Hailed “one of the most respected American musicians working today” by The Daily News, Smith has released 15 critically lauded studio albums. "Western Skies," his latest release, comprising a new studio record, and a book of photography, lyrics, and essays, is an immersive journey through a world both real and imagined, a place of mystery and mythology, possibility and longing. Like his photographs, Smith’s writing is steeped in isolation, though rarely lonely; timeless, yet acutely aware of the hours and minutes whizzing by like mileposts on the highway. The songs on Western Skies are spare and deliberate, often marked by a distinct sense of motion and transience, and the performances are similarly raw and intimate, reflecting the desolate beauty of the region that so captured the Austin-based artist’s imagination as he crisscrossed it time and again throughout 2020 and 2021.