Darden Smith

Overview

For Darden Smith, the creatively expansive Texas troubadour, Love Calling represents both. The album opens a new chapter in the artist's prolific career, and circles back to his musical roots. The release is Smith's first in three years and the first for his new label, Compass Records. Surprisingly, Love Calling also represents the first time Smith has recorded in Nashville, co-writing much of the material with some of the city's stellar songwriters and working with top studio musicians, under the co-production of Jon Randall Stewart and Gary Paczosa.  Yet for Smith, whose career has taken him all over the map, musically as well as geographically, the release also represents an artistic homecoming. The organic arrangements invoke the sound that established him as a breakout artist from the Texas club circuit in the mid-1980s, when he forged his style and found an audience that extended from country-folk traditionalists to those more attuned to contemporary trends.