Linda Smith - Cry Baby Cry (2003)

Songwriter and recording artist Linda Smith has a gentle but unconventional experimental style that continues to evolve as she adds new entries to her storied catalog. Her work with four-track production in the late '80s found her at the beginning of a home-recording movement that would set the pace for decades of indie rock that followed. During her most active times, Smith's music was limited mostly to obscure cassette and 7" releases, but her early approach to bedroom pop was revisited on the 2021 compilation Til Another Time (1988-1996). Shortly after the release of the retrospective, Smith teamed with old friend and collaborator Nancy Andrews, rekindling the creative partnership the two had begun in the early '80s, for the set of new songs that made up their 2023 album A Passing Cloud. The following year, her reissue series continued, with her long-obscured albums Nothing Else Matters (1995) and I So Liked Spring (1996) both being pressed on vinyl and shared to streaming platforms for the first time.
Smith was born and raised in Baltimore but relocated to Brooklyn, New York in the 1980s. There, she played in several bands, including the Silly Pillows and the Woods. She purchased a four-track cassette recorder to make demos to share with her bandmates but quickly found herself drawn to the specific charms and limitations of home recording. When the Woods disbanded around 1987, Smith continued working on solo recordings, eventually collecting some of her earliest material on the 1987 cassette-only The Space Between the Buildings. Her sounds ranged from moody, ethereal balladry to fuzzy proto-indie, all of it bearing similarities to the C-86 movement and the burgeoning K Records scene of the same period. Throughout the late '80s and early '90s, Smith released multiple collections of her songs, including cassettes with small lo-fi labels Shrimper and her own Preference Recordings, her 1995 album Nothing Else Matters, and several 7" singles with indie labels Slumberland and Harriet Records.
She continued making music into the 2000s, releasing two new albums, Emily's House and Something New!, in 2001 and collecting older material on compilations like 2014's All the Stars That Never Were. Smith remained active in music, and her early home recordings received a new wave of attention in 2021 when Captured Tracks issued the retrospective collection Til Another Time (1988-1996).
When Smith was still living in Baltimore in the early '80s, she and her housemate Nancy Andrews had a band called Ceramic Madonna Head (with Plastic Arms) that was active until Smith's move to New York. While digitizing archival cassettes, Smith came across a tape of some of Andrews' songs from that time and reached out to her old friend with the idea of working on a new album together. The two traded song ideas remotely until they had reached an album's worth of material, which they released in 2023 as the dreamy yet direct album A Passing Cloud, the duo's first work together in over 30 years. In 2024, Captured Tracks reissued Smith's mid-'90s efforts Nothing Else Matters, formerly available only on CD through indie label Feel Good All Over, and I So Liked Spring, an album that had only ever existed on various cassette editions. Both albums were pressed on vinyl for the first time and also released on streaming services.