Chris Smither in the Backyard

Chris Smither is a national treasure, a unique artist whose blend of blues and folk is timeless. He returns for his fifth backyard show on July 25, the first of four this year.

Tickets are $35 VIP with 7 p.m. entry and $25 GA with 7:30 entry.Music at 8. Bring what you'd like to drink and eat. This will be a seated show under the tent.

During a career that spans more than five decades, he has created an enduring catalog of classics. Just check his double album, "Link of Chain," featuring newly recorded versions of his songs with friends including Allen Toussaint, Loudon Wainright III, Dave Alvin, Tim O'Brien, and Kris Delmhorst. He wrote "Love You Like a Man," which Bonnie Raiitt turned into a hit, among many other classics.

Listen:

"Link of Chain"

"Down in Thibodaux"

"Leave the Light On."

"No Love Today"

His latest and what he says is his last album is All About the Bones, as elemental as the inky black shadows cast by a shockingly bright moon. The listener is welcomed into some gothic mansion on an imaginary New Orleans street, and there in the lamplit parlor confronts the band, a minimalist skeleton crew: Smither’s inimitable propulsive guitar and rumbling baritone are joined seamlessly to producer David Goodrich’s carpetbag of instruments, Zak Trojano’s rock-steady, primal drumming, BettySoo’s diaphanous harmony vocals, and the flat, mournful flood of Jazz legend Chris Cheek’s saxophone.

God and the Devil are opened here. Mortality is too. Politics, consciousness, renewal, family, vulnerability, surrender…Smither has sat with these topics like so many Zen koans, for so long, that every line is a pearl.

Don't miss him this time through town.