ZG Smith

The son of an English professor mother and a shipwreck diver/underwater archaeologist father, indie folk artist ZG Smith came of age in Los Angeles wanting only two things: to memorize the scientific names of all of the marine flora and fauna of the California coast, and to literally somehow be both Kurt Cobain and Paul Simon, simultaneously. Though neither desire was fully realized, he did find himself experiencing the kind of untamed, precocious adolescence that can only exist in certain notable big cities of the world. The kind of adolescence where a part time job might be selling nitrous oxide (laughing gas) at parties in the Hollywood Hills from old SCUBA tanks for a dollar a balloon, or where a new high school student might end up 150 miles from home at a rave in the middle of the Central Valley on a school night, then have to hitchhike home, or even the kind where a 15-year-old sophomore might purchase a fake ID from a shady strip mall in Koreatown, then subsequently gamble (and win) in a notable Las Vegas casino the following weekend. The kind of adolescence that would eventually culminate with a narrowly-achieved bachelor’s degree in ethnomusicology (focusing on Brazilian percussion) from UCLA. If this is sounding like a lost script from Paul Thomas Anderson, it’s because the twists and turns in ZG Smith ’s timeline are just peculiar enough to be true.