Smart Balm

   My name is Stephan Smith. I came here to drop a Balm. I write preemptive strike songs.

   My mother's name is Smith. She's Austrian and Catholic but with a Jewish great grandfather so we had family on both sides of the barbed wire in the war. My father's name is Said, he's Iraqi, his mother had family on both sides of the Kurdish line. I was raised by a Jesuit named Frank Gutowski.

   I started playing piano when I was three and violin when I was four, and I was writing songs a soon as I laid my hands on either of them. I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on Earth, near the close of the 2nd millennium with a fiddle in my hand and a fat head singing tunes in 12 different languages.

   Ask my mom, she'll be the first to tell you I was a pain to deliver! To make up for it, right after I popped out I threw a serious square dance in the delivery room , followed by a rockin Csardas with the Mexican and Polish nurses, the Midwestern born doctor, and the Native American anesthesiologist all dosido'in, flamenco-in', and new whirled dervishin' through the hospital halls. Since then I've always been out to meet, get to know, and sing for every type of person in this big country of ours and throughout this shrinking planet, in every beautiful neighborhood, from Syria, Virginia, to Davenport, North Dakota, from Iraq to Argentina, and from Israel to France. Wherever I've been and wherever I go, I want to absorb and make love to culture, poems and songs with the same love I have for the cool, burnin' music of the Blue Ridge mountains of my childhood.

   I quit high school early to go on tour with an SST punk rock band just before the grunge rock sell out and pulled my first motor out of a car with Mike Watt in an alley in San Pedro when I was still a kid. I abandoned loud screaming guitars in search for a way, a sound, a poetry, a music to rejoin a world I saw falling apart and started migrant farm working (while grunge killed itself). I traveled and worked all over the U.S., hoboed, lived in squats, on rooftops, on roadsides, and then all over Europe where I learned more tongues than can fit in an average mouth, and studied aural cultures' rich delivery.

   I came home to the States and headed South before landing in New York. In the big city I stuck to the hood, to the streets, hangin with rap artists, Irish fiddlers, and oh, the poets. I toured with Allen Ginsberg after my first year here, shortly before he passed, and got a lot of people trying to take me out for dinners on corporate accounts telling me I was a star, that they want to put out my records, that they don't want me to expose that I have Arabic descent even if I'm a champion fiddler and don't look like a terrorist. I busted out of that lie and started developing precision-guided songs for the days that now are quickly upon us.

   I rip breakdowns at fiddle competitions in Southwestern Virginia near where A.P and Maybelle Carter chawed chewin gum, I get tangled up with a great R&B, hip-hop, and Gospel singers like The Roots' Black Lily femmes, I cruise all night road trips coppin dope rhymes with my bros at Def Jux from NYC talkin the end of hiphop and rap as we know it, I pull motors out of 62 T-bird's layin on my back in the southern blood-red clay hillsides with the civil war seepin back into my pours stain my tshirt, neck and neck with beautiful, badass, chocolate skinned Delmas Crawford, I stay up late nights suckin brews, conjuring the contours of love with Dave Matthews, I help organize mass protests from Seattle to DC and write songs to inspire them that get passed around the world for free over the internet and word of mouth, I crash in subway tunnels with men who some rich publisher called "moles." Those men treated me with more hospitality then you could fit in a midtown hi-rise. I go to church with Republicans and sleep with dread headed anarchist folksingers.

   I ain't got no borders, I'm part of the post-border and post-boredom generation.