ANAHEIM, Calif. — As the Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Jake Smith, who goes by the moniker The White Buffalo, began toying with ideas for his eighth studio album, he decided to challenge himself by doing something sonically and lyrically different.
When he Googled his band, he saw that they’d been essentially pigeonholed into the country genre, which he said he could understand, but it didn’t feel entirely accurate.
“That would blow my mind,” he said during a recent phone interview while on the road in support of the new concept album, “Year of the Dark Horse,” which was released Nov. 11.
“I never thought country was my thing,” he explained. “I don’t sing about Solo cups and trucks and chicks with jean shorts … I always just write whatever comes to me and it’s always been sort of a genre-less thing.”
Smith — whose versatile sound includes elements of folk, rock, blues and Americana-roots music — gained popularity when his songs were used on the FX drama “Sons of Anarchy.” During the final season of the show in 2014, his music served as the soundtrack as he provided 11 songs total, with the last song in the series finale, “Come Join The Murder” featuring The Forest Rangers, garnering The White Buffalo his first Emmy Award nomination. His songs have also been used on TV shows like “This Is Us,” “Californication,” “The Punisher” and feature films including “Shelter,” “Safe Haven” and “West of Memphis.”
In an effort to shake the very specific label bestowed upon him, Smith said he decided to put down his acoustic guitar when he began writing songs this time around and picked up a synthesizer to play with during the pandemic lockdowns at home.
“I started writing with different sounds on an instrument that I really didn’t even know what I was doing with it,” he said. “Since I had pretty much always written exclusively on acoustic guitar, it opened me up to different soundscapes and melodies and opened up this whole new world, so that inspired a lot on this new album as well.”
The concept for the album started to take shape as he mapped out the story arc of following an anti-hero through the four seasons and incorporated a love story as well. He had a bunch of musical influences swimming in his head, such as Electric Light Orchestra, Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen, the latter of which he’ll be opening for on tour in Italy in 2023.
While not entirely a work of fiction, he said there’s more autobiographical lyrical content within the songs than he realized at the time he was writing them. Smith also worked with a new producer, Jay Joyce, who has produced songs and albums for artists like Eric Church, Cage the Elephant, Emmylou Harris, Fidlar and Patty Griffin.
“He’s about the closest thing to a savant or genius I’ve ever worked with,” he said. “He pushed us to extremes and I wanted to just abandon the cages I’ve been trapped in.”
The band — including bassist, keys player and guitarist Christopher Hoffee and drummer Matt Lynott — recorded the 12-track album in just 11 days at a studio in Nashville, Tennessee, about a year ago. Smith said it was good to be able to get away and be free of distractions. He wrote a song per day, and two songs on day nine, including a love song for the summer season section that he had already written a melody for.
“I was completely consumed, walking around and mumbling like a complete madman writing these songs,” he said. “I was waking up in the morning before we hit the studio and writing the lyrics for that day and for some of the others, just bouncing around sounds and songs and trying to create and not make it perfect, because I like imperfect, but make it as good as it could be.”
The final product includes 12 musical vignettes; he’s released “Not Today,” “Winter Act 2” and “Kingdom For a Fool,” thus far.
“I wanted to make an album that was made to be consumed all at once and that would take you on this ride,” he said. “I know people’s attention spans are smaller and shorter than they’ve probably ever been, but I’m pretty old school as far as my approach to almost everything.”
The band has sprinkled a few of the new songs into the live set, which was a challenge for the trio considering all of the layers of music that were created inside the studio.
“You have to pick and choose how to make the songs work live because it’s so sonically lush that you can never have that many people on stage for it,” he said. “There’s a power in having it just be a trio that I think when we add other people, it lessens the dynamic of that. But they’ve been coming off good and we’re learning as we go. We’ve been jonesin’ to get them out into the world and to be able to start playing them live, so that always keeps things exciting.”
Smith also stepped well outside of his comfort zone as he starred in music videos for each of the 12 songs, which in its entirety makes up the album-accompanying film, “The White Buffalo: Year of the Dark Horse.” It was offered as a limited stream on Veeps.com on the album release day and will be officially released by the end of the year.
“I went all the way on this one … I went full Beyoncé,” he said with a laugh, noting his dance moves in the previously released videos and adding that there’s “so much more” to come. He worked with four directors for the video portion of the project, breaking it up into four acts, each director taking a different season with three songs each.
“It was really fun, but a lot of work,” he said. “We did all of that in about a month and a half, but it was fun to be able to get to the emotional core of each song and figure out how to represent that in a visual form. We did those, put them all together and then you have this visual experience to go along with listening to it.”
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