LITTLE ROCK — See the pretty lights, a Pink Floyd concert poster once proclaimed, and that was good enough for Derek Vincent Smith, who, like Sam Beam (Iron & Wine) and Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), chose a new name (Pretty Lights) for his career as a performance artist.
“When I was in middle school, I wanted to be in a band, but I evolved out of that,” Smith says from a stop in Alpharetta, Ga., where he prepared to perform at Verizon Amphitheater, not to be confused with North Little Rock’s Verizon Arena. “I developed a vision of music that hadn’t been created yet. It wasn’t sampling. I wanted to spread the music and embrace that and sustain myself through live shows and on iTunes.
“Rather than sampling, I call it sample collaging. I take little snippets of songs. They’re more of a soulful sort of tone, sounds from another era, before songs went so digital.”
Though he at times has combined bits of songs by artists such as Led Zeppelin and even John Denver, whom he saluted with a remix of Denver’s “Take Me Home Country Roads” at a West Virginia festival earlier this year, he prefers to concentrate on his own original creations. National Public Radio put a Pretty Lights song, “I Can See It in Your Face,” on its list of “10 Songs to Shake the Dance Floor.”
Pretty Lights albums can be downloaded for free. See the website prettylightsmusic. com for information on Smith and his music. He released his first CD, Taking Up Your Precious Time, in 2006. He followed that in 2008 with Filling Up the City Skies, and a year later released Passing By Behind Your Eyes.
In January, Smith/Pretty Lights started his own record label, PLM, and released MP3s by Paper Diamonds and Break Sciences, which were followed later in the month by EPs by both acts.
“I finally had success creating my own sound,” Smith notes. “I used session musicians and old-school analog to get another kind of sound quality. So I’m fusing the worlds of the past and the future, to get something warm and soulful. In the shows, I’m onstage with my lighting designer, and we’re in this massive 3D city with a light show, and I improvise the electronics, via a couple of MacBook Pro laptops, and an Ableton, which send ‘triggers’ to the lighting board.”
Smith says his tour requires a crew of 12, a couple of buses and a tractor-trailer to transport his lights, sound and other equipment.
The man behind Pretty Lights grew up in Fort Collins, Colo., where he recalls that the first album he bought was Nirvana’s Nevermind. After his entrance in the grunge world, he dabbled in a succession of sounds, from hip-hop through the classic rock of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Doors to electronic, old blues and soul, folk and rave music.
“I like whatever’s good, including country and blues,” he says.
After high school, he went on to the University of Colorado for a year, but decided his future would be in music, so he dropped out to pursue the course he is now on. In 2007, he played music for late-night shows that were headlined by Widespread Panic and The Disco Biscuits, and within two years he was booked into the Bonnaroo and Rothbury festivals.
“I try to read the energy of the audience in what I do. I’ve been to Nashville, Tenn., where I’m working on stuff with LeAnn Rimes and Ralph Stanley, in a film that takes the history of country music and how it meets up with Pretty Lights.”
Music
Pretty Lights
Opening act: Big Gigantic
7 p.m. Saturday, Verizon Arena, East Broadway and Interstate 30, North Little Rock
Admission: $31 (general admission, floor, no seating); $28 (general admission seating, lower level)
(800) 745-3000
ticketmaster.com
Weekend, Pages 38 on 10/27/2011