Mockingbird Express Marks a ‘Change Of Season’ With Long-Awaited LP Release
Photo by Alejandra Sol Casas
Minutes before the sun dips behind the rugged urban skyline, Marc Smith steps outside into the buzzing twilight of the meandering sunflower labyrinth he planted in his own backyard. The 42-year-old singer-songwriter has just put his infant son down to sleep. In the dim light of dusk, he flicks on a lamp in his makeshift outdoor art studio, revealing a clutter of tools, art supplies, and half-finished collages leaning against a shed wall. From inside, his wife Lydia, taps on the window and waves.
Nearly a decade has passed since Smith captured the soul of San Antonio’s psychedelic music scene with his galvanizing psych-blues sound. Now his musical venture, Mockingbird Express, is finally celebrating its long-overdue self-titled LP. With only 100 ten-inch vinyl copies pressed, the album delves into themes such as western violence, devious religious evangelism and the emptiness of consumerism. It’s his first release following a series of life-altering experiences, including a felony arrest, the loss of his father, and his own transformation into parenthood.
After snapping a few photos amongst the sunflowers with his dog, Rocky, a gentle black and white pitbull mix, Smith leads us through the back door into his home, a snug haven of lively eclecticism. Psychedelic music posters, religious art, photographs of Smith and Lydia and a neon sign reading “Aqui Estamos” adorn wood paneled walls, while plants spill from shelves, tables and the floor, growing and intertwining. In a small room across the living area, a wall lined in shelves stacked nearly to the ceiling holds an extensive vinyl collection. Andre 3000’s New Blue Sun spins on the record player. Smith holds a deep belief in the immutability of vinyl “When I listen to music off of a record, it doesn't just disappear. It rings out into the air forever,” he says. In the same way that art is destined to endure, for Smith “vinyl is forever.”
Photo by Oscar Moreno.
Smith has been a musician since childhood, from clanging pots and pans with wooden spoons to taking piano and trumpet lessons, eventually picking up the guitar after feeling an “exhilarating high” while listening to Jimi Hendrix’s Experience album, with his brother. He remembers asking why such music wasn’t on the radio at the time, to which his brother explained that Hendrix had lived before they were born.
Over the past decade, Smith has self-mythologized, introspectively journeying through biblical gusts of meaning. The name Mockingbird Express is more than just a moniker; it’s a calling. Smith sees “express” as a divine command, akin to the angel’s message to Mohammad to recite. “In that Quranic way, I've been commanded to express myself, to make noise,” he reflects. His totem is a mockingbird.
Smith played experimental amalgamations of sounds in his college band, The Blend, which recently reunited for an improptu show at Lighthouse Lounge, while later careening his way into the fuzzed-out psychedelic act, Creatura. As those bands dissolved, Smith felt his calling come to the forefront. He envisioned an aggressive guitar rock and roll sound with the fluidity of Lightnin' Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, and Neil Young.
Heavy Feathers was the prototype of that vision, but Smith needed musicians that matched his frequencies. “I need dudes who can play fucking badass and loud too,” he says. Enter Kory Cook and Josh Borchardt, “the biggest hired guns in town,” and thus the first incarnation of Mockingbird Express was born.
With Cook and Borchardt, Smith describes a telepathic magic that transcends notes and allows the music to evolve naturally, yet unpredictably, until each song breathes with its own life. They proved relentless before a seemingly unhinged version of Smith, often going their different ways in their own style of improvisation until it was time to meet at the verse. He christened the band at Limelight in 2014, playing alongside some of Texas’s neo-psychedelic heavyweights such as Christian Bland and The Revelators, and El Paso’s Holy Wave.
Promotional Flyer for Mockingbird Express’ first show at Limelight in 2014. Other bands that played included Holy Wave, Christian Bland and The Revelators. Artist unknown.
Though the band has seen its share of lineup changes, it returns each time with a radically reformulated chemistry. Meanwhile Smith has had to take a more directive role in creating music with every rotation of new members. Under his leadership, he would direct members to play in the style of certain artists from the 60s or 70s; no matter how obscure the musician was, the band always knew exactly what direction Marc wanted to take the song. Currently the lineup consists of Travis Hild on drums, Josh Borchardt back on bass, and Smith on Guitar and Vocals.
A revolving door of personnel changes wasn't the only thing that hindered the release of the LP. In 2017, Smith was arrested in El Paso and received a felony conviction for possession of twelve ounces of marijuana. “I might as well have had five pounds, because it stuck me in the same category,” he laughs. But the uncertainty of his fate after a long-awaited trial added a newfound urgency to Smith’s writing and desire to finish the record. He kept quiet, but with the majority of the city shut down, Smith admits that the pandemic was the perfect time to get out of the garage and play shows, though, with a new baby on the way and COVID restrictions enforced, he had to slow down. The year his son, Martin, was born, he played only three shows.
