This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.
Justin Smith of Gustavus has produced albums for Alaska artists like Annie Bartholomew, Blackwater Railroad Company and Josh Fortenbery.
He’s performed at festivals with blues legends like B.B. King, James Brown, Son Seals and Taj Mahal, but Smith says he loves playing and producing for Alaskans more than anything.
The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Justin Smith: There’s this whole sort of instrumental bridge section in a tune called “Happy Tune” on the Blackwater Railroad record where it’s just musically so exciting. And I was just sitting there hearing them play it, you know, and looking over at the computer and seeing, like, “Yes, it’s recording. We’re getting this, yeah!” You know?
Dec. 1 of 93, I spent my last dollar at Heritage Coffee. Got off the ferry. We were like, pulling change out from under the seat, you know, of the car, trying to get enough money together for our ferry tickets.
And I had $1 left when I got to Juneau. Walked around, it was First Friday in December. We walked out of the galleries eating all the cookies because we didn’t have any food. That was my start in Juneau. And I got here, and everybody told me I needed to go to the Alaskan (Hotel) on Thursday night for the open mic. So I did that on my first Thursday.
And I was always the guy in the high school bands and stuff that would set up the PA and figured those things out, and I would mess around with a four-track recorder, things like that. So I had kind of an inclination towards the gear side of things, but eventually I wanted to record myself.
I got a little bit of gear, and then I just kind of branched out from there, because I heard somebody singing once at open mic and invited them over to record their stuff. And I just, I just love it, you know? I just love it.
And I tried to acquire nice gear and learn the best methods, because I didn’t want anything to sound amateur, and I didn’t want to put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into getting a performance, and then feel like if I ever wanted to put it out on a record, I’d have to re record it in a real studio, you know, because it’s just so hard to get that performance and get that thing that you want, and to think that you’re only doing it temporarily, until you can do it for real in a real music studio. So I tried to start with nice equipment and doing it the right way.
When we did Annie’s record, when we did Sisters of White Chapel, we did that in a cabin at the Methodist camp. One of my favorite things on that was, at the end of “Last Confession,” there’s this long piano outro, and we recorded the band with Kat (Moore) playing bass, and then we came up with this arrangement idea to like, give it to the piano to reprise the melody at the end of it.
Kat sat at the piano and was trying to pick out the melody, and she played a few wrong notes while she was trying to figure out the melody. She’s okay, “I think I got it. Let’s do this.” And we recorded it once, and I was like, “Could you play it the way that you did, like a few minutes ago, and you’re still trying to figure out the melody, and it wasn’t quite exactly right?” And she sort of got back to that space, and that’s what’s on there. And it’s just so beautiful.
Because the concept of it is like, there aren’t — of the record, you know — there weren’t concert musicians in the Yukon, you know, in the 1860s right? And so it was meant to seem a little ragged and a little sort of amateur. And it’s just such a beautiful moment when we all put that together and listen back to it, we were all so floored. It was so great.
What I love about music, and what I love about Alaska, it’s all the same. It’s beauty, you know. And there’s so much beauty in these things. And I want it around me. I want music around me all the time, and I want Alaska around me, and wildlife and just the beauty of the environment here and the beautiful, amazing people. I want all of that around me all the time in my life. So that’s why I want to be here, you know?
And there’s so much support for music here and all of the arts. And Alaskan artists, I found with these productions that I’ve done, are passionate about doing their work in Alaska. They often see it as like a little bit of a cop-out to go down to Seattle or LA or something and buy some studio time to record their music that they’ve come up with up here. They want to do it in Alaska with Alaskans and that’s so cool, because we have it all here.
Here’s Justin Smith performing a Red Carpet Concert in 2019.
