CALGARY -- He's been making records since 1971, but Chris Smither believes he is only now doing his best work.
Listening to his laconic, world-weary voice wrap cozily around the lazy, late-night blues on his latest CD, Drive You Home Again, you realize the New Orleans-born, Boston-based singer-songwriter just might be right.
Smither, 54, plays this year's Calgary Folk Music Festival, which kicks off tomorrow and runs until Sunday. He plays the mainstage tomorrow night and will take part in workshops Saturday and Sunday afternoon.
"Not to take anything away from what I did before," says the writer of Love You Like A Man and I Feel The Same (popularized by Bonnie Raitt), "but I'm just more in control of what I do now ... I no longer feel totally at the mercy of some sort of whimsical muse."
Of course, it helps that his life is in order. After a handful of acclaimed early-'70s albums, he disappeared from the music scene for a decade while he battled alcoholism.
"I was at the end of my rope and something had to change or I was going to die. And I didn't want to die," he recalls.
By the mid-'80s, he had sobered up, allowing him to enjoy his most proficient and popular period during the '90s.
"Things have been great. I've just come together," he says.
Yet, as he acknowledges on his new song So Long: "To see me now you would never think to wonder/ How near we were to sinkin' under."
"That song," he says, "is really a hymn of gratitude."
The lessons he's learned about finding happiness are shared in another new song, Hey, Hey, Hey -- which sounds like a conversation with himself.
"I do a lot of thinking. I do a lot of reading. And I've been called a philosopher a lot and I'm not sure that applies," he says.
"I mean, it comes across as philosophy, but what I'm looking for is more like what you described -- as conversation and, at times, clever conversation ... that can illuminate a point and even use a little humour, so it sticks."
Smither, after all, is the son of a Tulane University professor and grew up in a household with "a love of words and language -- the economy of expression."
That love has never waned.
"I'm standing on the second floor of my house right now and, even as you and I are speaking, there's an open dictionary here. A big one. If I go down to the first floor, there's another great big dictionary and it's open, too. I'm always looking things up."
His consuming interest in words helped him appreciate the blues when he was first exposed to the music at age 17.
"What I really liked was the drive of the music. It makes this wonderful vehicle for conveying huge ideas very concisely. It's almost like haiku," he says.
"What also appealed to me was that it was one-man rock 'n' roll. I was never interested in a band. When I heard people like Lightnin' Hopkins and Robert Johnson, it was an answer to a dream. They were doing rock and it was all by themselves. It was amazing."
