Burly-voiced vocalist and songwriter Nate Smith is swiftly accumulating career milestones. His debut major label single, “Whiskey on You,” spent two weeks atop Billboard’s Country Airplay chart, becoming the first multi-week No. 1 debut single on the chart since 2019. He’s nominated for new male vocalist of the year at the upcoming ACM Awards and this weekend he’ll make his first appearance at Indio, California’s Stagecoach Festival.
“This past year has been crazy and a dream come true,” he tells Billboard, seated in an office at the Sony Music Nashville offices, where he shifted to the RCA Nashville imprint after his former Arista Nashville label home folded last month.
But he’s most excited about his self-titled, debut major label album, which comes out Friday (April 28), because he considers it a full-fledged testament to his devotion to writing and finding great songs.
“I want to sing songs that mean something, songs that people can relate to and take hope from,” says Smith, who is managed by The Core Entertainment. “I think of songs I love like Rascal Flatts’ ‘What Hurts the Most,’ and Keith Urban’s ‘Tonight I Wanna Cry.’ Those songs just set the bar.”
Nate Smith offers a hefty mix of heavy-hitter ballads like “I Don’t Miss You” (which Smith calls “the epitome of what I want to hear in a big rock ballad”), uplifting, romantic compositions such as “You Shouldn’t Have To,” and fun fare including “Alright Alright Alright” (inspired by actor Matthew McConaughey’s famous catchphrase in the 1993 movie Dazed and Confused).
“I think my agents have even reached out to [McConaughey’s] team, hoping he will do something with us on it,” Smith says. “It’s a nod to him in a lot of ways—it’s catchy, and people can sing along with it easily.”
As Morgan Wallen continues to top the Billboard charts with back-to-back albums with more than 30 tracks each, Smith’s debut weighs in at 20 tracks. But Smith is already augmenting his album with a deluxe version that also releases on Friday, adding six songs to the mix, because of a last minute addition that he felt passionately about releasing.
“Didn’t you think it would end up just always being singles?” he says, pondering the change in how music is released since the advent of streaming. “And then it moves back to these large albums. I think Morgan [Wallen] pioneered a lot of that.”
Smith wrote 13 of the songs on the 20-track album, and five of the six songs on the deluxe version. One of his co-writes is “Raised Up,” an ode to his small-town roots and growing up, as he sings, “Any time I lose my way, I turned to the way I was raised up.”
“I remember tearing up when we wrote that, because it made me think of home,” Smith says. “Life goes so fast and people get so busy, it’s just a great nod to remembering where you come from.”
But further fueling these songs is Smith’s formidable, rangy and raw vocal power, especially on songs such as the piano-laced “Wreckage” and the HARDY and Taylor Phillips-written “Better Boy.” The latter is among the songs Smith performed when he showcased for country radio professionals during the New Faces Show during March’s Country Radio Seminar. The song offers up an earnest warning to give a relationship a full-hearted effort, and to “never let her think somewhere out there’s a better boy.”
“It’s a miracle that I got that song before anybody else did,” Smith says. “I got the worktape from Taylor. I was listening to it, and it was HARDY singing on it. I felt such a connection to it and they let me cut it.” Growing up in Paradise, Calif., Smith says his interests always slanted toward music rather than sports.
“I went hunting a bit with my dad when I was younger. I tried every sport and I wasn’t good at sports,” Smith says. “I grew up listening to country music, artists like Garth [Brooks] and George Strait, but in junior high and high school, I was more into rock artists like Blink-182.”
At church, he honed his skills by playing worship music on Wednesday nights for his youth group and often favored jam sessions over studying. “In high school, me and my friends would skip school. We knew the secretary in the church and she’d let us sneak in,” he says. “We’d leave school and would be in there jammin’ out. I don’t know how we didn’t get in trouble, but we didn’t.”
Smith moved to Nashville in 2008 and, initially, Smith’s path seemed aligned with contemporary Christian music; he signed a publishing deal with Centricity Music and came close to inking a deal with Word Records. But the soon, the deal fell through, at the time same as Smith was weathering a divorce. The string of obstacles led Smith to return to California in 2011, where he worked as a nursing assistant. But even prior to leaving Nashville, he was already exploring his country roots.
“Before I left Nashville, I made a 10-song album and everyone was like, ‘It sounds kind of country,’” Smith recalls.
In 2018, Smith became one of the 14,000 residences who lost their homes when the Camp Fire raged through Paradise. He poured his pain and perspective into the song “One of These Days,” and was determined to give Nashville another chance. He made a month-long road trip from California to Nashville, playing bars and clubs along the way. Soon after returning to Music City, Smith released the viral track, “Wildfire.” Soon, labels came calling, he signed with Sony Music Nashville and released the radio single “Whiskey on You.”
Another fire-fueled song, “World on Fire,” which Smith wrote with Ashley Gorley, Phillips and Lindsay Rimes in November 2022, led to Smith’s decision to release a deluxe version of his debut album in tandem with the original.
“We weren’t planning on doing a deluxe album at all,” Smith says. “But the demand for ‘World on Fire’ was so high and it was doing so well on socials. We were like, ‘If we add it to the album, it takes away all our pre-saves of the song.’ We could have waited until after the album was done and just dropped it separately, randomly, but opted to include it in a deluxe version. Fans have been asking for this song, so I’m glad to finally release it.”
Later this year, Smith will perform many of his new songs as part of Thomas Rhett’s Home Team Tour 2023, which launches May 4. As much a student of the stage as he is of songs, Smith keeps finding new ways to enhance his live show, and says he paid close attention to when he was previously opening shows for Brett Eldredge.
“It feels like Brett’s never in a rush onstage, in a good way,” Smith says. “His transitions between songs are really powerful, but then when it’s just him and an acoustic, it’s magical. He taught me to realize the importance of moments. Also, he doesn’t rush off the stage — he will thank people and take his time getting offstage. And I do that at every show now, and I completely stole that from Brett.”
Looking ahead, Smith teases an upcoming collaboration with Ashley Cooke, and has his sights set on a Saturday Night Live appearance one day.
“I really want to do it because I love being silly,” Smith says. “I would love to act and be on the show and sing and all that. That would be a dream.”
