When country artist Elisa Smith writes new music, she usually does it on the Takamine acoustic guitar she received as a gift from Garth Brooks in 2015. Brooks and his wife, Trisha Yearwood, were speaking at Harvard, and Smith, a master’s student at the time at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, asked for his advice on overcoming stage fright during a Q&A session. When she revealed that she was a country musician herself, he invited her onstage to perform for the 400 people in the audience. “This is what we call being baptized by fire,” she remembers him saying. “Get on up here and play us a song!” Afterward, as a kind of benediction, he told her to keep the guitar he had loaned her onstage. When she released her first full-length album, in 2022, she titled it Baptized by Fire. This summer, she is releasing a new album, Perfume.
Smith—whose real name is Leah Waldo, Ed.M. ’15—has built a musical career in Boston, a place some might consider an unlikely home for a country artist. But Smith says Boston actually “loves country music”—partly because the city loves drinking and dancing, two of the genre’s major themes, and partly because the music itself has shifted, adopting new influences from pop and hip hop that make it more appealing to urban audiences. There’s a cultural element, too, Smith says: for many people country music is associated with warm weather and parties. “Rebranding itself as this carefree, summertime, barefoot, blue jeans, bro country kind of thing,” she says, “really catapulted it into the mainstream.”
These days, country stars like Kenny Chesney, Luke Combs, and Megan Moroney regularly sell out TD Garden and Gillette Stadium. Some of the city’s smaller venues also cater to the country scene. One of Smith’s favorite spots is the legendary Paradise Rock Club near Boston University. “I’ve been doing country music in Boston for a really long time,” she says. “When I first started, there [were], like, no country artists here. And now, Zach Bryan is selling out the stadium where the Patriots play, and the Zac Brown Band is selling out Fenway Park multiple times a year.”
A graduate of the Berklee College of Music, where she studied music production, Smith grew up in a musical family in Mokena, a small town outside Chicago. Illinois has its own country music history: it’s the birthplace of stars like John Prine and Alison Krauss, as well as the influential 1990s alt-country group Uncle Tupelo. Smith remembers sitting in her father’s guitar case while he practiced gospel songs for church and listening to her grandmother’s stories of seeing country stars perform at the Grand Ole Opry while honeymooning in Nashville.
“Elisa Smith”—pronounced “Eliza”—is taken from Leah Waldo’s real middle name (Elizabeth) and her maiden name (Smith); away from the microphone, she is a Boston educator and mother of two young children. Having a stage name, she says, “gives you a character to step into, and it helps you get your mind right for when you’re about to perform.” It also provides a bit of protection, she adds: “If people want to say, ‘Elisa sucks,’ it’s not like they’re criticizing me, who is a mother, wife, and an educator. The music industry is hard, and you get battered quite a bit.”
Smith gained experience in giving and getting feedback while at Harvard, particularly in a course called “Models of Excellence” with Ron Berger, Ed.M. ’90, who founded an organization for school improvement called Expeditionary Learning. “He created a framework for giving feedback: it should be specific, helpful, and kind,” Smith says. She applies Berger’s teachings when she’s co-writing, rehearsing, or recording in a studio.
Smith describes her sound as “Loretta Lynn meets Led Zeppelin.” When she plays with a full band, the fiddle and pedal steel guitar ramp up her country sound; an electric guitar gives other songs a more rock or bluesy feel. Smith doesn’t have a Southern twang, but her voice is whiskey-soaked enough to sound like it was meant to be heard from the back of a well-loved dive bar. The songs feel familiar, even the new ones. “I often get folks saying, ‘I remember that song from when I was a kid!’’ Smith says, “And I say, ‘Do you now? That’s funny ’cause I just wrote it last month.’”
One of Smith’s goals as a songwriter and performer is to continue the subversively feminist tradition that has long existed in country music. Lynn, her musical hero, “wouldn’t necessarily call herself a feminist,” Smith says, “but I would, with the songs that she wrote about the pill, and ‘Rated X.’” She describes Lynn’s songwriting as simple but powerful. “That’s why country is so popular, and why people continue to go back to it over and over again,” she says. “You know that joke, that it’s ‘three chords and the truth?’”
When Smith writes, she typically starts with a title, often a phrase borrowed from a book or a movie. She works that into a melodic hook, which then anchors the verses, chorus, and bridge. “Smut,” a track on Perfume, was inspired by steamy romance novels. “I wanted it to be visceral, very heavy on the storytelling,” she says. “Your mama sneaking downstairs, reading a Danielle Steel romance novel.” Another track, “Angels Who Take No Shit,” is an homage to role models like Lynn and Dolly Parton: “Women with loose lips who took aim and sank your ships/They smiled nice, but made you think twice/Of all the dumb shit you said.”
Smith still gets nervous on stage at unpredictable times. “I actually do what Garth told me back then,” she says. “You get on stage, you take a breath, you focus on the chords that you’re playing, and then you settle into a groove. Also, I usually take a shot of whiskey, which helps.” If you’re buying, she likes Blanton’s.
