Sonny Smith
Sonny Smith is an American musician, playwright and multimedia artist residing in San Francisco.
While Smith is a native of San Francisco, it was when he moved to Gunnison, Colorado, that he got started with music. While there he worked as a professional musician, playing blues piano in various bars. He moved to Denver and made a name for himself there, but before long headed to Costa Rica to work on an Organic Farm. While there, Smith began writing songs, plays and short stories in earnest.
In 1996 Smith returned to San Francisco, where he once again found work as a blues pianist. Before long Smith abandoned the piano and began performing his own unique long-form story songs. He continued to write short stories and plays, and even wrote & directed a film. He released a steady string of solo records throughout the early 2000s, and even toured in support of Neko Case.
Smith’s early CDs include This Is My Story, This Is My Song, released in 2002, followed the next year by Sordid Tales of Love and Woe, Sweet Lorraine featuring Jolie Holland on harmonies.
In 2000, Smith wrote and directed his first short movie "Kid Gus Man." In 2005, he garnered a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts to write and perform the play The Dangerous Stranger, and received a residency in 2006 from the LAB in San Francisco to produce part two of the saga, “Stranger Danger!"
Smith also wrote "Steppin' Out," a column for the New Mission Newspaper, in addition to publishing stories in various literary magazines.
In 2005, Watchword Literary Magazine commissioned Smith to produce One Act Plays, a CD that includes Edith Frost, Neko Case, Miranda July, Jolie Holland, Andy Cabic, Virgil Shaw, Mark Eitzel, John Dwyer and Mekons’ Rico Bell, among other talented artists. Following this was the release of Fruitvale, a collaboration with Wilco’s Leroy Bach and other Chicago musicians that features songs Sonny wrote about his then neighborhood in Oakland.
In 2009, Smith released Tomorrow is Alright (soft abuse/secret seven) with his band Sonny & the Sunsets, a loose collective of musicians including Shayde Sartin & Tim Cohen of the Fresh & Onlys, Tahlia Harbour of Citay and The Dry Spells as well as Sub Pop recording artist Kelley Stoltz. The Sunsets now include Ryan Browne, Tahlia Harbour, and Kelley Stoltz.
In 2009 he acted in a short film by Robert Arnold All Animals.
In March of 2009, he gained another residency through The Headlands Center for the Arts to begin a large project called “100 records” in which 100 artists make 7” record covers of fictional bands that he supplies the music for. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.
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