Corey Smith's 'calculated risk'
One of Corey Smith’s earliest memories is being allowed to hold his father’s guitar.
“Dad played in bands and I sang in church when I was a kid, so I’ve been around music all my life,” he said. “I didn’t take it very seriously as a teenager, but because I was exposed to it at an early age, it came more or less naturally.”
At age 7 he won third place in a talent show for his Elvis impersonation, but it wasn’t until he went to college and started playing to earn a little money that music took off for him.
“I played cover tunes and would work in my original songs,” he said. “It’s a challenging way to go about it, but playing cover songs, I felt like people were plunking quarters into me and I didn’t like it.”
After college, he taught high school social studies for four years, married and fathered two children, with the hope of having something like a normal life. But he continued to write and record and the time finally came when he took the “calculated risk.”
“I knew I had to make a certain amount of money,” he said, “and once I realized that I could make more money in one sold-out show than in a month of teaching, it wasn’t such a hard decision.”
Writing songs, he said, is “a lot like therapy.”
“I never thought that making a living at this was an option, so I wrote the songs I wanted to write, about the stuff that keeps me awake at night,” he said. “But I was lucky that people responded to the sincerity, the authenticity, the whatever it is that the artist strives for, to be as open to ourselves as we can be.”
