[Editor’s note: Jay Gonzalez is a multi-instrumentalist from Athens, Georgia best known for playing keyboards and guitar for rock band Drive-By Truckers since 2008. Pete Smith is a writer that’s worked in both music and comedy. He’s written songs with and for musicians such as legendary jazz composer Gary McFarland and served as producer and writer for Adult Swim for almost two decades. He was an integral part of Space Ghost Coast To Coast and its spin-off, The Brak Show. On Friday, December 1, the duo known as Gonzalez Smith will release their debut Roll Up a Song. For Water Tower Sessions, Jay decided to perform their song “Something Good” and penned an essay about the song and his connection to Smith.]
Something Good
I met Pete Smith on a snowy December night in the Manhattan Bar in Athens, Georgia. We were visiting with family and friends after meeting each other at Pete’s daughter Nora’s wedding the year before. We got into a conversation about music and eventually realized we shared a love for a lot of the same fare – [Harry] Nilsson, Randy Newman, Carole King and many other singer/songwriters from that bygone era.
As they were leaving, Pete’s daughter Nora pulls me aside and tells me I should listen to Pete’s record. I agreed to look it up but, snob that I am, assumed he put out a burned CD of songs he recorded at home or something. When I got home and googled it, I realized Pete had actually written lyrics for an album called Butterscotch Rum in 1971 on Buddah Records with jazz composer Gary McFarland. Strangely a friend of mine had mentioned the album to me soon before and later gave me a vinyl copy of it.
Gary’s previous albums ranged from straight ahead jazz to covers of Beatles songs done in the Bossa nova style. He had worked with Stan Getz and Bill Evans among a long list of notable performers. But in the late sixties he started writing songs in a wistful soft pop style.
Pete, a graphic artist who studied at Pratt Institute, got a gig doing the album art for Gary’s Skye Records. On the cover of Gary’s Today album, Pete featured short poems within the artwork that Gary took a shine to and he asked Pete to write lyrics for his next album.
The songs on Butterscotch Rum were kaleidoscopic both musically and lyrically- songs about Salvation Army bands and folks running away to Florida, a song about Poor Daniel who finally got a piano but then disappears, an ode to his future wife Pat and the jewel of a song “All my Better Days.”
McFarland sadly passed away later that year and Pete left the music business, started a family and began working television production.
Somewhere down the line Pete and Pat and family ended up in Atlanta where he began working at Cartoon Network on the seminal animated show Space Ghost Coast to Coast. He then went on to create The Brak Show and created many of the iconic bumpers between commercials on Adult Swim.
By the time I met Pete in 2017-ish, he had retired. We often met for lunch and ended up chatting about music and movies for hours at a time.
I had always wanted to ask him if he’d be into maybe collaborating on some songs as I’d always preferred writing music to writing lyrics. Then one day he asked me if he could send me some lyrics, he’d written for a song called “Helen Magellan”, about an explorer who gets in with the wrong crowd and has different parts of her body end up on different continents. Dark and funny stuff. Pete said he had listened to one of my albums and that he was worried about me as the lyrics were so sad.
I was overjoyed to write some silly happy material.
Cut to six years and 40 plus songs later- we have an album called Roll Up a Song that’s being released on Bobo Integral Records in Spain and I couldn’t be happier to have an LP of our songs out there for the world to hear. There are also three songs on the album that have the most amazing string arrangements by my friend Brent Cash (a wonderful composer/singer/songwriter in his own right).
Anyone familiar with my work with Drive-by Truckers might be surprised at the different ground covered here but there’s a lot of common ground between myself and Patterson and Cooley – we all love a good top 40 AM radio song from the 70’s. That’s definitely a connection Pete and I have as well. I feel like a lot of the songs on the album could be a lost one hit wonder from a regional station in Atlanta or Albuquerque or Buffalo.
“Something Good” is the song I chose to perform in the accompanying video. I recorded it at my home studio, The Carport, where I recorded the basics for a lot of the songs on the album. My longtime collaborator Chris Grehan helped me out by mixing and making my home recordings sound presentable.
Like many of the songs on the album, “Something Good” is not as lighthearted and silly as some of the earlier stuff we wrote (though there are a few fun ones on Roll Up) but it sure is a pretty song, if I do say so myself and its title sure works well as the title of this piece, to boot.
Jay Gonzalez
11.28.23
Jay Gonzalez
Contributor
Jay Gonzalez is a multi-instrumentalist from Athens, Georgia best known for playing keyboards and guitar for rock band Drive-By Truckers since 2008.
