Nate Smith would be the first to tell you that he makes for a peculiar nominee for new artist of the year at Wednesday night’s Country Music Assn. Awards.
Yes, the scratchy-voiced singer and songwriter released his debut album just 18 months ago. And yes, he’s put in time since then on the road as an opening act for more established country stars such as Morgan Wallen and Cole Swindell. But at age 39, Smith is easily the oldest artist nominated in a category that also includes 27-year-old Megan Moroney and 24-year-old Bailey Zimmerman.
“Dude, it’s insane,” he says with a laugh. “Bailey is literally like my little brother. When he first got to Nashville, he was like, ‘Man, I’m just so glad to meet you.’ I said, ‘Thank you, buddy. Why are you talking so fast?’”
Smith, who grew up in the small Northern California town of Paradise, did a lot of living before he made it big, including a brief marriage that ended in divorce and a failed attempt to become a contemporary Christian musician. He also survived the 2018 Camp fire that killed 85 people and all but destroyed Paradise.
“I lost my place and all my stuff — my great-grandparents’ dining-room table, the cigar box with all my ticket stubs, all these things I could never get back,” he says, adding that he was one of the lucky ones. “My dad had a house in Chico, so I had somewhere to go. A lot of people were living in tents at Walmart.”
Brawny yet sensitive, Smith channels the depth of his many experiences into his sturdy, riff-driven songs, which is one reason they’re connecting: This year his hit “World on Fire” spent 10 straight weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s country radio chart, a stay equaled by only Wallen’s “You Proof”; Smith quickly followed it with another chart-topper in “Bulletproof,” the twangy lead single from his sophomore LP, “California Gold.” It’s about a guy who’s trying to kill the memory of a woman who left him. But in the gutsy rasp of his voice you can hear hard-won wisdom regarding more than that.
“Nate sings with might and passion,” says Thomas Rhett, another Nashville star for whom Smith has opened on tour. “The world tells you that you gotta be 22, single and only sing about whiskey and shutting bars down. But artists like Nate are proving that the right song with the right artist at the right time is the recipe for success.”
Indeed, beyond the emotional heft of Smith’s music, it might be his background as a Nirvana- and Bush-obsessed child of the ’90s that’s helped him attract an audience at a moment when Nashville is in a serious rock phase. Acts like Hardy, Warren Zeiders and Koe Wetzel have brought heavy guitars into commercial country music, while Nickelback has become a reliable draw at country festivals including this past April’s Stagecoach in Indio, where Smith was also on the bill and did a faithful cover of Foo Fighters’ “My Hero.”
In May, Smith dropped a version of “Bulletproof” featuring Avril Lavigne, the veteran pop-punk singer whose music he loves for “the desperation in her voice”; Lavigne, who was once married to Nickelback’s Chad Kroeger, teamed with Smith again for “Can You Die From a Broken Heart,” a soulful power ballad from “California Gold.”
“I’m friends with Chad because we’re both signed to the same management company,” Smith says over drinks during a recent visit to Los Angeles. (The Core Entertainment also counts Zimmerman as a client.) “But I never told him Avril and me were doing something together.” He laughs. “I thought he might slit my throat.”
Dressed in black jeans, a black leather jacket and a black ball cap, Smith orders a Casamigos neat at a West Hollywood hotel bar and divulges something “it took me my whole life to figure out,” as he puts it. “If I drink really good tequila and I don’t do any sugar — no margaritas — I can get as drunk as I want, and I’ll have no hangover.” Good thing: Though he’s in town to shoot a performance for “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” he’s booked on a red-eye flight to Tampa tomorrow for a stadium gig with Wallen the following night.
Smith’s gateway to country music when he was a kid was Garth Brooks, whose flamboyant live approach in the ’90s was basically that of a rock star. “I loved his voice and I loved the songs and I loved that he used to fly around the room like a crazy person,” Smith says. “And I thought he had the coolest shirts I’d ever seen in my life.”
Having performed in church and played in a band after high school in Paradise, Smith moved to L.A. — “Well, Orange County,” he clarifies — when he was 21 to give music a go. He describes his early style as “wannabe Ryan Cabrera,” which led to some meetings that never went anywhere. Then he got an offer from a Christian label in Nashville; he moved again and immediately met a woman with whom he ended up eloping. Looking back, Smith says, “we were really toxic together. It wasn’t a healthy situation.” They split up around the time the label deal fell through, which he figures now was for the better.
“Going through an ugly divorce while I was in the public eye as a Christian artist — rocks would have been thrown at me,” he says.
Smith returned to California in “a bad mental spot” — depression runs in his family, he says — but he regained some stability working as a nurse and as a worship leader. The morning of the Camp fire, he had a doctor’s appointment in Chico and left his home in Paradise before the town was engulfed. After the destruction, Smith wrote a song with a friend called “One of These Days” that went viral on Facebook. The attention inspired him to record a demo and eventually to try Nashville a second time. In 2020, he drove his Honda Civic 2,000 miles east, sleeping in rest stops and “playing random bars in the middle of the pandemic,” he says. “It was the craziest time of my life.”
In Nashville, another song of Smith’s — this one called “Wildfire” — took off on TikTok; the buzz earned him a sit-down with a publishing executive where he played “Sleeve,” a sensual, Fleetwood Mac-ish soft-rock number he says tells “the story of me and my ex-wife and how that s— really sucked.” The exec offered to sign him on the spot, and he had a record deal not long after.
Smith, who still carries himself with the eager enthusiasm of a worship leader, no longer goes to church. “I’m a terrible Christian — like, the worst,” he says. “I cuss and I drink. But I love people so much, bro. And I don’t judge anybody.” His unlikely journey has shaped a worldview he describes as “delusionally optimistic — or maybe optimistically delusional.” (Zoloft helps, he admits with a laugh.)
“No matter what you believe or don’t believe, I think it’s important that people feel like there’s a glimmer of hope,” he says. “That’s my whole message.”
Smith has set aside two months at the top of next year to make a new record near Mt. Shasta, which he says has “a really special energy.” Then he’s got plans to tour Europe — “I’m gonna spend three days in Norway trying to figure out where my ancestors are from,” he notes excitedly — and to play festivals including Wallen’s inaugural Sand in My Boots blowout in May in Alabama.
What has he learned on the road with country music’s biggest superstar? “That you don’t throw chairs off f—ing roofs,” he says, grinning as he refers to Wallen’s arrest in April for doing just that from atop Eric Church’s six-story bar on Nashville’s busy Broadway. “No, but I also watched how comfortable he is onstage.” He took something too from Rhett, who advised him to tell his life story during every show.
Or at least the portion of his story that’s already happened. Smith went back to Paradise not long ago to see what condition the town was in. “You don’t recognize where you’re at anymore,” he says. “My church is gone, my apartment’s gone, certain landmarks and trees — it just looks different. You can tell it’s scarred, you know?
“But then the Cozy Diner’s still there.”