Sky Smeed’s latest accentuates the positive

Sky Smeed can’t keep a straight face.

We’ve been hanging out for more than an hour on the spacious patio of Il Lazzarone in the River Market, discussing his latest album, Drive All Night. We’ve tried to stay on topic, but Smeed, who has been idly strumming his guitar, keeps catching stares. From a table a few feet away, a potential fan inquires if he takes requests.

“Well, that depends on the song,” Smeed calls back with a winning smile. When he doesn’t know the chords for the solicited song — or any subsequent petitions — he laughs apologetically. “I’m sorry,” he tells the woman, “but usually, I just play my own stuff.”

Smeed needn’t be sorry. The nine songs on Drive All Night are the best kinds of originals: honest, humble and not without a sense of humor. It’s the sense of humor that stands out most, and Smeed establishes it early with the opening track, “Smoke ‘n’ Spice.” It’s a jangly blues tune filled with double entendres, narrated by a man who explains his relationship goals in food terms: If you’re the kind to eat and run, I really can’t stand fast food, he drawls. The last time I had a brush with danger, I was choking on a piece of tofu.

“I like to read personal ads,” Smeed tells me. “They’re hilarious to me. People reveal so much in a personal ad. And the barbecue song, that’s written like a personal ad, but it’s a combination of that and my favorite cookbook, which is this barbecue cookbook called Smoke & Spice. It’s pretty funny — [stuff like] ‘The meat isn’t good without some serious foreplay’ — and I was like, ‘Oh, I can put a personal ad together with that idea.’ It was really fun to write.”

This is the most anecdotal that Smeed gets when relaying the background of Drive All Night, which he recorded last September at the 9th Ward Pickin’ Parlor, in Lawrence, with Truckstop Honeymoon’s Mike West. Not all the songs are as tongue-in-cheek as “Smoke ‘n’ Spice” — in fact, none of them are, with the exception of the irreverent “Talkin’ Medical Marijuana Blues.”

Rather than barroom sing-alongs, the other seven tracks are written as ambling country tunes, some of them highly personal. On the mellow “Blue Highways,” he sings: My mother said, “Son, you’re gonna make us all proud“/I never made it out of the bar.

But Smeed, who seems unflappably cheerful, doesn’t have any dark thoughts or grievances to air. He went with music full time in 2010, two years after he had returned to his native Chanute, Kansas, from Massachusetts. Now 32, Smeed lives a few miles outside Chanute, in a self-restored train station. It’s a comfortable space, he says, though he isn’t often there to enjoy it. The demands of his job are such that he spends most of the year on the road. But that was always the plan.

“What really made me want to move back was that I wanted to build a place for cheap, and I wanted to have a home base because my goal was to start touring,” Smeed says. “I lost sight of that goal for a few years, completely. I didn’t play for a few years.”

Smeed doesn’t dwell on lost times and goes on: “But now I’m half a decade in, and I have a lot of fun. I feel very lucky. For the most part, I get to meet the best people ever, and I get to sleep on a lot of couches, which is fun.” (He appears sincere in this comment.) “I’ve developed friendships with all these people everywhere. It’s the best.”

Admitting that his mood is particularly elevated thanks to his new album, Smeed allows my photographer to lure him away for a few posed shots outside the restaurant. As he continues to strum his guitar, some bystanders on a bench first observe, then ask for a song. Smeed happily obliges them with a rendition of “Talkin’ Medical Marijuana Blues,” and the audience of four laughs heartily at the end of every verse.

The song is clever, but the real charm is in Smeed’s delivery. He’s affable, with an open face that invites conversation. When the song is over, he asks for the names of his impromptu crowd. Were it not for our agenda, Smeed might have continued his day on that same bench, busking in the sunshine.

Eventually, we return to our drinks, and I try a serious question. I ask him about the bad nights he has had — the most challenging parts of doing this for a living.

“Booking is kind of rough,” he says. “Continuing to keep on top of being busy while I’m busy is hard, and I can’t really not play. And balancing creativity with all the other shit you have to do, like book — for me, a lot of the time, it’s hard to write and come up with new songs. And it’s kind of hard to be gone a lot because relationships — relationships with anyone — suffer.”

With a shrug and a smile, Smeed seems already to have forgotten those complaints.

“I try to stay positive,” he tells me. “I have this family on the road — this extended family everywhere — and I’m doing what I love. It’s better than sheetrock. Shit,” Smeed says and laughs, “even a bad night of playing music, I still got to play music. I don’t really ever have to talk myself into it.”