Smith out to show some things never change

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This article was published 16/05/2022 (1421 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Dallas Smith is no stranger to playing in front of a raucous Wheat City crowd, having previously dropped by the Keystone Centre in the fall of 2019, a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic put most live performances on hold.

But now that in-person concerts are back nationwide, Smith is looking to reconnect with his Westman fans in a big way by kick-starting his five-week-long Some Things Never Change tour in Brandon on May 24.

Talking to the Sun last Friday, the 44-year-old country music star said he is eager to finally get back on the road, even if he has been staying busy throughout the last two and a half years.

In addition to finishing and releasing his fourth solo studio album, “Timeless,” while in quarantine, Smith has continued to release hit singles and rake in industry accolades, having been named the Canadian Country Music Association’s entertainer of the year in both 2020 and 2021.

But for the next two months, Smith’s primary focus won’t be watching the country music charts or attending a fancy awards gala.

Instead, he’ll be throwing most of his energy into this comeback tour, wanting it to be a harbinger for a spring and summer season that allows Canadian artists to get back on track and share their love of live music with the masses.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

THE BRANDON SUN: How do you feel about getting back on the road in this capacity? Are you nervous at all about having to adjust to performing live again?

DALLAS SMITH: Not that part of it. It’s just more the prep, like leaving the house again, leaving the family behind for weeks on end here. That’s the kind of stuff that I’m nervous about.

I’ve been touring for 20 years, so I trust that it will all turn out good. I’ve got an amazingly talented band and crew around me, so we’ve been through this a bunch of times.

It’s a little nerve-wracking, but it’s just about getting into that mode again and there’s a little bit of a fear of the unknown. We haven’t been out on tour for a while. I don’t know if it’s fear. It’s more like a good nervous energy. There’s nothing bad, nothing negative. Just a good energy.

SUN: This tour spans around five weeks and includes stops in big cities across the country like Calgary, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Ottawa and Toronto. Why did you decide to kick off this big return tour in Brandon of all places?

DS: The Prairies are, in general, my biggest market.

I think being able to start in a smaller town, you get a better gauge of how the tour is going to run.

I find small-town crowds are just more into it. It’s a really good gauge for how to start a tour and see if the tour is going to work. We’ve got a couple days in the Keystone Centre to do some pre-production. So it’s all really worked out.

SUN: So this first show in Brandon is really going to set the tone for the next couple weeks on the road?

DS: Absolutely. We’re going to test out a few new ideas and hopefully they work on Brandon.

SUN: This tour features a lot of stellar supporting acts, including the James Barker Band, Meghan Patrick, Jojo Mason, Shawn Austin, Manny Blu and others. Why did you select these specific artists to be a part of this big event? How did that recruitment process go exactly?

DS: A lot of these guys are my friends. Jojo Mason, Shawn Austin, they’re all local here to the lower mainland. So I’ve been friends with them for a long time, and it’s exciting to watch their careers grow. So to have them on the same stage for this travelling circus is going to be an absolute blast.

The James Barker Band, I’ve been a fan of those guys for quite a while, but we’ve always missed each other at festivals, where we would play different days and stuff like that. So it’ll be great, selfishly, just to be able to see those guys play every night. They bring a lot of great energy.

And Manny Blu is a great artist out of Quebec, so I really wanted to give him an opportunity to show what he could do. He’s a good dude.

So it’s just a mix of friends and people I just selfishly want to see every night and play with.

Being an all-Canadian thing, we need to get back to work, so we tried to cram as many people as we could on this tour.

SUN: Will the tour serve as a kind of big reset for you and all the artists involved in terms of getting back on track and performing on the road?

DS: Yeah. It’s tough to do any marketing as an individual artist without being out there and being able to actually play music and play shows. It would be great to have that part of the business up and running.

Because the music business never really stopped. But in terms of the live business and when it comes to letting the artist cash in on the work that they’ve done, it’s been really tough for artists in Canada, obviously. So it’s just great to get things back and moving in a positive direction.

SUN: I’m assuming this event marks the first time you will get the opportunity to perform certain songs from you latest album “Timeless” in front of a big crowd. What was it like having that album come out at the start of the pandemic and not being able to promote it on the road in any meaningful way?

DS: It was tough.

It’ll be weird to look back on that record; it achieved a lot of things as a record, but we never really got to go and experience that one live as the excitement is building.

