Lady sings the blues

Hollie Smith. Photo / Brett Phibbs

The cicadas might be singing of summer in Hollie Smith's backyard. But she, well, has a winter's tale to tell.

The early February heat has forced us out onto the deck of the Freemans Bay house where she's been staying with friends for some months, and only a brief, glorious downpour is capable of drowning out the cicadas' shrill droning.

Smith, a striking, boyish 27-year-old, leans back into her chair, a cup of takeaway coffee and her rollies on the table in front of her, and asks how she might tell this story of hers. Should she just start or do I want to ask her questions? There is no escaping that this is business, this interview, a formal transaction in which she tells and I listen.

Her manner is no-nonsense, almost formal, though she looks much like someone coming to the end of a long, possibly rather tiring, holiday. She is clad for the beach, in baggy black shorts and singlet which show off solid shoulders and long legs.

She is quite something to look at, with arms sheathed in exotic, Polynesian-esque tattoos, rosebud lips and eyes framed by astonishing, arched eyebrows.

On her right hand are two rings, one a man's gold signet ring and the other an arty silver thing. She is restless during our conversation, fidgety. She unties then reties her hair, which is in a rough knot at the back.

She rubs her arms, stretches out and hunches up. She is rarely still. Her voice is something too.

Though not as melodious as when she sings, it is deep and there is hint of a lisp. "Do you mind if I smoke?" she asks, then begins. A very different Hollie Smith ought to be sitting here, a brighter being, shining with self-assurance.

Three years ago she had just released her debut album, Long Player, after establishing herself with an EP in 2005, but more significantly the following year with a song written by Don McGlashan, Bathe in the River, the signature soundtrack piece for the local film No 2.

Long Player, released here by EMI, would go on to sell double platinum. But before it was even in the shops it was announced, with some fanfare, that Smith had signed to a major American record label, and not just any label, but to Manhattan Records, an offshoot of the famous jazz imprint Blue Note.

Blue Note's boss was effusive: Smith was "unbelievable", Smith's soulful voice was "overwhelming".

She toured Australia and Europe. She went to New York. She got a lawyer, she signed a contract and recorded with a famous producer. And then, well ...

The girl with the strange tattoos had been rehearsing for New York all her life. She was singing by 4. By the time she'd arrived at Takapuna Intermediate she was in love with a bunch of old blokes with names like James Brown, Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder.

At 11, the first song she ever wrote - with the rather tragic title City of Sails - won a school competition, and by 14 she was in a band. There was no escaping music at home.

Her father, Paul Smith, played in blues-rock cover bands and her stepfather, Steve McDonald, is a traditional folk musician and recording artist.

At 16, she recorded a Celtic-influenced album with McDonald, a release which won her a best female vocalist gong at the 1999 National Jazz Festival. And then, in 2003, she moved to Wellington.

The capital has its beehive bores, but it also had, early last decade, a distinctive musical hive mentality, built around groups like Trinity Roots, Fat Freddy's Drop, Illphonics and Fly My Pretties.

Smith worked with them all, later telling a music magazine that in Wellington you could hang out, play music with and have fun. "It doesn't have to be a gig ... or a rehearsed thing [but] it's really apparent how much easier it is to work with other people. That's why it's so magic and so much good music comes out from it."

Including, eventually, some of her own. The 2005 EP consisted of songs written in her teens, but it would be Long Player that revealed a fully-formed singer-songwriter doing her own material her own way.

McGlashan's Bathe in the River, an unexpected hit it should be remembered, featured an illusional Hollie Smith. Long Player was who she really was: a soul singer with powerful set of lungs.

The Herald TimeOut editor Russell Baillie, who gave the album three stars out of five, said he heard, in the big, high, deep, long, loud notes on the better tracks, the "beginning of something special, the start of something major". This was clearly what EMI NZ's boss Chris Caddick had heard too.

Well before the album's New Zealand release he'd shopped it around his branch office's global affiliates, including New York's Blue Note, which is owned by EMI.

The story goes that when Blue Note honcho Bruce Lundvall listened to Long Player in his car en route to see his wife in hospital, he was so overwhelmed by it he narrowly avoided pranging his no-doubt-flash automobile before getting off the road to work his phone to find about this girl with the major voice.

