We’re so excited to read this amazing review of All is Song by John Apice over at Americana Highways - he clearly took the time to listen and we really appreciate his insights and observations on our record! Thank you Americana Highways for shining your light on our new offering!
Read the full review here: https://americanahighways.org/.../review-misner-smith.../
We were featured on the The Great American Folk Show from Prairie Public hosted by the amazing Tom Brosseau!
We’ve been a fan of Tom’s music for a long time and we’re really honored for our music to be included on this show.
Here’s the show rundown …
The Great American Folk Show live sessions from songwriter Caitlin Cannon, NorCal acoustic duo Misner & Smith, Minneapolis guitarist Tim Sparks , and some country from The Hawthorns - Plus, a visit with Richard Nordgren about past curling in Hazen.
Episode 106 of The Great American Folk Show with host Tom Brosseau on Prairie Public Radio, coming to you from North Dakota is now archived. LISTEN HERE
We are both huge fans of the work that The Center of the Arts do in their community up in Grass Valley, CA. This year we’re pleased to announce that Sam will be joining in on the fun by providing songwriting coaching on Sunday, April 28th. This is a great opportunity to immerse yourself in the creative process and be around other folks who are also learning, playing, and sharing their music. There will be workshops, coaching sessions, an open mic night, as well as shows every night from some amazing artists including Rufus Wainwright, Brett Dennon, and Ayla Nereo. Come on up and join in the fun! Sign up HERE.
(From New Songs Fest): Happy April! This month marks our second annual songwriting festival April 25th-28th and we thought no better way to kick off the countdown than with a series: Meet the New Songs Fest Workshop Instructors
Meet Sam Misner of Misner & Smith!
Sam Misner is the main songwriter for the unclassifiable Northern California-based duo Misner & Smith. Known as much for their soaring vocal harmonies as they are for their poetic and technically precise songwriting, the pair has been touring and recording music for the past 20 years. Sam has also written music for several professional theater productions at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Sacramento Theater Company, and Marin Theater Company. Misner & Smith will be releasing their new album, All is Song, in April 2024.
We’re heading up to Alaska to take part in one of the longest running free folk fests in the country and we couldn’t be more excited to be playing our set on the very day that our new album, All is Song, will be officially released into the world! Our set is on Friday, April 12th at 8:30pm. If you want to come to the 49th annual Alaska Folk Fest, check out all the information on their site. Can’t wait to party with you Juneau!
Shoutout to Tina Macuha and Sakura Gray and all the folks at Good Day Sacramento for having us play on the show Saturday morning! We had a blast, thanks for the hometown love!
GET YOUR TICKETS HERE for this very exciting night! Not only will we be celebrating the release of our 6th album, All is Song, but we’re also celebrating 20 years of making music together! We’ll be playing this new music with two of the amazing musicians from the album, Co-producer, and multi-instrumentalist Bruce Kaphan (American Music Club, David Byrne, The Black Crowes) will be featured on pedal steel guitar, keyboards, and electric guitar. Oakland-based drummer and multi-instrumentalist Dillon Vado will be featured on drums. We want all of you to be with us for this amazing night!
Americana Highways premiered our song, “Silence of the Sun” and our handmade stop-motion animated video that we crafted over the course of about a week. With over 2800 individual shots and lots of handmade artwork, it features the lyrics and puts a spotlight on the poetry and story of the song. Get the track HERE.
Watch the stop-motion animated video for “Silence of the Sun”, the second single off of our new album, All is Song, which will be released April 12, 2024.
“Misner & Smith search deeply in their songwriting, and their music is beautiful complex poetry … Listen to the lovely vocal harmonies and acoustic instruments in an existential slow dance.” - Melissa Clarke, Americana Highways
Big thanks to Country Lowdown for sharing the news about the release of our new album, coming out on April 12th, and for sharing "Anthem" our first single off of the album, out right now! Get the new track right here: https://anthemmisnerandsmith.hearnow.com/anthem
Thanks again to the folks at FOX40 for having us play live in-studio last week to celebrate the release of our new single, "Anthem"! We had a great time playing for you all! Check it out ...
