Photo by Sean O'BrienDwight Smith has been building up a trove of songs over the past few years while traveling, working, and living in Brooklyn, Chicago, Guatemala, Ecuador, Alaska, and Connecticut.  Somewhere in his travels across two continents, he seems to have developed hands with a touch like Nick Drake's, a voice as powerful as Marc Bolan's, and a lyrical ability all to himself. He is currently writing and recording his full-length debut, due out some time in 2012 on Twin Lakes. Download the short form debut, Plumed Serpent, here.

Our bodies are driven to sustain and reproduce without worries of a greater meaning. It's no wonder that our minds and hearts are similarly driven forward to understand and create, all the while vexed by how the facts of the physical world may or may not add up to very much at all. Our faculties might just make us tragic because they allow us to dream of and define beauty, completeness and peace that seemingly can't exist in our physical world.

But what is more hopeful than filling a void with ringing voices?  What better answer can we give monstrous solipsism than to write of what we see and feel so that others will understand? Dwight Smith seems to be heeding this call when he gives us two sad, hopeful, and gorgeous songs that pull us through these questions, pull us into him, and push us up and out to a place of shared fragile exhilaration.  In each song, Smith pulls us behind his minor chords and harmonies towards what will certainly be a maelstrom and wreck but instead drops us gently each time into glorious but sadly complex resolution. The questions, maybe the void too, are still there, but we feel different about them -- a little lighter, a little tired, happy to be on the positive side of materiality, and slightly sympathetic to the necessary negative.

When Smith sings that 'everyone wants to talk like they know something/I don't know anything' it's not a statement of defeat, but a declaration dripping with breathless epistemological glee. It's Buddha smiling from the front of a runaway train. It's Icarus realizing his glory will actually be his fall. When he sings later on about the need for forgiveness or about our own falls, the songs ring out, resonate and amplify an out-sized hope and love for the world and humanity. There's an angel living in this music, or somewhere in Dwight Smith.