of the camera, monitors and studio tech that surround her.
Unlike the four studio albums to have preceded it, Sometimes A Rose Will Grow In Concrete is entirely self-written & produced, revealing the many facets of Sy’s artistry.
“I had done so many albums and recorded so much in the past it was like ‘Wait, why haven’t I just taken the reigns as a producer?’” Says Sy over the phone from her pad in Los Angeles, pre-pandemic and during a short pitstop between tours with Grammy winning trumpeter Chris Botti. “I had already started demoing some of the songs and called a couple of producers that I wanted to work with but, long story short, cats were just busy and after waiting to hear back I figured ‘Just do it,’ like, ‘What’s holding me back from doing this myself?’ and the answer was me. I was the only one holding myself back.”
Female producers have always been something of a rarity in soul music, despite there being no disparity in the number of female singer-songwriters to that of their male counterparts, but behind the glass - where the console is situated - it still resembles a men’s locker room.
“I think when it comes to women, or girls, in music we just do not think of ourselves as producers,” says Sy, her voice rising in bemusement, “When of course we are absolutely. A female singer in a session will end up producing the vocals themselves even if she doesn’t realise that is what she is doing. So, I just said ‘I’m gonna do it myself.’ Like I had to say that out loud,” Sy laughs. “And then even if everybody hates it when its finished, at least I did it.”
In deciding to produce the album herself, with a singular, consistent vision, Sometimes A Rose Will Grow In Concrete is arguably Smith’s finest, most fulfilling suite of soul music to date. From the stark to the sublime, highlights include the defiant title track; the gorgeous, string laden Camelot - which sounds like a mid-seventies solo effort by a member of Wonderlove - the Latin-soul-trip of Catastrophe (featuring west-coast percussion icon Sheila E), a Rod Temperton style homage called Closer Than You Know & the assured, jazz-combo tease of first single Now & Later.
Compared to the more character driven escapism of Sy’s last release Fast & Curious in 2017, the subject matter of the songs on Sometimes A Rose Will Grow In Concrete are drawn far more from Smith’s own experiences.
“Every song on this album is deeply personal to me,” explains Sy. “The title track was the first song I wrote where it felt to me like I was making an album.” The black & white cover shot has Sy wearing a V-necked plain T-shirt. As she looks intensely into the lens, her left shoulder is visibly raised with her arm just out of shot, one imagines, lifted high into the air holding up a black power fist – a conviction also reflected in the design of the rose as a fist on the back cover.
“When I wrote the title track I immediately knew that it was the start of an album, like, I’m always writing songs – sometimes to a track or sometimes for a specific person – but this song just came to me, the melody … ” Sy pauses and then begins to sweetly sing over the phone, “Sometimes a rose will grow in concrete/sometimes the caged bird will sing.”
“The chorus,” Sy continues, again in her speaking voice, “along with the piano riff just fell out of me and didn’t take that long to write. When something comes out of thin air like that it feels really special and that was the moment where I said to myself ‘I could just sit here at the piano and write the whole album like this.’”
At the very end of the song, Sy hits a soaring soprano note, giving the feeling of the caged bird finding liberation. The anthemic We Were Never Free was written in similar fashion; Sy sat tinkering on the ivories.
“I was in my dressing room at a venue,” Sy recalls. “Next to a piano waiting to go on stage and this melody came to me and sounded like “Pretty little flower” (the first lyric) and I had read a year or two before about the flower industry, a scientific podcast talking about how tree’s have a network and communicate with each other, and I started to think about the concept of flowers in a field all connected, flowers as sentient beings just getting snipped out, chopped up and what that would do to the network, to the flower being taken - displayed all pretty for someone else’s enjoyment. So, I started to think about Africa, the middle passage, the slave trade and snatching our people from their homes and taking them to another place for their own benefit and what it would feel like to sing a pretty melody about a sombre situation and to speak to that without directly naming it.”
The continent of Africa is the setting for the video to Camelot, the 2nd single lifted from the album. Filmed by Sy’s husband – renowned actor/director Shawn Carter Peterson – during a recent holiday in Tanzania, the breath-taking beauty of the scenery is perfectly in sync with the aural paradise of the soundscape.
I feel like I spent more time on Camelot,” says Sy. “There were more elements to produce. I had a choir, I had Lucia Micarelli arrange the strings, Lee Pearson (the 2nd) & Ty Macklin on drums, Jairus (J’Mo) Mozee… yeah he’s bad, I had him on guitar too. More people were involved and then I went back and revisited it for the reprise.”
The sublime Fender Rhodes-style keys and melodic synth bass – played by Sy – reveal a taste for ‘70s soul, in the manner of the classics Perfect Angel or This Is Niecy. “I did want to pay slight homage to Minnie Riperton & Deniece Williams on this album, I feel they sometimes get left out of the soul conversation and in the singer/songwriter aspect I just wanted to have my Roberta Flack moment,” Sy laughs. “Not necessarily her sound but I wanted to sit at the piano, play and sing.”
Whether by accident or design the playful video to Now & Later suggests a (hot n’) heavy Diana Ross influence, somewhat of a heroine of Sy’s who has worked with her a few times on American Idol, The Billboard Awards, TV Land Awards and at the Tobago Jazz Festival.
“Now that I think about it, since 2006 I have worked with Miss Ross quite a bit,” Sy says, thinking back to when they met. “She was really, really kind; I had this coffee table book about her which she signed and a vintage Ebony Magazine where she was the cover star from 1975 and she looked at the cover and kind of sang a little song there and then on the spot, it was really sweet. I called her Miss Ross and she was like ‘Call me Diana’ but I couldn’t, I was like, ‘Thank you Miss Ross’.” Sy laughs.
For her album, Sy enlisted another legend she has previous with, producing Sheila E on the mostly instrumental Catastrophe. “Sheila made it to the studio straight from hospital!” Remembers Sy. “She had just been discharged for dehydration and exhaustion or something like that and she called me, ‘Sy, I’m just coming out of the emergency room but I’m on my way.’ Sheila arrived to play percussion and knocked that thing out in two takes. I was like ‘Ok, Sheila, go home!’” Sy laughs, “‘Drink some water!’”
Sy’s father, Sy O. Smith, aka “Big Sy”, also features on the prelude Doowop with Dad, handling the bass part (“I used to sing … first tenor” he jokes, in the deepest voice he can muster), a doo wop veteran having performed on the street corners of Sutphin Boulevard, Linden Boulevard & New York Boulevard, near the “40s Projects” in Queens, New York City. “My dad’s a natural entertainer,” says Lil’ Sy with pride. “I flew him out to LA because I never had the chance to record him like that and he’s just really cool, what you hear is only about 25% of it, he had us all cracking up.”
After the aforementioned session clip of Camelot (Reprise) finishes another edition automatically cues up on Youtube. An episode called “Father’s Day” begins and in it, Sy the producer can be seen working with her dad on record for the first time, cutting to an old polaroid of Sy as a baby in her father’s arms. ‘Shout out to all the dad’s who tell their daughters sweet & funny stories,” says the text overlay, “…making them feel like they can do anything.”