Praise for “Anthem”
"...a light-hearted anthem with colorful melodies that swirl around the room in a hazy psychedelic light show reminiscent of Nickel Creek. Poetic lyrics jump off the track and paint vivid images for a lead single that encompasses the many emotions of evolving as a person."
"Brutally honest lyrics are set against an unpredictable arrangement for a new direction for the band that showcases their growth as musicians."
"Songs are small moments you can carry with you, Misner & Smith captured so many emotions and moments in the album’s six-year creation process, All is Song is gearing up to be the best music of their career. "
We're thrilled to announce that Glide Magazine is featuring a premiere of the official video of our first single "Anthem" today, and you can watch it now!
The single will be available everywhere you listen to and purchase music tomorrow, but in the meantime you can watch and listen to the song HERE! Please drop us line or comment and let us know what you think!
Happy Fall to all you music lovers!
As we write this we're only a few hours into autumn and it feels like the air and light took their cues to shift the scenery for the next act. Seemingly overnight the warm sun has that hint of cool to come, and the sloping shadows seem to be leaning into the new season like the spent towers of sunflowers in the fields. This time of year is one of our favorites. There can be a calm, reflective, and energizing feel to the air, as we shift ourselves into the changes around us. Here at Misner & Smith headquarters we're feeling all of that, plus a huge amount of excitement!
After having spent the better part of the last twelve months in the studio, we're thrilled to announce that we recorded our last instrument and vocals in September, and the album is now in the mixing phase! For those of you who don't know, mixing is what happens after you've recorded all the instruments that you're going to have on the record, and when you start leveling out volumes and timbres and tonalities, choosing when that electric guitar comes in or goes out, or maybe pulling up a harmony to better support a lyric in the song.
We've never worked harder on a project than we have this year, recording our new album. It's taken an immense amount of focus (and organizing): from pre-production planning, gathering ourselves and guest musicians, to figuring out schedules, traveling to and from the studio, making countless decisions big and small, and being meticulous about every last note that makes it onto the record. We truly believe we've created something that is more than the sum of its parts, and we couldn't be prouder--or more excited to share it! But there's still work to do...
After mixing, we usually spend a week or so living with the mixes to make sure we've made all the "right" decisions before we send them off to be mastered. The mastering process is hard to describe, and even after all these years still feels like some sort of alchemical wizardry that we'll never quite understand completely. We just refer to it as "the magic sauce".
At the same time, the rest of the behind-the-scenes work for a record release are in full swing. We're in the middle of building our team that will help us get this new music to as many ears as possible. That involves a lot of things, but namely finding a publicist to work with us on the campaign. The old adage "If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it..." comes to mind. The truth is, in this world of constant streaming content, we independent artists have to contend with both the staggering amount of content out there, and the huge corporations who have unlimited resources to dominate the field. So we're gathering a posse of stout-hearted believers in this music in order to help raise it up above the fray. We're also in discussions with a graphic designer about the album art, which is already starting to shape up and is looking great! After all of this, everything gets sent off to the presses, and if all goes according to plan, we will release the new album early next year.
Now, you may be thinking this is taking longer than you expected. So are we! But there are very good reasons for it. After having had to wait to record this album for as long as we did, due to the pandemic, we made the decision early on that a we didn't want to cut any corners or rush our process if we could help it. We have one chance to make this record, one chance to release it, and we want it to be the best it can be. And to the angels who donated the money that made this whole project possible (and chose to receive a thank you gift), rest assured you will all be receiving your thank you gifts, just a bit later than anticipated. We know that you all have as much excitment and anticipation as we do about the release of this album and we hope you all know how grateful we both are to you all for your patience and support as we come around the last leg of this incredible journey.
This project is a marathon, not a sprint, and with every choice we were faced with over these many months, we asked ourselves this question: what is best for each song? We could go the easier way, or the right way. Sometimes the right way meant that things would take a little longer, but to our ears, the results speak for themselves. The songs are soaring. There is no substitute for time. It is truly a gift, and not one we take for granted. We took so much care in making this record, we want to take just as much care in releasing it.
In the meantime, we do have some secrets to share about the album itself that we've been holding close to our chests:
• The title of the album is "All is Song"
• There will be 12 songs! (This includes all of the new songs you've been hearing us play live)
• The record includes 2 re-imagined older songs, "One Day" and "Compose" (More on that later...)
