Nashville artist Tre Burt announced a residency at Brown’s Diner kicking off this Friday (October 23rd) with Sunny War, the debut show for their Smooth Harrison collaboration. The Oh Boy Records artist chose one of John Prine’s favorite spots to go and play and Burt calls the diner “a darling of Nashville where you can see a lot of cool music in an intimate spaces,” he saw this as a perfect spot to reflect for his love of Nashville.
“I’ve been in Nashville going on almost seven years now, and it’s starting to get weird how little I’ve played in Nashville since then,” he said. “I came to the realization that, I’ve been sleeping here every night for seven years, and this is definitely my home. I think it’s just time to start laying roots here and get comfortable with that idea.”
He continues: “When I first got to Nashville, it was a little intimidating,” he said. “You got all these professional players and masters in their crafts. It felt like the X-Men Academy. You got all these mutants with their special powers under this one academy, and it was intimidating because I guess I wasn’t sure where I fit into that. Now being a part of the community for so long, it was a me problem. There was nothing to fear the whole time, it all came down to me needing to jump into that pool. I want the shows to look like a culmination of the community I’ve built for the past seven years here.”
As Burt takes this leap up faith he gets to do it with someone who feels like a distant cousin Sunny War. A fan of her music before he even met her, he remembers their first meeting at a showcase put on by Lizzie No during Americana Fest in 2019.
“I was terrified because I was playing right after Sunny and that’s a hard act to follow up,” he said. “I had my official showcase right after that set at City Winery and Sunny had stayed behind and watched my set and she came up to me afterwards and was like, “That was sick.” It’s a huge honor and I was like, “Thank you.” And she’s like, “You got your official showcase. Where is it at? I’m gonna get us a Uber. I’m coming.” Since then, we just had this deep mutual respect for each other’s work and I think we both moved to Nashville around the same time. She came a couple months after me, and she lived at my house for a couple years, we both lost our father figures at that same time, so it was just a lot of kindred spirit going around. Both of us would always be playing music on my porch, just at different times. I hadn’t written a song with anybody else at that point. I guess I’m a pretty isolated type guy and so is she. But you stay on the porch a little too long, you start playing music together eventually, and that’s where Smooth Harrison was born.”
On one of those late nights on Burt’s porch the name arose. The idea behind it was what if George Harrison had some groove to him. The two would collabarate on “Scornful Heart” on Sunny War’s previous record, Armageddon In A Summer Dress. He said this song would capture the essence of what Smooth Harrison is.
“What I love about the project is you can still hear our individual styles at the same time, which I think is why it works so well,” he said. ” I would say for Smooth Harrison, as it stands now, we’re mostly concentrating on getting an acoustic representation of our work out right now, which is our bread and butter. Both of us have pretty unique styles of playing the guitar and we’re just having a lot of fun seeing how that fits into each other right now.”
There is no official release date for the Smooth Harrison project, but Tre Burt has released three solo songs this year as he gears up for the follow-up to his 2023 project Traffic Fiction. Listen to the full interview with Burt above the article or WNXP Podcasts, wherever you listen to podcast.
