The sound and imagery of the 20th release by Chris Smither, All About the Bones, (released in 2024) is as elemental as the inky black shadows cast by a shockingly bright moon. The listener is welcomed into some gothic mansion on an imaginary New Orleans street, and there in the lamplit parlor confronts the band, a minimalist skeleton crew: Smithers inimitable propulsive guitar and rumbling baritone are joined seamlessly to producer David Goodrich’s carpetbag of instruments, Zak Trojano’s rock steady, primal drumming, Betty Soo’s diaphanous harmony vocals, and the flat, mournful flood of Jazz legend Chris Cheek’s saxophone.

All About the Bones has a feel that is somehow baroque and austere at once. Smither and his longtime producer David Goodrich have been refining their musical conversation for decades, both in the studio and onstage, and by now, their bond verges on the telepathic. Goodrich plays on nearly every track. His sound is by now so translucent that it seems to function as a swath of silence, allowing the songs to burn like ciphers in the crackling air.

And oh, the songs on All About the Bones. Chris Smither, after six decades of sharpening his knife as a songwriter, can at this point open damn near anything with a flick of his wrist. God and the Devil are opened here. Mortality is too. Politics, consciousness, renewal, family, vulnerability, surrender. Smither has sat with these topics like so many Zen koans, for so long, that every line is a pearl. The title track, All About the Bones, kicks the record off with “Consider your high station/ think about your fame. All of your creation depended on your frame.” Irony, wit, the double meaning of depended, each verse is a master class in songwriting.

As noted by the New York Times, Rolling Stone, MOJO, NPR, and others, in the decades of travels to All About the Bones, Chris Smither has gone from up and comer to journeyman to veteran to icon, and yet the whole time his path has more closely resembled Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces - an unblinking, fearless trek into the depths of struggle and revelation, and a return back to the land of the living, to share the hard won treasures found along the way. His restlessness is long gone, and his eyes are fixed where the moonlight falls on some never to be seen horizon. The light given off from his music casts our own lives into a sublime and welcome clarity.