There is a particular kind of 70s Los Angeles record that seems to live in the cracks: too strange for coffeehouse folk, too intimate for rock radio, too restless for the Laurel Canyon song circle. Kathy Smith / 2 is one of those beautifully unplaceable artefacts, the 1971 second album from Californian singer-songwriter Kathy Smith, originally issued on Richie Havens’ short-lived Stormy Forest label and long whispered about as a cult object. Emerging from the same Orange County and L.A. folk milieu that birthed Tim Buckley and Jackson Browne, Smith had already carved a reputation as a formidable performer at venues like the Paradox and the Troubadour before cutting her debut Some Songs I’ve Saved in 1970; the follow-up finds her taking a sharp, exhilarating turn outward.
Where the first album carried the intimate, confessional glow of late‑night coffeehouse sets, Kathy Smith / 2 opens the windows wide and lets in a warm gust of jazz, psych and low-key funk. Critics have called it her “most daring and accomplished” work, and it earns the claim: arrangements built around flute, brass and supple rhythm sections lend the songs a restless modernity, while Smith’s vocals ride above with a kind of smoky directness that recalls Linda Perhacs or Judee Sill without ever echoing them. The material moves fluidly between her own compositions - pieces like “Fly Off With The Wind,” “For Emile,” “Seven Virgins” and “Blessed Be The People,” which braid mystic imagery with grounded, street-level detail - and carefully chosen covers, among them Jackson Browne’s “It’s Taking So Long,” Jimmie Spheeris’s “Lady of Lavender” and Tim Hardin’s “Hang On To A Dream,” each reshaped to fit her slightly off-axis sensibility.
Part of the record’s enduring fascination lies in the calibre and chemistry of the band who help her realise that vision. Working again within the Stormy Forest orbit, Smith surrounds herself with heavyweight players: keyboardists Jan Hammer and Warren Bernhardt, bassist Tony Levin, percussionist Don Alias and jazz flautist Jeremy Steig, among others, create a soundworld where the borders between folk, fusion and psychedelic rock dissolve. Drum patterns lean into a loose, almost funk-inflected pocket; flutes ripple through the stereo field; guitars flicker between gentle strum and wiry interjection, giving the songs a sense of continuous motion. Reviewers have noted that the album “pushes a slightly more eclectic mix of songs” than her debut, retaining Richie Havens’ taste for mixed instrumentation and jazz touches while allowing Smith’s own melodic quirks to rise to the surface.
The story outside the grooves is both archetypal and singular. Smith had the kind of breakthrough opportunity artists dream about - a set at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival in front of hundreds of thousands of people - and seemed poised, like so many of her peers, for a lasting career. Instead, Stormy Forest’s limited reach and eventual collapse meant that both her albums slipped almost immediately into obscurity, circulating mainly among collectors and appearing in footnotes about the American psych-folk underground. In recent years, though, Kathy Smith / 2has quietly resurfaced as a touchstone: championed by specialist reissue labels, highlighted on compilations like Andy Votel’s Folk Is Not A Four Letter Word, and now restored in an authorised 180‑gram gatefold edition with previously unreleased bonus tracks that frame her original vision in newly vivid detail.
Heard now, the album plays less like a period curiosity and more like an alternate history of the singer-songwriter boom, one where Native American identity, L.A. bohemia, jazz-club chops and folk-club storytelling coexist without compromise. According to family accounts, Smith is an enrolled member of the Keweenaw Bay Band of Ojibwe, a fact that adds another layer to music already preoccupied with belonging, dislocation and the costs of freedom. In the current reissue climate, where lost voices are finally being pulled back into the frame, Kathy Smith / 2 feels essential not only as a beautifully played, quietly radical record, but as a reminder of how many such careers were allowed to vanish. As the flutes rise, the drums loosen and her voice cuts through the haze, the album stops being a collector’s grail and becomes what it always was: a fully realised world, waiting patiently for listeners willing to step inside.
