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Feb 15, 2021 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Derek Mendieta

Black Nash, a new solo recording project from singer/songwriter Jody Smith, was born briefly after Smith left the U.S. military in 2019. “I basically fell flat on my face,” says Smith. “Which I think is a pretty typical experience for guys getting out. The civilian world is a whole different animal. Different work, different people, different lifestyle.” Then the pandemic hit, locking everyone indoors, with Smith in new isolated territory. Out of that isolation came Black Nash, the upcoming self-titled album from Smith. Smith released his newest single, “Love Underwater” last Friday and he’s following it with the track’s accompanying video, premiering with Under the Radar.

“Love Underwater” the third single off Black Nash, is instantly surreal and otherworldly. Gentle folk pop melody breaks for flashes of guitar, as Jody Smith’s lyrics walk through bizarre imagery and off-beat phrasing. “Love underwater is not what I thought it’d be / They took dolphins and force-fed them ecstasy,” Smith sings. Tense melodies and twisting escapist landscapes color the track until Smith ends on an oddly emotional addmision - “I changed for you, and you left me so easily.” Walking the line between floating melodic beauty and a cracked psychedelic freak out, the new track is just as weird and wild as the rest of Smith’s world. The accompanying video follows with lovely aquatic imagery as Smith delivers the song half-submerged in the water himself. Check out the song and video below and watch for Black Nash, out February 26th via Ramp Local.

Under the Radar also caught up with Jody Smith over email for a Q&A about the song and upcoming album. Check it out below.

(Under the Radar) You got out of the military pretty recently in 2019. Was your plan to commit to a career in music right after leaving?

Definitely not. I was trying to get a 9 to 5 job and go out on the weekends. Look how that went. Ha.

What was your experience in music before recording as Black Nash?

I used to play in bands, sing a lot, and write music when I was a kid into my early 20s. Pretty much stopped after I joined the military. Most of my experience making music in the last few years has been making beats with friends of mine who are producers in Atlanta. That experience has been one of the most transformative things I’ve ever done, seeing people write lyrics in the booth, and learning how people make beats and mix. Five songs in a night. I haven’t played a show with a band for 10-plus years.

How did the experience of recording during quarantine play into the record’s sound?

I was seriously by myself while I was recording, and on top of that I didn’t think that anyone would ever hear the record, even without COVID. I’ve got like five records that only a couple of my friends have ever heard, and I thought this one would be the same. So I made it a goal not to self-edit. Cool exercise in free-writing, especially on the musical end. Different on the lyrical end, because I was pretty isolated and some of the lyrics just naturally bent dark.

The record as a whole has a really unique style. What were some of your reference points for this record?

On the recording end, really early Beatles for the pacing and the live sound, and really late Beatles for the super dry, no reverb thing. Plus the autotune on the vocals, which is me doing a version of that auto-double tracking thing they do on the late records. I was rediscovering rock music, basically, which I hadn’t played in around a decade. Bought an amp when COVID kicked off and that was it. The whole unifying musical idea of the album was to limit everything to two guitars, bass, drums, and one vocal track. Who does that well? Strokes, Television, Led Zeppelin. Probably all of them actually used like three-guitar overdubs all the time. Hendrix, maybe. I really am not attracted to the wall of sound rock thing, where the guitars are just infinite and the drums sound like taiko drums. Or the indie thing where the guitars are padded with synths and the drums are programmed and fat. I like stuff like Chuck Berry and Howling Wolf, or Hubert Sumlin, where the guitars are really small and scratchy. Prince the more modern version of this. Pure liquid. Curtis Mayfield. BB King. All space.

You have some really fascinating surreal imagery running through the record. What inspires your lyrics?

I was trying to do something different with lyrics on a bunch of these songs, not really write the lyrics out and improvise a lot of them. You can hear some of them where I messed up. I like improvising lyrics because it reliably produces stuff that feels good in your mouth— “where the midnight sun and the hot winds blow”—and because it’s also a way of getting to places you didn’t expect, like writing with a ouija board. I’d like to do more of that in a different context, in a different year.

Another thing improvisation does is reveal what your mind returns to, where it runs in a circle. Sometimes your mind feels infinite and sometimes it feels like a zero.

What’s the story behind “Love Underwater?”

Love Underwater is one of the songs where the lyrics came out of improvisation. I wanted to write a song with a melody like a ballad in a Disney musical. I love those songs, the ones that sound like they were engineered in a lab by like 40 LA songwriters. A Whole New World, Can You Feel the Love Tonight. So I sang the first line without any words, and then sang it again until I had the first line of lyrics. “Love underwater is not what I thought it’d be.” I thought that was interesting and I ran with it.

“They took dolphins and force-fed them ecstasy” is a great line. Where did that come from?

Personal experience. Ha. Naw….the honest answer is that I needed a rhyme. It was gonna be “they took humans and burned them in effigy”. Sometimes I wonder if that version would have been better.