Aaron Smith’s music sounds so bucolic, so natural, that it encourages you to think of something beautiful, almost pastoral. The reality, though, is a little harsher. He grew up in the small Scottish town of Polmont, a kind of nowhere zone 50 miles outside of Glasgow. As he puts it: “It’s not a nice place. There’s an ALDI and a prison. And that’s about it”.
The songwriter’s journey, his experiences of both love and trauma, fuel an incredible new EP. Picking up the guitar following a bout of friendly competition with his cousin, Aaron became infatuated with music; later, he discovered a makeshift studio in a dusty corner of his school’s music department, and began sketching out songs – simple, at first, but then more complex, more confident. “It wasn’t great, but it was workable,” he recalls. “I was self-taught, really. I wrote my first song when I was 14, put it on Facebook, and started from there. That’s how I discovered I could write songs.”
And these are glorious songs. His debut EP is the work of a bold, singular voice, one that wants to speak truths but also find as wide an audience as possible – it recalls Bon Iver but also Keane; it harbours the pensive approach of Ry X, but also the sheer will to communicate of Coldplay’s Chris Martin. “I want a sense of privacy. I want to do this in a way that’s cool, and not too out-there,” he comments.
It’s a path Aaron finds on his extraordinary new EP. Recorded at studios across London and whittled down from more than 70 tracks, it’s a brave and extremely humane selection of songs. “It’s a good introduction for showcasing me as an artist. It describes me as a person,” he comments. “It’s quite personal. And I’m really, really happy with it”.
He has every right to be confident. Stunning lead single ‘Better Than You Loved Me’ deals explicitly with the trauma of his childhood. The beautiful piano ballad ‘Unspoken’ is a real highlight, a song of emotional strength that deals with the desperate desire to communicate. “The song is about a relationship moving faster for one person than the other and that person being scared of commitment.
But Aaron Smith is ready for what’s next. Live, he’s a study of quiet concentration, allowing each song to speak loudly for itself, existing on its own terms. “All my stuff is quite intense,” he explains. “I’m not a chatty person onstage. I just let the music do what it needs to do.”