Darden Smith

?Basically, this is a show I?ve been working on, taking the songs and stories around the album. It?s not just a straight run-through of the songs, but more of a theater kind of approach that looks at my rise and crash around the time of the album.? Darden Smith is an Austin, Texas-based songwriter / musician / artist / educator whose almost forty-year career continues to evolve and change with time. Since getting his start in 1986, he has released seventeen critically acclaimed albums and toured extensively in both the US and Europe. His latest work, Western Skies (2022), is a sprawling multimedia collection comprising two albums (music and spoken word); a book of photography, lyrics and essays; videos; drawings, a suite of lithographs and a one-man theater show. Among his other diverse projects, Smith has composed a symphony, scored three full-length dance theater works, produced a documentary for BBC2 Radio and written music for film and TV. His visual art is in both private and corporate collections as well as the Library of Congress. He is the co-founder and former creative director of SongwritingWith:Soldiers, an organization that brings collaborative songwriting to veterans and their families. The Habit of Noticing: Using Creativity to Make a Life (and a Living), a collection of his writings, photos and drawings, was published in 2018. Smith is the 2024-2025 Songwriter Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin.