Micheal Smotherman King of Brooklyn

"One of my favorite artists / musicians / songwriters / instrumentalists is Michael Smotherman." - Willie Nelson

"Michael is one soulful, unique guy. So glad he's bringing us some new music…" -- Bonnie Raitt

"Ah ... at last mr smotherman has made another album. AMEN!!
I have always been haunted by his innate ability as an emotive Songsmith to often reduce
me willingly to tears !!
He has always written for So many ,and now we are blessed (as Michael is)
to have a new selection of songs that as many before will withstand the tests of time!!
We are lucky to have you!" - Mick Fleetwood

"I think Michael is one of the most prolific writers on the planet. I can say that because his songs have been covered by my idols. Ray Charles, Willie Nelson,Roger Miller, Waylon, Glen Campbell.
I want to be him when I grow up." - Mickey Rapheal 

 
Rap Sheet 

I was born in Erick, a tiny town in western Oklahoma whose main industry seemed to be dust...I have been writing for as long as I can remember, beginning with little mainly sci-fi stories and then later songs...I started out musically playing in a local Western Swing outfit that my mother ran when I was about twelve or thirteen years old...she played piano and was the bandleader, while I played drums and sang the "young people" songs...I switched to electric piano at around fourteen and started my first raggedy-ass rock and roll band with some other guys from high school...one of our first gigs was a teen club somewhere up in Texas, where we had to have a police escort out of town because some pissed off high school football players who felt they'd wasted their money on tickets were waiting in ambush at the Dairy Freeze to whip our asses...that's how good we were... I went to California right out of high school with a well known band out of Oklahoma City that was actually pretty decent, especially considering the time and place...they were older, more seasoned guys who had real amps, matching skinny-tie suits, wore leather shoes, etc...our first gig was in San Diego, where we were wildly popular for some reason that I still don't get...we were supposed to play two weeks at this joint and pulled such big crowds that we wound up staying for a couple of years...had lines around the building...in hindsight the only thing I can figure is that we changed outfits at midnight, from one ridiculous pimp suit to another...the bell-bottoms on the pants were so big that we had to spread our legs to walk...I guess people thought that if we wore two thirty-eight dollar suits a night, we must be really good... I quit those guys, determined to get into the real music business, and limped into Hollywood in an old Ford sedan with a cracked back windshield and a hat full of dreams...I was young, didn't know a soul, stone broke, unbelievably naive, and clueless...wound up crashing in a storeroom up over a recording studio, sleeping on a cot and eating pork and beans out of the can with a pocketknife...had a little end table with a bare bulb lamp, my electric piano, and about two hundred unclaimed 24-track tapes stacked from floor to ceiling...that was it...I was so lonesome and alone that I believe that's when I first started writing what I consider real songs...didn't have anything else to do, and my heart was definitely in it...
 I literally stumbled into a keyboard gig that year with Captain Beefheart, which is a whole other story...suffice it to say that I'm still recovering...I'd never actually heard any of his songs, and although I'd heard that he was gonzo weird, I was one bologna sandwich away from the street and didn't care...it was puny dough and the music definitely wasn't for me, but it was a job...after that whole thing lurched to an ignominious halt, I was hanging around a big country music venue out in the Valley, and again literally ran into Roger Miller, a huge star at the time and coincidentally from my hometown...one of my major heroes...I immediately jumped on him and started babbling something about being a piano player, and a singer, and an all around cool guy from his hometown, and I needed a job, weep wop woop, and due to some serendipitous rip in the fabric of the universe got the gig...from Captain Beefheart to Roger Miller...major whiplash...Roger kind of took me under his wing, introducing me to his friends and graciously asking me to play my songs for them, and they started recording them...Waylon, Willie, Glen Campbell, Ray Charles, Cher, a bunch of them...I was in a kind of daze, and such an unregenerate dumb-ass that I didn't even realize or appreciate just how big a deal that was, that guys had spent decades busting their asses trying to get any one of those artists to do just one of their songs, and here they were doing mine by the handful...Glen Campbell cut a whole album of my songs...I was so green that I just took it as a matter of course...the natural order of things so to speak...oh, Ray Charles cut my song?...cool...any beer in the fridge?...I think one of the reasons that it didn't dawn on me fully was because I wasn't really doing anything all that differently than I had been...sleeping all day, getting up and smoking a little reefer, working on a song, and then bird-dogging chicks all night...the only difference was that now I was doing it at Roger Miller's house...I loved that guy, and am truly grateful...I had the unbelievably rare opportunity of being exposed to the very best right off the bat...R.I.P. vato...wherever you are, they're laughing...

