Beloved Seattle singer Shawn Smith gets fitting swan song with Brad

The timing was finally right.

Before Seattle stalwart Shawn Smith died in 2019, the beloved singer-songwriter who touched nearly every pocket of the local music community had recorded an album’s worth of material with Brad, one of his many musical endeavors. Dating back to the early 1990s, the Seattle rock band by nature has always been a casual, get-together-when-we-can project among close friends Smith, drummer Regan Hagar, Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard and, for the past 15 years, bassist Keith Lowe.

After taking time to grieve the loss of their friend, the stars aligned and schedules opened enough to put the finishing touches on what would be the band’s final album, released four years after the death of Smith, who would have turned 58 on Saturday.

“I think our ears were especially tuned into Brad because of Shawn’s passing,” Gossard said, “thinking about him and what he liked and the things that were important to him. We spent a lot of time being reflective of his artistic genius and his style that we love so much and tried to bring out as much of that as we could.”

The band’s sixth full-length, “In the Moment That You’re Born,” arrived this summer through Hagar and Gossard’s Loosegroove Records, a label the two founded in the ’90s and have reenergized since awakening from an extended dormancy in 2020. The record was about 90% complete at the time of Smith’s death, and when his bandmates returned to put the finishing touches on the songs (mostly light edits and mixing choices), they largely operated under one guiding principle: “What would Shawn do?”

“We were really referring to what we assumed Shawn would be thinking or saying in the moment and trying to imagine him being there with us,” Hagar said. “It was hard. There was a grieving period where we took a break and when we got back at it … there was definitely a melancholy to it, for me, just hearing Shawn in a different way after his passing.”

Smith, a regular at a number of open-mic nights around town, was a gregarious, soft-spoken singer and pianist known for bringing his uniquely soulful touch to a wide array of projects, including his electro-soul rocking Pigeonhed with esteemed producer Steve Fisk.

“He was a fearless improvisor,” Gossard said. “That was part of the very core of him. That blind ‘I’m about to jump up and do something and I don’t know what it is yet.’ That was something that, most of the time, elevated him far above other singers.”

Of the album’s 10 songs, the opening “In the Moment That You’re Born” — “a real Shawn song,” according to Hagar — was a clear standout and eventually became the title track. Mixed by Seattle producer/engineer Josh Evans (who also produced Pearl Jam’s last album), it’s the album’s heaviest and moodiest number, carrying the weight of a gentle Puget Sound wave washing over a rocky, gray-day shoreline. It’s calm yet stern. Centered, with a lightness poking through the dark clouds.

“The way that song is heavy, it’s sort of melancholy heavy — this certain aspect of it that makes it feel not gratuitous,” Gossard said. “It’s very heartfelt. And the [title] lyric, you can tell Shawn is feeling the sublimeness of the universe.”

The song, Hagar said, also hearkens back to their work with Satchel, another alt-rock band Hagar and Smith formed in the early ’90s, which released three full-length albums, plus a split compilation with Brad. The two met while working at Tower Records in Seattle and quickly bonded while swapping demo tapes.

“I was blown away,” Hagar recalled. “I was just, like, ‘Oh my god, this guy’s voice!’”

Gossard, who had been “lurking,” he joked, around Hagar and Smith’s jam sessions, was similarly impressed. Pearl Jam mania was in full effect and the 20-something guitarist’s creative drive was pumping harder than the motoring riff on “Stars n You,” a throwback Malfunkshun cover on “In the Moment That You’re Born.”

“Based on some of the success that I was having with Pearl Jam, I was just, like, ‘This is the time,’ ” Gossard said. “I felt like I had learned the lesson of be aggressive and go for your dreams. … I would go to their practice place and we would just jam and smoke pot and just feel very free about discovering what was cool about instantaneous music and our styles, how they mixed and being creative — just being energized by the creative process.”

Having come into some new rock star cash, Gossard financed a week in the studio and Brad was born. With its members involved in other projects, including Gossard’s globe-trotting obligations with Pearl Jam, Brad operated on an “off-schedule schedule,” said Hagar, who also plays with Seattle punk rippers Thee Deception, getting together every other year for a weekend or two. The new album was made in similar fashion, a collection of material that was recorded over the past six years or so and featured more songwriting input from Lowe. (The bassist also released his first solo album in January.)

“The nature of where we were at as a band, when we got together there were always grins of seeing each other,” Gossard said. “We’ve known each other for so long, and this process and all of it, it’s so familiar that it definitely was a little bit of a reunion.”

Heavy as it may have been finishing the album after Smith’s death, from the sounds of it, that same familial nature carried through its completion.

“It was as nice of a way to spend time with Shawn’s spirit, the music and his memory as we could,” Gossard said. “It really felt good to be together and it felt like the decisions we were making really were reflective of the best of what Brad was, which was a certain rawness and a certain take-us-as-we-are. The magic is in the chemistry and in the moment. All of us come from different places, but we really had a lot of time to reflect on how special Brad was for all of us.”