Popscene And Rickshaw Stop Co-Presents: Thursday, Nov 20 YOUR SMITH the rub tour '25 $20 adv/$24 day of show 7pm doors, 8pm show, All ages Your Smith The first newmusic from Your Smith in over five years, TheRub is a testament to the risk and beauty in abandoning the dreams thatonce defined you. After devoting most of her life to cultivating a celebrated careeras a singer/songwriter—including releasing a series of critically lauded projects,touring internationally, and collaborating with major pop superstars and indiedarlings alike—the Minnesota-bred artist shelved a body of work she’d beguncreating in 2020, with the intention of taking a potentially permanent breakfrom music. But after nearly four years of living a dramatically different existence(including starting a family and returning to college at age 32), Smith feltcalled back to songwriting with a wildly altered perspective on identity, art,and the never-ending work of building a good life. “Before thepandemic, I was a touring artist and my husband was a chef at a Michelin-starredrestaurant—we were both so excited about what we were doing, but at the sametime it felt like there was a huge hole in our lives that couldn’t be filled,”says Smith, who left her former homebase of L.A. and moved to Minneapolis inthe early days of lockdown. “There’s this idea that living your dreams meansyou’re completely free, when really you can end up quite stuck. Once we madethe radical decision to choose a normal life, the world opened up in a way thathadn’t felt possible.” Mostly made with JakeLuppen and Nathan Stocker of Saint Paul-bred indie-rock band Hippo Campus, The Rub takes its title from the Shakespeareanturn of phrase indicating a stubborn obstacle to a desired outcome. “A big partof making this record was figuring out how music could coexist with this newlife I’d created,” says Smith, now the mother of a three-year-old boy andco-owner of a restaurant with her husband, Adam To. “It wasn’t a very neat orfluid process, but it required me to think about how to fit music into my lifein a way that’s entirely on my own terms.” Despite the complexityof its creation, The Rub inhabits a warmand lovely ease that feels gorgeously out of step in an era of hyper-compressedpop. Produced by Luppen (a songwriter/producer/ engineer who’s also worked withCharly Bliss and Samia), the album strays from the sleek aesthetic of her 2019EP Wild Wild Woman and leans into herlove for ’70s R&B and soft rock, unfolding in breezy grooves and lush guitartones and brightly soulful piano melodies. For help in forging the LP’stimeless yet wholly unpredictable sound, Smith and Luppen recorded with a fullband, then ornamented each song with beautifully strange details and unexpectedtextures. Rooted in Smith’s ever-captivating vocal work, the result is an idealsetting for her tenderly drawn and confessional vignettes of those seeminglysmall moments that hold so much meaning. Recorded at PachydermStudios (a residential space inside an old-growth forest), The Rub first began taking shape in the brief period betweenSmith’s move to Minneapolis and the start of her musical sabbatical. “I camefrom a really great community of writers and producers in L.A., but when we gotto Minneapolis I didn’t have anyone to work with,” she says. At the suggestionof her sister, Smith reached out to Luppen, who turned out to be a longtime fanof her work (an expansive catalog that includes her defunct indie-folk band CarolineSmith & the Good Night Sleeps and debut solo album Half About Being a Woman). But while Smith felt an immediatechemistry with Luppen and Stocker—and quickly enlisted them in creating hernext album—she ultimately felt an overwhelming need to disengage from thedemands of a modern music career. “The rigid cycle of write/release/tour/writehad broken enough for me to assess if I wanted to do it at all anymore,” shesays. “When I finally found the bravery to walk away, we had a lot of greatsongs we were leaving behind.” Upon reconnectingin 2024, Smith and her two collaborators soon came up with a song called “Peaches,”The Rub’s bittersweet lead single. “Iremember feeling like I had no idea how to write anymore, but Jake engendered avery safe creative space where I felt unbelievably loved and supported, and thesong just poured out of me,” Smith recalls. A winning introduction to The Rub’s radiant sonic world, “Peaches”tells the tale of a make-believe road trip, channeling both carefree nostalgiaand heavy-hearted longing for an unattainable past. “I wrote that song in amoment when my older brother was going through a very difficult time and I wasdealing with a lot of change in my own life,” she says. “It’s about wishing Icould just scoop us up and drive us away, but also wishing I could have donethat in our childhood.” With a singular giftfor locating sweetness and joy in the most uncomfortable of feelings, Smith bringsa particularly enchanting candor to “Hey There’s My Girl”—an intimate look atthe delight and occasional mortification of having a crush on your closestfriend. “It’s about waking up hungover with anxiety, because the night beforeyou almost kissed your best friend and told them you loved them,” says Smith. “Itwas a scary song to write, but I think a lot of women understand that feeling. Womenare complicated creatures, and sometimes love feels and looks like a bunch ofdifferent emotions colliding all at once.” Another twist on the typicallove-song trope, “Leaving You” presents a lived-in portrait of interminable heartache,imbuing her lyrics with a charming nonchalance (e.g., “It must be nice on theother side of feeling like you’re kind of dying”). “That’s the first song Iever wrote with Jake,” Smith points out. “It’s about how sometimes it feelslike you’ll spend your entire life getting over your first heartbreak—but whenI hear it, I hear the spark between two people creating something together forthe very first time.” One of the most exhilaratingmoments on The Rub, “Mr. Revival” isa reimagined remnant of a track written in 2018, back when she’d recently adoptedthe Your Smith moniker and started working with heavy-hitting pop producers inL.A. With its pulsating beats and frenetic guitar work, the larger-than-life anthemtelegraphs the power and triumph in self-reinvention. “It’s a song about rebirthand facing the final boss of yourself, and feels even more apropos now that I’mgoing through an even bigger revival in my career,” says Smith. As a counterpointto “Mr. Revival,” the sublimely wistful yet self-assured “Little Highways”emerged from what she sums up as “the death of who I previously was as anartist.” “I wrote that when I’d just found out I was pregnant; it’s the lastsong I came up with before I walked away from music,” she says. “It’s tough to getout of the grind and divorce yourself from the monster of an ego you’ve created,but we found that throwing up those guardrails gave us a whole new direction topursue, and jolted the car into fifth gear.” Growing up in thenorthern Minnesota town of Detroit Lakes, Smith began her journey as an artist duringher high-school years and opened for blues legend B.B. King when she was just16-years-old. After moving to Minneapolis, she founded her former band and roseto fame in the local scene, then headed to L.A. in the mid-2010s and landed a dealwith a boutique record label under the name Your Smith. “By the time I steppedaway from music, I’d been on the nonstop merry-go-round of writing andreleasing and touring for more than half my life,” says Smith. “There’s apressure that comes with constantly trying to prove yourself—and even thoughthat pressure can lead to great material sometimes, it can also create a kindof choked feeling. With this new album I finally stopped holding on so tightlyto everything, and allowed myself to do whatever felt right to me.” In reflecting onthe shift in mindset that brought her to TheRub, Smith acknowledges a certain irony in her chosen alias. “I startedcalling myself Your Smith in order to have a character to hide behind, but nowI’ve come full circle and feel the opposite way,” she says. “I lovehigh-concept art, but I think the world needs more artists who aren’t sointerested in building a persona. This album was written by a woman in middleAmerica whose life is very family-oriented; I very much let go of the need to comeoff like the cool L.A. girl. Nothing about it was made for the approval oraffirmation of others, and because of that I created something that’scompletely from my heart.”