April Smith comes home

You like her, you really like her. In a recent poll, Jersey Shore Metromix readers chose April Smith and the Great Picture Show as the Shore-connected act they felt most deserving of a major record label deal.

We chatted with the Toms River-bred pop songstress, who released a limited-edition live EP this summer and will be performing solo at Hey Cole Presents: Naked Writers Round at 8 p.m. Friday (Aug. 15) at The Saint in Asbury Park along with Frank Bressi, Anthony Fiumano and Arlan Feiles.

Tell me a bit about the growth of your sound from the last record (2006's "Loveletterbombs") to what you're working on now.
I don't know, I just started writing a lot differently than I used to. Really, I’ve always been influenced by the Andrews Sisters and The Beatles and Tom Waits and the crooners of the '50s and '60s like Gene Pitney ... all these great songwriters and arrangers and producers and it hasn’t come out as much in the music as it is now.

(These) songs kind of lend themselves to a real timeless sound which, I think, is not an intentional thing but it’s certainly not a bad thing, either. Because I think if you have a great batch of songs that can hold up over time, that’s like the best thing that you can ask for as a songwriter, and I just feel like this is my best stuff yet, definitely. It’s got that big retro-pop sound, but it’s also got a little bit of that 1940s girl group sound too, like the Andrews Sisters, so it’s definitely a departure from the old stuff, but not in a bad way.

There's been speculation online that one of the new songs, "Colors," is about the troops overseas.
You know what's funny? It’s not, actually. If you listen to the lyrics, it never says anything about fighting or about coming back from battle or whatever. It's (about) someone far away, but I guess it's got that feel, kind of like an old-timey feel, but it's also like the perfect song for somebody who’s far away, somebody who’s overseas and it just sort of fell into this whole thing. I know some people who are overseas fighting and they're like, "This song is the best," it’s so different from every other song that they send to the troops because it’s not like a ballad or a sad, sappy kind of song. It’s so upbeat and hopeful, and I guess their favorite thing about it is it's a feel-good song and it’s definitely not your average “salute to the troops” kind of song, but it definitely works in that respect. … I’m happy that they're liking it and hopefully they’ll get to come home to it one day.

Switching gears a little bit -- your tour bus now runs on vegetable oil. What inspired that decision?
Well, I had been researching it for a couple of years and I really, really had been wanting to do something like this. … Knowing we were traveling so much and burning so much gas, it just felt like we weren’t doing the right thing. We took two big, big long trips and I was just like, "You know, I don’t know if this is the way to do it." We went to South by Southwest (in Austin, Texas), and I was like, "If I don’t have some kind of environmentally friendly vehicle next year, I’m not going to do South by Southwest," and we didn’t go this year because the bus wasn’t ready, but we did take the bus to Chicago and back and we did half on veggie, which was totally cool.

But it's just, I guess, a matter of conscience where if you're a band and if you have that kind of a voice where you have people coming out to see you and showing up to your shows and listening to what you have to say. If you have that kind of power, then you also have that kind of responsibility, and that’s like a responsibility of all artists. I feel that it’s on people who are in entertainment to say you can find better ways of getting to shows, better ways of traveling, and you can always lessen your carbon footprint. … It’s just, I guess, something we've been wanting to and then I finally got the money to do it and I bought a bus, converted it and now it runs on vegetable oil.

You grew up in Toms River and your MySpace page lists you as being from Brooklyn. Do you still consider yourself a Jersey Girl, or have you switched sides and become a New Yorker?
Well, I live in Brooklyn right now, but I'm constantly in New Jersey. I feel like if you're from New Jersey you’re never not going to be a New Jersey kid. Brooklyn is so different from New Jersey, but absolutely I always consider myself from New Jersey even though we're based in Brooklyn because my bass player moved here. If you're a musician, it's a really great place to be right now because you're right next to the city but you're not kind of in the mix of it all.

We're playing a lot in the city right now, and we’re also traveling a lot … (and) the majority of my band is Brooklyn, so I’d be coming here anyway, so it’s kind of like I might as well go where it’s convenient for us all to be. And I’m starting to like it here, for sure, but it’s definitely not Jersey, and that’ll always be home to me.

Photo credit: Florian Weckert