Biography

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"If you want to understand California, you could do worse than listen to Nina Jo Smith’s new album Out of the Darkness, a beautifully written and produced road trip though place and time. Like the state she calls home, Nina Jo’s voice is simultaneously innocent and knowing, whimsical and a little worse for wear, which makes it a powerful vehicle for her Folk Rock troubadour tales: LA in the Vietnam era, musings on her beleaguered San Francisco, meditations on social justice and climate change, and a visitation by John Prine, who refuses to accept he’s dead. Capped off with a cover of Tom Prasada-Rao’s 'Out of the Darkness,' this album winds its way through some harrowing pathways searching for, and often finding, the warmth and promise of that California sun." - Rain Perry

On Out of the Darkness, her second studio album released at age 70, Nina Jo Smith sends us a surrealistic urban postcard (from "Clarion Alley" in San Francisco’s Mission District) and a love song to a time and place ("LA Man," set during the Vietnam War). Traveling through her landscape, you’ll meet a Confederate ghost-in-process ("Take Me Back to Tennessee"), a young Black birder accosted in Central Park ("Justice Sestina," a poem), and "John Prine Last Night" (he forgot he was dead). And you never know who you’ll meet on "Highway 33."

Nina Jo wrote these songs and poems over the past ten years. During that decade, we endured a president who crushed every point of light he could find and a pandemic that shut us inside our homes, if we were fortunate enough to have one. Emerging from that time with damaged lungs, Nina Jo reconstructed her voice, resulting in a grittier tone but with increasing clarity of thought and feeling.

The title song, "Out of the Darkness," by Tom Prasada-Rao, is an offering of hope in dark times. Together we can be a lighthouse to help navigate dangerous waters.
In order to find the light in the darkness, you have to find the light within, then turn yourself inside out — and join your light with others’. The underlying darkness lends depth and texture. It pulses in tension with the light — and that is what feeling is.

Nina Jo Smith plays acoustic guitar and ukulele. She stole her mother’s guitar at age ten and never looked back. Walks, bicycle rides, eavesdropping, and close observation populate her songs with real and imagined characters from places she knows and loves.