Sonny Smith Celebrates 100 Records Project | East Bay Express

San Francisco singer-songwriter Sonny Smith has always taken a character-driven approach to his music. In fact, he began his music career while working on a screenplay for a movie. With his guitar nearby, Smith ended up turning dialogue and plot structure into songs. He did residencies writing plays in which he sang songs in character. He often assumes the persona of a fictional character or sings dialogue, or features guest singers as characters in his songs.

So it wasn’t a huge stretch when Smith was attempting to write a novel last year that incorporated fictionalized singers and musicians that then tempted him to think about what their album covers might look like, and songs might sound like. He thought it’d be cool to write fictional songs for the fictional characters, and applied for and received a five-week residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts to pursue the idea. “Once I got there I started writing some songs and I fairly quickly sort of found out the job of drawing other record covers [should go] to an artist,” he said. He assigned a couple of the covers to some artists who were also at the Headlands at the time, and realized his sketches weren’t sufficient. “I can’t have rough sketches and one really incredible piece,” he surmised. Likewise, the songs couldn’t be rough either. “So that’s where it quickly went to the next level from my original idea, what I was thinking it was going to be,” he said. “The novel got shelved immediately because once I got artists to work on the record cover it wasn’t hard to see that this was the project.”

Chris Johanson, courtesy of Gallery 16, San Francisco

Fitting with Smith’s ambitious nature, he decided to commission 100 different record covers and write 200 songs (two per record). A little more than a year after starting the project, Smith will celebrate the finished 100 Records project with a show at Gallery 16 (501 3rd St., San Francisco), which displays the art show until May 31. The opening reception happens Friday, Apr. 9, from 6-9 p.m. A jukebox will spin all 200 songs and Smith will perform with his band, the Sunsets.