i really dont wanna do saturday shows this year. but when someone like jacob smigel writes and asks for a saturday show....well there just aint nooo way i am gonna say no

Jacob Smigel: folk musician— turned ER doctor— turned musician again, returns with a long overdue collection of left-of-center songs called If I Were Me, brought to life and to new heights by Providence, RI’s own Deer Tick, who back him on this recording. Smigel has a knack for taking a scalpel to the human condition, wether he’s singing about the dharma and doldrums of midlife (“You Can Relate”), what cadavers can teach the living (“The Library”), remembrances of time spent on the road back in the day (“Waste Your Life, Be an Artist”), or his own medicine/music duality (“The Shadow”). As the Nashville Scene says “He’s folded interests like medicine and entomology and a fascination with found sound into gentle songs that seem to tumble out of his head fully formed.” Vowing to keep artistic expression at the forefront of his life, Smigel is hitting the road again this Fall.

“I suppose that if I had two lives to live, I’d be an ER doctor/family man in one of them— which I am for the most part— and in the other I would have never stopped making music full-time, and instead have followed that pure creative energy where ever it could take me. Considering I have just one life to live, I need to do both."

Besides music, Smigel has also released several collections of "found sound"— culled from thrift stores, yard sales, and more… these recordings often find their way into live shows and even into the songs themselves ("Band Nerd Love”). These human-centric recordings are best experienced live and blur the line between eavesdropping and performance art. One such recording from 1976, "The Carol Tapes,” is a shockingly raw audio diary that follows a young woman named Carol, through her troubles in art school, her love/hate relationship with Mick Jagger, her fast food binges and diet pill-induced starvation, to her eventual arrival at rock bottom, and then— the foothills of recovery. "The Carol Tapes" is out now… on cassette of course.