Smith & Ryder offer desolate, beautiful 'Small Town Blue'

As winter finally starts to show its teeth and a bitter cold sets in, perhaps it’s fitting that the last great local song of 2015 is a small, lovely and achingly sad acoustic number by the Worcester-area duo Smith & Ryder.

 “Small Town Blue” is a desolate little tale of a high school athlete with his life ahead of him who messes it all up by stealing alcohol from a liquor store and crashing a car, killing his best friend.

“There ain't nowhere he can hide inside of this .... small town,” sings singer-songwriter Sean Ryder, “Where each glance reminds him how he let them down./It plays in endless repeats in his mind./Feeling Small Town Blue, hoping that he could find ...  some way … to rewind.”

With gentle compassion and stark imagery, Ryder and his collaborator, violinist Miriam Smith, paint a vivid picture of the man’s unraveling, and how a youthful mistake utterly destroys his dreams. But it’s more than mere guilt at play: Smith & Ryder’s portrait captures the indelible gravity of a small town, the claustrophobia of having everything and everyone around you remind you of your failings. “Hell is other people,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1944 play, “No Exit,” and nothing illustrates that better than Ryder’s portrait of the subject’s one-time high school sweetheart now transformed to a stone-faced diner waitress who “serves his fried eggs up with a face made of stone.”

Throughout the song, the guitar and violin work is subtle and unforced. Everything flows like a gentle brook to its sad, inevitable conclusion. It’s the light hand that gives the song its power, the gentle wistfulness in Ryder’s vocals, the understated accent of Smith’s harmonies. The violin plays softly, the guitar strums softly, and the result is a song in which every inch is pregnant with heartbreak.

Email Victor D. Infante at Victor.Infante@Telegram.com and follow him on Twitter @ocvictor.