"I had a couple of other international deals come through from majors [record labels] in the States," Smith says. "But with Blue Note, for me that was a really different side of the major label industry because of their artists. They've also taken a risk on a lot of different acts. It's a label that people trust, they find new artists.

Those were my thoughts behind [signing to them]. "I was really, really excited but in my view there was a long way to go before establishing that this was going to be okay contractually. I wasn't counting my chickens before they were hatched. I went over to New York and started discussions with them and managed to keep New Zealand separate, which was great."

The deal, as it was done, seemed good. Even with her eyes wide open, and an expensive Manhattan lawyer taking care of her interests.

"Essentially, the contract was that an advance would go to a producer to make two extra tracks that I was obligated to make to release the album internationally. Once that was done and on the signing of the contract, I would gift them my masters [original recordings]. So the masters would become theirs, which is reasonably standard. But on signing the contract they had an obligation to release the album within six months. So as much as I'd given away something, it was give and take."

With her "reasonably minimal" advance from Blue Note, Smith flew to Philadelphia to record with Grammy award-winning R&B producer James Poyser, who has worked with such acts as Al Green, Mariah Carey and Lauryn Hill. It was, she says, an amazing experience. She was pleased, too, with the result.

So, as 2007 came to an end, Smith did, indeed, seem at the beginning of something special, the start of something major.

Electrical and Music Instruments - EMI - is arguably Britain's most famous record company. Established in 1931, its roster has featured some of the greatest names in 20th century music including Frank Sinatra and The Beatles (on its Parlophone imprint).

It has owned the famous Blue Note label since in 1979 and, until recently, was listed on Britain's FTSE 100 index. The latter ended in August 2007 when a British private equality company called Terra Firm Capital Partners bought EMI in a $6 billion takeover deal.

Then began the run of bad headlines. By the end of the year, one of EMI's biggest acts, Radiohead, quit the label.

In January 2008 Terra Firm boss Guy Hands revealed a plan for major restructuring, announcing a cut to EMI's marketing budget to 12 per cent of the company's projected sales, the loss of 2000 jobs and indicating the company might also ditch thousands of artists.

Indeed, Hands warned artists they would be dropped if they did not work hard enough for the company. Six months later, The Rolling Stones also walked away from EMI. It wasn't long before Smith had bad news of her own.

"What happened from my point of view was [EMI] started calling me probably about four months before the release internationally of Long Player. So a couple of months after signing, they came through and said 'hey we think you've got a lot of potential, we want someone to write you a radio single and start doing the whole radio-friendly single thing'.

I said 'well, give me a month and I'll write you a couple and you can say if they're adequate or not. And if that's the case, then sweet and if not, let's talk about the idea of someone else writing my stuff because I don't want a cheesy pop song that's totally irrelevant to the rest of the album'.

They were like, 'cool, cool, cool'. I sent them over some stuff and I hadn't heard back from them and I rung them again and said 'what's happening?' And they're like 'oh we've decided not to release your album at all internationally'. I said 'okay, well that's fine, then give me back my masters'.

"I wasn't too concerned about them doing this because obviously they'd starting going on a bit of tangent ... and it wasn't going the way I thought it should. So I was sort of starting to get a bit weird about it and then they came back and said 'we've decided not to release you internationally at all'."

Smith, however, wasn't about to panic. She believed they could simply tear up the contract, she could take her masters and approach other international record companies who were interested in working with her.

"It was like 'cool, let's just dissolve the contract and get my masters back and let's just leave it at that'." But Blue Note informed her they owned the masters and Smith would have to buy them back. She says they told her: "You can buy your masters for 'x' amount of dollars', which was a huge, huge amount.

A couple of hundred thousand to buy back my life. "I basically said 'I'd rather sue you for that' and they said 'okay, go ahead'. That's kind of when you go "oh f***'." She laughs, in a rueful fashion.

"They essentially said 'if you want to sue us, go ahead but we're a $4 billion corporation' and that was kind of where it was left. I was obviously very conflicted on whether I should fight for it. I was completely, completely f***ed. At the start, I was angry, angry, angry. But then, realising how hopeless the situation I was in was, I kind of stopped doing anything."