• There is one brand new song that no one has heard!
• We've included a cover of "Rising of the Moon" by Kate Wolf. (This track also features the great Nina Gerber (!!), Kate's long-time guitar player and collaborator, on lead guitar.)
All in all, the album has so many surprises in store for you. It is full of joy, it is full of love, and these songs on this record have come into bloom with the time we've had to make it.
As we get closer to our release date we plan to release a number of singles off the album, so stay tuned! In the meantime, we are so grateful for all of your support and patience as we get our many ducks in a row and position ourselves to launch this album into the world!
Thank you!!
Your friends,
Sam and Megan
We may be busy preparing to release the new album, but we're still booking shows and House Concerts are some of our favorites, so if you're interested please drop us a line at misnerandsmith@gmail.com and we can talk about making your house concert dreams come true!
And we've updated our Bandcamp Page, now we have our full catalogue of past albums available for you to listen to or purchase whenever you like.
Thank you as always for supporting and listening, we are so excited to share all that is to come!
We’re coming to Sacramento tomorrow night, July 8th, to play one our favorite house concerts, the always fabulous Bootleg Music Cafe and Tiki Lounge doors open at 7:15pm/Music starts at 7:45pm. If you’ve been there before, you know just how special a venue it is. Outdoors, with plenty of room for you to join us! RSVP to get the details at bootlegproductions.com
We'll be playing a special house concert in Grass Valley, CA on Sunday June 25th at 5pm, and we can't wait to get back up to the foothills! This is where it all started for us about 19 years ago--on the shores of the beautiful Yuba River, on the airwaves of KVMR, and on the historic stage of the Nevada Theater. No RSVP needed, just pay at the door when you arrive. To get the address and more info email us at: misnerandsmith@gmail.com
San Francisco SHOW ALERT! Hey Bay Area, we’re coming to you! Saturday, June 10th starting at 3:00pm we’ll be filling the air with music. This is going to be such a fun backyard house concert in beautiful Cole Valley, SF. We’re really excited to play at Echoes in the Valley Concerts and we hope you’ll come out to help make it all the more special! RSVP and make your reservations now by sending an email to: echoesinthevalleyconcerts@gmail.com
Let’s have some fun!
On the drums, introducing Dillon Vado ...
As we’ve been working hard in the studio over the past many weeks, spending a day or two at a time there recording, listening, rearranging, composing, re-recording, fleshing out arrangements, the songs end up revealing themselves in ways we’ve always imagined, and in other ways that have been illuminating and surprising. When we first started thinking about this album we knew that drums would be a larger part of the sound than in our previous albums. Not because we just wanted to have drums for a bigger sound, but because these particular songs were originally written with drums in mind.
And though we perform mostly with acoustic instruments, as many of you know well, our songs jump around genres pretty regularly, and we certainly aren’t straight ahead folk music, by any means. We’ve always been proud of the amount of sound that we can create with just the two of us, but being in the studio affords us the opportunity to orchestrate these songs in ways we’ve had in our heads from the beginning, to fill them out in ways that illuminate the songwriting, melodies, harmonies and instrumentation even more. Frankly, to give them their due.
The single biggest element so far that has allowed us this freedom to explore our own songs is the incredibly tasteful, musical, unique, and lush drumming by our new friend and collaborator, Dillon Vado.
As we listen back and build on the tracks he laid down we are in constant amazement at the treasure he’s left us. Not only is it abundantly clear how closely he was listening to everything we were doing as a duo, responding to it all and highlighting those nuances beautifully, but he also brought new elements of phrasing and rhythms that give us even more to play with as we build these songs further. It’s a true collaboration and is really exciting! Whether he’s playing with sticks and driving the beat on songs that call for that kind of approach, or playing beautifully subtle and heartbreaking parts on brushes, he is helping us capture the dynamics and wide spectrum of these songs. At the beginning of this project we’d planned on a handful of songs having drums on them, but as soon as we heard him play on his first day in the studio with us, that list quickly grew. So, the rhythmic foundation for this album is a strong and beautiful one, and we’re having a blast framing the rest of this house out!
(Stay tuned for more updates from the studio)