It’ll get some recognition now. But I don’t know if it will ever be the same when the songs are the biggest that they are at the time and being able to play them live. I think that moment was lost, unfortunately.

SUN: I read that you had to finish part of this album in quarantine, which meant you had to diverge from your usual recording process. What was the most difficult part of that creative shift?

DS: It’s trying not to self-critique too much.

It’s easy to get in there and have somebody else to press “play” and bounce ideas off of them and get reactions in real time as far as what you’re doing. But at home, it was just me hitting “play” and hitting “stop.”

So building up confidence enough to say “I’m proud of this” without having anybody else to validate that in real time was a bit different. That for me was a bit more of a self-conscious way of putting myself out there.

That was probably the biggest difference, turning off those negative voices and just trusting that what you put down in your judgments is going to be a good representation of the song.

SUN: Since “Timeless” was released, you’ve released a couple of singles, including “Classic” and “Hide from a Broken Heart.” So how did you maintain your creative process throughout that time as the pandemic continued to drag on?

DS: Music never really goes away for me. It just takes a different shape. I’ll use music as a different outlet.

It was more of an escape for me during the pandemic as opposed to being in a creative sort of space. But the pandemic did make it difficult. When you’re not in there living and breathing music every day, it’s difficult to just turn that on.

So it was a different process for sure. It was hard to stay motivated at times. I’m sure other people felt that way during the pandemic with whatever they do for a living.

There were times where I was really bitter towards music because of all the shows that were lost and watching friends and colleagues and artists and musicians all kind of go through that part. It was pretty ugly.

It went through waves of me needing to motivate myself, needing to get inspired, and I don’t want to ever go through that again and I don’t think anybody else wants to go through that again. That’s for sure.

SUN: Will you be using the tour to debut some new music you’ve been working on?

DS: Yeah. Absolutely. “Hide from a Broken Heart” came out a little while ago, so we’ll be playing that one, obviously.

We’ve got a new duet that’s going to be coming out at the end of the month. So we’ll be playing that the entire tour and I think after the tour is when I’ll be getting into the bulk of getting the rest of the new record recorded.

I’ll be down in Nashville recording after the tour and getting that ready for an end-of-summer release.

And at that point, hopefully, we’re hitting the ground running and we can get out to market and play shows and start going to shows as well. Because I’m starved to go watch shows as well, as a music fan.

SUN: The name of this tour is taken from your song “Some Things Never Change,” which is about paying tribute to aspects of our society and culture that stay the same. But at the same time, do you think there are aspects of the music industry that have been irreversibly changed because of the pandemic?

DS: I think the things that have changed and won’t go back are positive things. I think the music industry adapted as best as they could.

We’ll see. It’s been two and a half years since there’s been significant touring in Canada. That’s a long time for us to be out of people’s lives and out of people’s minds. Whereas in the U.S., it never really went away. And shows are just rocking down in the U.S. right now. Ticket sales and everything have been great. So it never really went away like it had in Canada.

So hopefully, it’s not too far out of line for people, that they don’t forget how fun a live music experience is with people. Music is supposed to bring people together and not be a symbol of how things are different.

So that’s kind of the thing with the name of the tour, is that I’m hoping that this tour is going to show that people love live music, love getting out and experiencing that kind of thing with strangers in a big room.

So that’s the lead off, that a lot of things have changed in the world during the pandemic, but at the core of it is a love for music, and that will never change.

SUN: So in general, the tour is meant to be a throwback to the pre-COVID times, to help the audience forget about that for at least for a couple hours?

DS: No matter what changed out in the world, once you get into the room, live music is live music, and we’ll all just drink beer and have fun.

SUN: Is there anything else local country music fans should know heading into the May 24 show in Brandon?

DS: We always want to get creative with the presentation of the show.

We’re going to have a lot of artists involved with a lot of other artists, creating experiences that will only happen on this tour, and you won’t be able to see those artists do those things again. So we’re trying to create tours like that, a little moment in time you get to witness and hopefully, people are going to come down to Brandon and enjoy us.

We’re going to be having a ton of fun and there’s so much energy coming from us, being so starved for playing shows. And we hope that the Brandon crowd will be just as energetic and starving so we can feed off of each other and have a great night.

» kdarbyson@brandonsun.com

» Twitter:@KyleDarbyson