Western Skies

RATED 5 STARS BY Chanticleer Book Reviews"Intimate and personal." ―Chanticleer Book ReviewsPart prose, part album, and part photographic essay, Western Skies is singer-songwriter Darden Smith’s stunning homage to the mythologies of Texas and companion to his music release of the same name.Amid a series of road trips across West Texas, Darden Smith―Austin-based musician, author, and creative―found himself writing songs at the wheel and taking Polaroid photographs of the stark and ghostly terrain. Inspired by the spirit of the landscape, Smith scribbled his observations in a notebook and found new life in old lyrics―and between the prose, the music, and the Polaroid images he captured with his camera, Western Skies came vividly to life.This beautifully designed and collectible book combines everything Smith captured and created during his travels. Features include:Dozens of Smith’s personal Polaroid imagesSixteen new essaysA foreword by Grammy Award–winner Rodney CrowellThe lyrics of Smith’s latest album, also entitled Western SkiesLink to a free download of the complete Western Skies album with book purchase The perfect companion piece to his latest album, also titled Western Skies, this arresting travelogue celebrates the sights and sounds of West Texas in a truly immersive and transportive way.PRAISE for Western Skies“This multi-front production by one of Texas’s great songwriters feels not only urgent, but authentic, as if the songs, poems, essays and photographs gathered here were things that could no longer be withheld. They blur into each other in the richest possible way, erasing genres and leaving only a singular voice that demands to be heard.”– Stephen Harrigan, Author of the New York Times best-selling novel, The Gates of the Alamo and writer for Texas Monthly magazine “What a lovely, lovely, evocative piece of work. Maybe because of this pandemic my heart breaks more easily than it used to, but some of this is flat heartbreaking. Darden Smith is doing many things here. One of them is conjuring that hard, wild, beautiful, tragic thing called Texas that we all mostly love.”– S.C. Gwynne, Pulitzer finalist and New York Times best-selling author of Empire of the Summer Moon “Sometimes a story requires more than one discipline to get itself told. It’s a lucky thing that Western Skies found multi-hyphenate artist Darden Smith and he was up for the job, for he gracefully ushers it into our consciousness with his wonderful ability to notice, question, and show. This is a beautiful project full of shadow and revelation, tenderly shaped into a meditation on what fills the space that exists both within us and around us.”– Allison Moorer, Songwriter and Author“Darden Smith’s new multi-media project Western Skies is big, bold, and beautiful. With perception and vision, an artist’s job is to help us all to see more, and to see better. Western Skies does exactly that, it helps us to see these West Texas landscapes through the loving eyes of the artist. There is plenty of love in Darden’s new work, and as a result, we are given the chance to see and to love as well. Well done my friend, well done.”– Mary Gauthier Read more