 

    I've been signed as an artist to two or three major labels and a couple of smaller ones...every time was a carbon copy of the first...they'd hear me play live somewhere, get all worked up, sign me in this sort of giddy frenzy, and then the instant the ink was dry on the contract start resolutely and inexplicably trying to change the very thing that hooked them to start with...confused and angry, I would resist this in my very bones, eventually leading me to be labeled throughout the industry as difficult...I would be assigned some producer that I didn't know from Adam, we'd butt heads and compromise to a sickening degree, and the end product would reflect it...neither fish nor fowl...the records didn't do well for the most part, and for fair reason in my opinion...I  didn't even like them, although conversely the people who did buy them still play them and are die hard fans to this day...I tried to front it off, but secretly it broke my heart every time, and I started losing interest in that whole side of it...I started concentrating mostly on writing, which was my first love anyway, but I never lost and will never lose that burning bone deep desire to make the music I hear in my head 24/7, that lives and has always lived deep in my heart, for better or for worse...right or wrong, I'm in all the way daddy-o...I've also gone on the road playing keyboards for Glen Campbell, Mick Fleetwood and a couple others, but I'm just not a very good sideman I think...it bores me and my ego is too big...

   I eventually came to Nashville, a new page so to speak, to what I thought might be greener pastures, but was really just greener horseshit...in fairness though, I must say that I was fortunate enough to have had several major artists record my songs there; Trace Adkins, Lila McCann, Brooks and Dunn, Shenandoah, Kenny Rogers, and Hank Jr. among others, and for that I am very grateful...it was enough to support me and mine, such as it was, but I was truly of a different bent and a bona fide stranger in a strange land...I just couldn't quite get why every song had to have something to do with farm equipment...still don't get it...I did however make a precious few really good friends, truly talented people that I'm tight with today...which brings me to Radigan...

    Terry Radigan was a friend the instant we met in Nashville...beautiful, talented, funny, honest, true in her gypsy heart, and ornery...ballsy without being pushy...still don't know how she pulls that one off...my kinda gal...a Brooklynite to the bone, she was also in Nashville for a time, cutting a swath as it were, writing songs for major artists and doing some recording of her own...she eventually went back to New York where she designed and built her magic recording studio...she began calling me and inviting me to come up and record some of my songs with her as producer...I was reluctant at first honestly, because...well...I don't know...I was holed up in Oklahoma at the time, Erick to be exact, trying to help my mother out with my little sister who has health problems, and riding around out in the country drinking cheap tequila and firing pistols...after about a year of of Terry calling, I thought why not?...at least with her it would be fun, sound like the real me for a change, and if it didn't turn out I couldn't bitch and whine about it being somebody else's fault...

    I fell instantly in love with Brooklyn...the energy, the people, the streets, the food, the colors, the energy, and most of all the palpable artistic vibe which I realized with a start had been so sorely lacking in my life...we started right away, and I reanimated on the first note...she called in some wicked good and beautifully crazy players that inhabit Terry World, and all too soon we were done with the first phase...that was in October of 2012, and while I was there Hurricane Sandy struck...I've always felt somehow that that was a portent of some kind, an omen, although I couldn't tell you what kind or why...I went back to Oklahoma, and in February of 2013 went back up to do some new vocals, cut another couple of songs, and fix a few things...this is the result...I believe that so far, this is the most fun I've ever had...you rock, Radigan...

    I have come to realize at this stage of my life that I really don't give a shit about "things"...never have and never will evidently, and although like W.C. Fields said I've been with money and without it and with it's better, I just don't care...I've driven new fancy doo-dah SUVs and I've driven smoking beaters, and as long as I got there it was pretty much all the same to me...I've spent thousands of dollars on vital necessities like Chinese hand-carved ivory boxes from which to stylishly dispense that evil cocaine to the worthy, and I've dug change out from under the seats for a gas station hot dog...lived in big fancy houses with snooty neighbors and crash landed on friends' couches...I lived in my studio once for two years...I have spent an entire lifetime flying around the room backwards, running at a hundred miles an hour with my hair on fire, and I'm still here...I have tried above all to be true to myself, even in the face of common sense, because I just don't know any other way...I make music the best way I know how, from my heart, and regardless of who else likes it, I have to like it...that's my criteria...what a fool believes, and all that...what else does a man need?...

 

Micheal Smotherman

Nashville, Tennessee

January 2014

Please checkout the brilliant folks who added their
shine to the  "The King Of Brooklyn". 

Joshua Camp - http://www.joshuacampmusic.com

J Walter Hawkes - http://www.blatboy.com

Greg Cohen - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Cohen

Jim McNamara - http://newyorkmusicdaily.wordpress.com/tag/jim-mcnamara-bass

Dony Wynn - https://www.donywynn.com

Gary Schreiner - http://garyschreiner.com/new-and-exciting-stuff

Andrea Zonn -  http://www.andreazonn.com

Russ Meissner - http://www.russmeissner.com

kat (smotherman) Cossey - http://katsmo.bandcamp.com

Steve Turner -  www.facebook.com/steveturnerdrums

Andy Baldwin - http://rolapola.com

Kathena Bryant - http://www.thehippynuts.com

Pat Buchanan - http://patbmusic.tripod.com

Boo Macleod - http://www.boomacleod.com

Rick Vito - http://www.rickvito.com

Craig Blankenhorn - http://www.blankenhornphoto.com