Hello, and welcome to Volume 38 of the Underground Binder Clip Society.
I started recording and releasing music as Legit Smitty in 2016. 8 years ago at the time of writing this. The first musical project I ever released was called “The Legit Tape” and it was a rap project (if your’e generous enough to call it that.) I chose the name Legit Smitty in middle school as my instagram handle because I was infatuated with the idea of being real. Nobody had ever called me Smitty, I just liked the idea of having a nickname. I knew I was gonna have to blaze my own trail, because my friends were being fake. They would switch up on me at any given moment to make someone laugh. I knew I wanted to do my own thing and that I might lose friends in the process. But I had to heed the call. I had to be legit.
When I started doing YouTube nobody around me was really doing that kind of thing. I didn’t feel very supported by my peers and that was the start of my feeling “other-ized” for being a creative. I trudged along all the while. By the time I started picking up music I had developed a little following online. I was daily vlogging in the age of Casey Neistat and began making beats in class on the side. I was also in a video broadcasting class at my high school where we got to record and edit videos for sometimes more than half of the school day. I felt myself slowly becoming more infatuated with sound while I was editing videos. This eventually got me into music production.
Ironically, my high school had a program for audio production that I was never formally apart of. But when I finally started taking music more seriously, I weaseled my way into the on campus studio. I went to a public school, that was a part of group of other public schools which housed specific “centers” that students could travel to learn about technology or cars or law for part of the day. Our School housed the audio and video centers. So I would get to hang out in the on campus studio with kids from all different public schools almost everyday and we would listen to music and beats we had been working on. Everybody loved rap more than anything else, and it all felt a bit like college in retrospect.I eventually went to college for audio engineering in 2019. But I digress.
I cut vocals for one of the first “real” Legit Smitty songs “Fun” with some peers of mine in this on campus studio. They knew how to operate the console and would let me come in with my instrumentals and play them over the big speakers. We all eventually knew a lot of the same stuff about music production just by paying attention to each other. But everyone was quite insecure and always picking fun. Making art is vulnerable. Even though I had started to feel like I was finding my people, I still felt a bit “other-ized.” I made rap music and beats because thats what these guys were doing. But I liked alternative rock and other small indie bands too. I eventually started to incorporate guitar into my instrumentals and get into more a of rock-sphere after I bought an electric guitar with money I made from editing videos for my church.
My comedy Rap side-project “Jart” blossomed from that same on campus studio. Back then there wasn’t much difference between Jart and Legit Smitty. But I anticipated pretty quickly that i’d want to have a more serious side to the music I was making. So I went ahead and designated myself a joke project. The guys in the recording class would let me freestyle on the beats they made, but would chop out all my good parts and leave only my breath noises and mess-ups looped over and over. I didn’t get to hear my verses back ever. I think I was trying too hard and they wanted to bring me back down to earth and remind me that everything was supposed to be a joke. I always thought if they tried a little harder they could have made something pretty amazing. But all I could do was try hard on my own time, and lean into their jokes whenever it made sense. I still wanted to be around. They’re the ones who came up with the name “Jart.” I literally think it means Jake-Fart, but I really don’t know. It was weird and lighthearted so I leaned into it, and eventually made more raps under that name. If nothing else, those guys taught me not to take myself too seriously and that a lot of things are worth doing if it makes someone smile. We smiled a lot in that little control room.
By this point I was making short films for class, writing songs and writing raps. I was getting into stuff like Alex G and Mac Demarco and early Clairo. “Bedroom pop” was starting to become a thing and there was new sort of DIY emerging in the music scene. Youtube channels like Audiotree Live and David Dean Burkhart put me onto a lot of my favorite bands at the time. Pinegrove, Mom Jeans, Boy Pablo, and Modern Baseball. I hate to say it, but I owe a lot of who I am today to the Internet, and YouTube specifically. Eventually Brockhampton hit the scene, and my mind was blown. I felt like I could do anything that I put my mind to, and that I didn’t have to have one specific sound.
