NATE SMITH

                                                                "Wreckage" 

                                                                Sony Music Nashville

As “Whiskey On You” continues to make major impact at country radio and on the current charts, Nate Smith continues to show his much softer, more piano driven side with most of the teaser tracks he’s put out ahead of his forthcoming, self-titled album (slated for release in February of 2023): “Raised Up,” “I Don’t Wanna Go To Heaven,” “I Found You,” and now “Wreckage.”

Smith’s rich voice layered over softer toned instrumentation has been the catalyst for his quickly emerging, buzzworthy success as he’s drawn the listener in with transparent honesty and ultra-relatable lyrics, which he continues to accomplish with “Wreckage,” a song co-written by Smith with Mary Kutter, Chris Sligh, and Paul Wrock.

Vulnerably sharing his own scars while using the song to mostly praise the one who came into his life and saw the person underneath all of them, Smith first apologetically sings straight to her through the opening lines of the song, “I don’t mean to be guarded, I don’t mean to be rude, I don’t mean to just shut you out, it’s just what I’ve been used to.”

But he quickly moves from apologizing to being thankful to her for sticking around and embracing him - the scars and all - as he sings us through the chorus:

“I’m a little damaged, but damn you saw the good

When everyone saw baggage, you loved when no one could

Laying in this bed beside you, I don’t have to hide away

You see all the wreckage, and it wrecks me that you stay”

Continuing to shower her with praise throughout the remainder of the song, while also embracing his own disbelief that she’s still standing with him, he reveals that she’s teaching him how to trust again, that she’s taken his shattered pieces and put them back together, and that she saw through his pain and who he could be (and is) despite it.

So many of us are insecure in our relationships because of whatever past hurts we’ve already experienced previously, and Nate Smith absolutely speaks right to those fragmented hearts with “Wreckage.” What he so cleverly does here, though, is that he keeps the focus on the here and now and how she’s healing him, rather than diving into all the descriptions of the past hurts that caused him to build his walls. By being so vague regarding the past, he opens this up to complete interpretation, connecting with the listener on a deeper core level as he leaves room for them to insert their own personal stories into his. 

(Review Written By: Jeffrey Kurtis)

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