Sept 30, 2022: Austin, TX singer-songwriter and artist Darden Smith has released a new spoken word album, Western Skies – The Essays. This new release is the culmination of the overall Western Skies project, which Smith has created with his recent album and book of photography, lyrics, and essays. The new accompanying album of readings set to an original score continues the immersive journey through a world both real and imagined, inspired by the landscape, small towns and mythology of West Texas.

“Darden Smith’s stunning new project, Western Skies, exquisitely captures the expansiveness of the landscape of Texas and the American Southwest in photographs, essays, poems, and songs. In a book and album of the same title, Smith produces a cinematic take on a ragged, isolated terrain swept by windstorms and dotted with the detritus discarded by nature’s disuse and human migration. Smith’s grainy black-and-white Polaroid shots convey the desolate beauty of untouched spaces, as well as the jagged grandeur of found objects such as gas pumps and old tires.”
– No Depression

Listen to Western Skies – The Essays
Spotify
Apple Music

Watch The Bowl of Blue Sky and Bluestem

WESTERN SKIES BOOK

WESTERN SKIES original album (Digital / CD / LP)