When I was about to move away to college I felt myself realizing that I wanted to have a band. I liked the organic feeling of people in a room together playing their instruments. I felt myself moving away from some of the more electronic elements of recorded music. I knew i’d have to get better at my instruments and meet some new people to make the things I was wanting to make.
One of the first shows I played in college was in Birmingham, Alabama with my friends Billy and John. They were from Birmingham and their band was playing probably one of the last shows they’d ever play together. We had basically just met and they let me open for them and sat in and played my songs with me. Billy’s dad really only gave me one piece of feedback after our set, and that was that I needed to practice my guitar. Go figure. I knew that much.
I had gotten a taste of a different kind of way to play my songs. Time passed. I practiced. I made friends who showed me the ropes and picked up my slack. We listened to records and made them too. I started soaking it all in. I continued to look inward and ask what story I had to tell. I discovered more Americana and indie-rock. I studied analog recording and multi-track tape in and outside of class. I made my first albums with live drums. I started learning how to lead a band and how to sing. I learned the difference in a verse and a chorus. I bought more instruments and microphones. At the time, I thought I was arriving. Now I now, I was just getting started.
I feel like i’ve been climbing out of my chrysalis lately with this whole Legit Smitty project. It’s almost like I started my recording career as a little caterpillar just inching along, and then eventually I started to cocoon. I started to feel the walls harden around me. I knew I was gonna have to spread my wings someday soon, but that they were still growing. My last two projects “Good Grief” and “Yours Truly,” have felt like the beginnings of spreading my wings. In hindsight, Legit Smitty feels like a place where I’ve been able to learn and grow and try on lots of different hats. I hope with music I always continue to learn and grow. But I think I am learning to let some songs die a little sooner now. It’s easier to throw old things out when you know you’ve got new and better stuff to keep. I am writing more than ever, and I ever won’t be able to record everything i’ve written. With all the writing I am doing, I feel the art growing legs of its own. It talks to me, and tells me what it needs. It takes care of itself, whenever I am taking care of myself.
Knowing whats good and whats not is becoming a lot more black and white. I feel like asking for peoples attention again, but I need to separate myself a degree or two from the former. The electronic and rap-esq origins of the Legit Smitty project are simply a fact. I didn’t want to start playing revisionist history. After thinking about it for awhile, I thought it might be best to just put a sort of divider in the catalog. So thats what i’m doing. I toyed back and forth with the idea of holding on to the Legit Smitty namesake and taking down the earlier projects. Friends and fans of the project were quite against this idea. I’m starting to see and feel how the things i’ve made in the last 6 years mean something to people. One time a few years back I took my EP “Summer Sampler” off of streaming platforms. I had a fan reach out and tell me that record had helped them keep from taking their own life. They appreciated my putting it back up quickly. If anything I’ve ever done could be helpful to someone in that kind of way, then who am I to not make it easily accessible?
If you can’t tell, I’ve had a lot to think about throughout this whole process. I am grateful for the witness of the Legit Smitty project thus far, and the truth I have been allowed to bear through it. Yet, it feels time to give it a sort of bookend. This way, there is no revisionist history to be done. There is hopefully no more passerby writing off the project as sounding like the name of a rap project, or pop act. I want to be more universally accessible. I want a new start. A shift has occurred in my mind and my heart. I am maturing as a man and an artist and I need to make room. I am calling myself to something higher.
I am happy to finally be able to show my project to a new friend and not have to justify my namesake. Nobody was asking me to. But I felt like I needed to. It didnt make sense to ME, to continue as Legit Smitty. I started to feel more and more uncomfortable hearing my own name come out of my mouth.
Don’t get me wrong. The Legit Smitty brand as a whole will live on. I dont plan on killing it. My instagram handle will stay the same. People will still call me “Legit” like its my first name. And I do still plan on being quite Legit. In part, the heart behind my art has always been to bear witness to living truthfully. As contrary as it may seem, starting the “Smitty” project and leaving “Legit” behind, is what it’s going to take for me to feel that I am staying true.
I don’t mean to be more dramatic than I need to be. But I felt like a few of you might appreciate all of this. So, I hope you did.
Thats all for now.
Thanks for being here, and for listening in.
Yours Truly,
Jake Smith
(Smitty)
