Darden Smith

During the pandemic, the Austin-based artist also helped launch Frontline Songs, which connected musicians and healthcare workers to support them in telling their stories and healing their trauma.  

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His latest project, Western Skies, is a multi-media project comprising of a new studio album: a book of photography, lyrics, and essays: an accompanying spoken word album of readings set to music, drawings, lithographs and works on paper: video and theatre.  The collection is an immersive journey through a Texas landscape both real and imagined, a place of mystery and mythology, possibility and longing.  The Daily News hailed Smith as "one of the most respected American musicians working today," while the Austin Chronicle dubbed him a "master son craftsman," and AllMusic called him "a singer/songwriter blessed with an uncommon degree of intelligence, depth, and compassion."  In 2023 Smith was named the inaugural Songwriter-in-Residence at the University of Texas at Austin.