Smith stands up mid-sentence, walks over to a series of cardboard boxes, takes out one of the LPs and says “I’m just going to let you listen.” He carefully pulls the lustrous record out of its sleeve– a hot pink collage of his own artwork overlaid on a photo of him sitting in front of his old house-turned-art-studio-turned-DIY-venue, designed by True Indigo’s Oscar Webber. The design pays homage to the first Taj Mahal album, one of his father’s favorite artists, whom Smith coined a “folk freaker” – a complete antithesis to his own genre. He places the record down on the turntable, sets the needle on top and with a quiet click, we’re immediately greeted by a myriad of swirling textures and a dizzying headrush of fast guitars in “War Blues,” a thematic song about imperial violence. It was written during the Iraq war, but the lyrics eerily resonate with the perpetual state of man, the first line being, "I'm a young man, but I still know how to die."
The tune is quickly followed by the bright sounds of Smith’s Jefferson Airplane-esque experimental tune of “The Tower”. This song started as a songwriting exercise for Smith, who while scrounging around for something weird and cryptic, pieced together lyrics from phrases, lyrics and lines he saw on the record covers lining the walls of his previous residence, The Flop House. He describes the process of writing that song as mirroring his mixed-media art. “The painting knows when it's finished and knows what it's supposed to be about. So I just put paint down until this song was kind of like that.” When he finally stepped back, he realized his lyrics painted a picture of crumbling illusions with imagery about a burning tower and people jumping from it; it also became a sequel to “War Blues.”
Photo by Oscar Moreno.
Thematically, Smith wanted to fill the album with the intrinsic sounds of yesteryear, teetering on the brink of modern innovation while longing for simplicity. “Natural Feeling” channels that sentiment, addressing the poisoning of the modern world and a desire to return to a more “indigenous way of thinking.” It’s a protest song to consumerism and empty wealth with lyrics like “They gave me diamonds and pearls, silk and satin, French cologne and a house in Manhattan, silver spoons made to feed and fatten, plastic and gold. It's such a deadly fashion," questioning what it means to have everything yet still feel dissatisfied.
Mockingbird Smith’s Texas Music Recs:
Bill Baird/Heavy Meddo: “I think he counts as local now”
Grocery Bag: I saw them at Wizrow (Wizard Rodeo) and just the level of cohesion and polish on everybody in that band, I was like, hell yeah.
New Attractions: I like that pocket rock n’ roll y’know? They do it well
Holy Wave: Those are fucking homies. I think they’re the band i’ve seen the most in the world.
The Weary Boys: They’re so like my first band, The Blend. They’re slightly older dudes who we looked up to. They’re playing again so i fuck with them. I like that.
As the album spins, Smith chuckles when “Paoulina” comes on. Lydia teases him for this song, often asking why he hasn’t penned one for her yet, especially since “Paoulina” is about a woman he met one night and never saw again. Ironically, that same woman would later introduce him to Lydia, his now-wife. Like “The Tower,” “Paoulina” also started off as a songwriting exercise for him. He wanted to make a song as triumphant and sultry as John Lee Hooker’s “Gloria,” so he created the melody and plugged in the name because it had the right amount of syllables.
“Change of Season" would have been the title of the album, had Smith not opted out of naming it. It resonates with Smith’s experiences and captures the essence of his journey. "I feel like a lot of my songs are kind of precognitive, you know, because in the course of recording and finishing this, all the changes happened," he reflects. "My dad passed away, I got arrested, got married, had a baby—everything shifted from the start to the end of this project, so that title encapsulates it all for me."
But beyond the life-altering events, it was self-doubt that weighed heavily on Smith, causing the album's delay. "Strangely enough, a fear of permanence, I believe, is what has kept this record from coming out for so long," he admits. "Despite all the timing, the real-life issues, concerns, and complexes that arise... I kept asking myself, 'Is this good enough? Is this what I want to put out? Is this what I want people to remember?' And I've finally reached a point where I can say, 'Yeah, that's good enough.'"
The record finishes, leaving a brief silence as we absorb what we've just heard. Smith breaks the quiet, musing, "There's something about music on a record and how it gets translated from those tiny grooves into electromagnetic pulses. It's a cool science," he stammers, trying to articulate the ancient, almost primordial nature of analog sound. "It's like cuneiform on clay tablets, you know? Who would have thought that with a really small needle and a sensitive vibraflex, you could scratch a song into wax?"
Marc Smith holds up his LP alongside Taj Mahal’s first album, which was the inspiration for his design. Photo by Oscar Moreno.
The record was produced by Vernon Friday and mixed by Roland De La Cruz, but Smith has another LP's worth of songs ready to take into the studio. This time, he'll be working with Brant Sankey at Studio E, bringing with him years of writing and recording experience gained from this album. As for touring, that will have to wait—hopefully not another decade. "With Martin in the picture, whatever I might have envisioned in terms of the musical life, like tours and stuff, that's going to be further down the road. But I’m still in good shape. I feel like I’m only getting better."
Mockingbird Express’s self-titled debut album is currently available on Bandcamp. The vinyl release show will be at 8 p.m., Friday, August 23, at The Lonesome Rose.
