Nate Smith: ‘Music Is Supposed To Heal’ You
Over the last twenty years, Nate Smith has been on what some may call a wild ride. But it got him to where he is now. The country singer, who now resides in Nashville, Tennessee as a singer-songwriter, wasn’t always living the life of a No. 1 hitmaker touring the country.
Smith is this week’s guest host on Shawn Parr’s Backstage Country, and he didn’t hold back when it came to his personal life. From his painful divorce to working as a certified nurse assistant, living through the unexpected wildfires in California, and so much more, it all brought him back to music.
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“I did go through a divorce, and it was hard for me and her. I did meet her here in Nashville, and, so I ended up needing to move back to California, where I’m from, to just do some healing and some soul searching and that kind of thing,” Smith told Shawn Parr.
Smith continued, “They say it’s like close to the feeling of a death in a lot of ways. It’s very, very, very hard to go through that because it’s this separation that just it’s just hard [to understand] unless you’ve been through it. I definitely put that into my music. And I’ve always had a job working as a certified nurse assistant since I was 18. Everywhere I went, [I] had a job taking care of patients in hospitals and care homes. So I was kind of planning on being a nurse, to be honest. So I moved back to California. I was helping out at my brother’s church, working at a hospital. And that’s when the Paradise fire happened. About ten years after I moved back, we had an unexpected wildfire in Paradise, and our community was completely devastated.”
In November of 2018 at the time of the wildfires, Smith was working the night shift at his hospital. Luckily, he had a doctor’s appointment that morning, or else he would have been sleeping at home. Smith said, “If I didn’t have that appointment, I wouldn’t be here. Which is so nuts. So I definitely don’t take anything for granted. Getting a second chance at life, really. And so it kind of reset me. And what was really important to me and stuff.”
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Smith had no choice but to move in with his dad at that time when his friend Tom also mailed him a guitar. He ended up writing a song for Paradise and putting it up on Facebook and YouTube for everyone to hear which helped people move through their pain and turn it into a positive.
“Music is supposed to heal, and make you want to drink and have a good time. I don’t think any other genre does it as good as country music for that healing. I mean, other than worship music. I think there’s something symbiotic about the two genres because they’re both based in faith in some ways, ” Smith exclaimed.
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