Canaan Smith
A proud supporter of Toby’s Dream Foundation in Virginia and St. Jude, country singer Canaan Smith is starting to make his splash. I saw Canaan on tour with Sugarland a week ago in Arizona and was blown away by his natural talent and special lyrics. He has written songs for people like Jason Aldean, Billy Ray Cyrus and Love and Theft and that’s not all, this talented ‘newcomer’ writes his own material too! Sometimes I wonder how there can be so many ideas, but after participating in The Amazing Race Season 15 and staying culturally aware, there is no shortage of material for Canaan. We chatted about his live show and his music. Make sure to catch him on tour with Sugarland through September and check out his site, canaansmith.com for more information!
Arin: What got you interested in making music a career?
Canaan: Well, when I was a kid my parents bought me a microphone. Actually they bought a whole room full of instruments for me and my brothers and sister one Christmas and so I just had access to the instruments and to a microphone and I just began to write my own songs and it just became a passion for me and I found it as a great outlet to just go and pick up a guitar or step over to the keyboard and just create sounds, I’m fascinated by it. I’ve played by ear my whole life and I still do, I just love that whole process of creating music and experimenting with it and I think mainly because of that one Christmas in particular where my parents provided all that for us where we had that at our disposal. That’s basically what got the ball rolling and then as an adult I just want to tell my story and music is the best way for me to do that because it’s the most natural and the most fulfilling way for me to tell my story to people and I love that. I love how music can communicate without words sometimes and other times with words. You can connect to people on that level that regular conversation sometimes doesn’t. I think that’s why I’m so passionate about it.
A: You’re a songwriter by nature and you have written with some pretty cool artists so do you have a favorite song that you’ve written for someone?
C: Well right now I’d have to say ‘Runaway’ by Love and Theft because it made me the most money. [laughs] It got the ball rolling for me as a songwriter, and it was my first charting top ten single so I’ve gotta say that’s my favorite. If all goes as its slotted to go, Jason Aldean recorded my song called ‘Black Tears’ and that’s on his new album that comes out this fall. I think that’s a really cool one just because I wrote that with one of my other best friends and we really think that Jason Aldean is great and that would kinda just be some cool points I guess. Then another one I wrote that Billy Ray Cyrus cut and it was a duet with Amy Grant and those two names, those are both kind of legendary, iconic people in their genres and to have them both singing on my song and the subject matter, it’s about a soldier who misses his family and the sacrifices involved with war and having a family and still fighting for your country, that one I’m really, particularly proud of. It’s called ‘Stripes and Stars.’
A: Do you have a favorite song of yours that you’ve recorded?
C: I think ‘We Got Us’ is just super special and I never get tired of singing that story to people because so many people understand that boat of really starting their live together, not having much to call their own. Everybody is struggling financially right now so it seems like that’s one of the songs where it seems like no matter where I’m singing it or what audience I’m singing to, they all can connect to that one pretty well and I think that’s my favorite still.
A: I read that you were on Season 15 of Amazing Race, did that experience influence the way you write music or your outlook on life in general?
C: Well I haven’t written about waterslides yet [laughs] but I think the opportunity to see the world and to see so many different cultures and they way that people live and then realizing in that we’re all pretty much the same. Like yeah, we have different cultures and economic statuses and all that stuff, but a person’s a person. A heart and a soul and a little bit of flesh and blood mixed together. We’re all the same and I love seeing that and I love connecting with people halfway across the world that just lead totally different lives. I think it was good for me to just bring me to center and realize that I have a lot in common with the rest of the world and this platform I’ve been given with my music is a great way to remind people of that, to spread love, that’s what I wanna do.
A: The single, ‘We Got Us,’ is on iTunes now, but what else is coming up for you this year?
C: The whole album will be done in the near future, we don’t have a street date for that yet, but working really hard on that. You can stream some other songs from my website, canaansmith.com. I’m constantly writing new songs and I introduce them to my live set every now and then. I’ve got a new one called ‘Coozie’ that I’m really excited about, you know like a coozie that you put around your beer to keep it cold. That one’s pretty fun, but yeah, I’ve got a lot that I’m excited about but nothing that I can say a specific day for yet.
A: You’re on the Sugarland tour until September so are there any cities you’re really looking forward to?
C: Yeah, this stretch in particular, the West Coast stretch, has been just a blast. I love getting out here, the weather’s perfect so this has been really fun. I’m looking forward to hitting up the southeast, the northeast, really everywhere I mean this is what I’ve been dreaming of doing for a long time so you could put me in the middle of nowhere on a stage and I would be like a kid in the candy store. I’m really not looking forward to one particular place over another, I’m just really looking forward to getting out there.
A: Have any of the fans in one of the cities started to sing your music back to you yet?
C: Yeah I have. You can’t even describe that feeling, its monuments, it really is. Like that’s the moment that you dream of and the moment that you hope happens every show and it does not. It definitely doesn’t because we got support from different radio stations and not so much airplay support from others so some people in places we go, they don’t really know the songs, but the ones that do and when they sing it back, it’s like a feeling like no other. It happened in Atlanta, the entire crowd sang the entire song word for word, start to finish, I didn’t even have to sing the last chorus, I stepped away from the mic and let them sing it for me. I think that was the best moment in my career so far.
