He splits his time between projects, running the day-to-day operations at the Fort Worth base of record label/shop Dreamy Life Records after co-founder Robbie Rux moved to Seattle earlier this year, selling records and booking shows at Dreamy Life's headquarters at Main at South Side (M.A.S.S.), hosting M.A.S.S.'s monthly showcase Excursions on a Wobbly Rail, playing solo stuff and heading up the indie-rock outfit Sur Duda.
Sur Duda released its sophomore album, Total Distortion, in early December followed shortly by the first video the band has released in which you can actually see the band members' faces, for "Bad Ways to Feel Well."
The new single feels like a would-be story/song fractured by indecision and quotidian monotony, channeling Jonathan Richman's wit and Ben Kweller's pop sensibility, but for Smith, the song is the outgrowth of a slow day at the office.
"I wrote that song back when I was at was working at the Dreamy Life store when it was inside the Fairmount Community Library," Smith says. "I think I was probably just trying to write just to write something, because the first lines are literally just describing, like, the room that I was in — there was, like, this extension cord that we used during the shows in the library that was plugged into the junkiest old outlet."
As Smith began to mull over the possibility of bad wiring causing an electrical fire in a building that he loved so much, his mind started freely associating with life's many dualities, or as they came to be known in the song, the "many good ways to feel like hell" and "the many bad ways to feel well."
The lyrics of the song follow the frazzled narrator through his adventures as a chicken playing tic-tac-toe with a doctor who hates kids, his birth into a bureaucratic world that required his signature after his delivery and the drudgery of full-time work.
In each instance, the song sets the audience up to expect a grand lesson when what they get is just playful acceptance of the absurdity of it all. Take, for instance, the song's finale, in which the singer laments that "there are some folks I wish I never had met," but instead of banishing them from his life he says, "I'm not going back to the office until I can see a hypnotist" in order to deal with them. He goes on to vow that he will "quit once a year."
Much in the same way the song subverts the audience's expectations, the video for "Bad Ways to Feel Well" places its protagonist in the midst of a classic trope — a man followed throughout the town by ghosts with an unknown purpose."That image comes from this idea of being haunted by something from your past, but you come to find out that the ghosts are not there to haunt me. They're trying to just, like, give me my keys back." –Sur Duda's Cameron Smith
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"The ghosts came about because of the 'Can't Even Pretend' single artwork that was released way ahead of the record," Smith says. "When I was trying to think of a video with Jerod Costa, the director, we came up with the idea of them following me around. That image comes from this idea of being haunted by something from your past, but you come to find out that the ghosts are not there to haunt me. They're trying to just, like, give me my keys back."
Smith says that this is music for people who like to dig into lyrics to seek out the deeper meaning in the words. He points to songwriters like Silver Jews' David Berman, Songs: Ohia's Jason Molina, Big Thief's Adrienne Lenker and Karen Dalton and his influences.
"I've just kinda always been writing," Smith says, "it's been a thing since I was young. My mom is a writer, too. When I was little, she would set up little poetry diagrams for me — the ABA ABA structure kind of thing — and she'd be working on stuff at her typewriter in the kitchen, and I'd make my own little rhymes with her. I guess that's how I was taught to process things, and now it's just something that happens."
There's a lot to tease out in Smith's stream of consciousness intonations on "Bad Ways to Feel Well," and trying to connect the discombobulated dots is part of the fun.
"It's, like, if you have a style or something," Smith says, "you're the last person to know what it is."