In the arts, cathartic is a word suffering from something close to occupational overuse syndrome. But it's impossible not to believe Smith when she says her new album, Humour and the Misfortune of Others, to be released early next month, was, indeed, "incredibly cathartic" to make. She began "piecing it together" in August, but only after coming through the bleakest period of her still young life.

It wasn't so much the death of the Manhattan Records-Blue Note deal, but the loss of her masters - the loss, in fact, of six years of work - that cut deepest. But the end of the contract and the loss of the masters were catalysts for crises not only in her professional life, but her financial and personal life, too.

The cost of putting together the now-defunct record deal, a Blue Note tour to Europe and travel to the US had forced her to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, she says. "Some of it was borrowed, some of it was money I was making off Long Player.

Essentially, everything I was making here was haemorrhaging off into the next project and into the potential and possibility of what we were doing overseas. That's pretty standard, that's what you do.

"That wasn't my main concern at that point because I was doing reasonably okay here and getting lots of gigs. The money was flowing in but the money was just flowing out. I have not ever really received much. I've lived on the same wage since the beginning of that, which is not huge. I just get a monthly payment of $1500 to $2000 from my company."

She was, she says, unable to think about, let alone begin, making a new record either. The record deal had been for two albums and until the contract was legally dead and buried, she feared any future work might be lost to EMI-Blue Note too.

"I couldn't move forward because I didn't want to compromise anything new that I did, and I couldn't move forward because I was in such a state about what the industry meant, what music meant, why I was doing it in the first place, what was I here for.

"It was questioning my entire existence after that, which sounds really dramatic, but that was just the state that I was in. It was really difficult to see past that and difficult to understand what it was that I was trying to achieve with music if this was going to be the payback."

Smith would eventually reach an out-of-court settlement with EMI-Blue Note in which, for a undisclosed payment, she got back her masters but lost any right to royalties from Long Player in Australia, the only territory outside New Zealand in which the album was released.

But if the way was now open for further recording, she was in no fit state to do something about it.

The end of the affair came a year or so ago. Smith's two-year relationship with TV presenter Clarke Gayford was a victim of a crisis that now seemed to be swallowing her whole. "I was drinking a lot and dabbling in this and that. I kind of just ignored the music for along time I wasn't inspired by it, I wasn't passionate about it. I just sort of hid behind day-to-day bullshit and a large part of that was my relationship. So I put so much pressure on that. It was unbelievable that we actually got as far as we did."

The rueful laugh reappears. "We had big plans together ... or maybe I made that up in my head because I needed something. Then I got really, really bad and I started to get a lot worse within myself."

Eventually she sought clinical help, including counselling, for what, by now, was a significant depression. "I was on some pretty serious anti-depressants, I was on a pretty heavy dosage. I think, in hindsight, they made me a lot worse." She was, she says, playing "some pretty dangerous games" and being very self-destructive. Eventually she decided to stop taking the anti-depressants.

"A lot of things changed when I came off the pills. I said 'I can't get any worse'.

Regardless of whether they helped me or not, I hit a point where I had to do this on my own. I started writing again and started getting more inspired. It was really only last year that I got back on track.

Slowly but surely, it got better." Though she had little money to work with, she returned to the studio with Wellington friend Riki Gooch as producer to make Humour and the Misfortune of Others late last year. She is proud and confident about the record which is, she says, much more personal than Long Player.

"Ironically, given that it's such a personal album, I'm really not that precious about it. A lot of confidence has something to do with not really caring what people think about it ... like saying 'I know it's a good album, I'm not fussed'."

While the 12 songs swing from soul to funk to blues and even country, listeners will be unsurprised to hear that the lyrics are very much about the traumas of the last few years.

"Music is my way of expressing so much that I'm not good at doing in person. But the main thing I realised through this whole thing, especially that initial period of being on my own, was just realising that without music, it is so hard for me. It's not a need. I just want to do music and without it, I do kind of shut down in a lot of ways. What direction her career may take from here is, of course, uncertain. She is planning to tour the country in April-May.

Beyond that, it's wait and see. "I'm really focusing on getting back to the New Zealand audience and maintaining that relationship. It's kind of hard [because] it's been so long. But this is not a comeback. If I could have done it quicker, I would have."

She laughs again, not ruefully this time, but happily. Summer for Hollie Smith might finally have returned.

Hollie Smith's new album, Humour and the Misfortune of Others, is released on March 15.