Stephanie Smith: Reaching Her DreamThe Right Way
By Elisabeth Deffner
Rock singer Stephanie Smith knows what she’s singing about: she, too, got lost on her way to her chosen destination.
As a freshman at Greenville College, a small school outside St. Louis, Missouri, she connected with a band almost immediately. She was 18 and a band novice; the other musicians were juniors and seniors who had played with nearly a dozen bands.
“I was pretty new at it—and kind of stupid,” recalls Smith, 24. “My entire identity became wrapped up in that, which is a dangerous thing.”
The Nashville resident remembers that she was hungry for fame—and the band captured plenty of attention. Smith loved the spotlight. In fact, she says, she loved it so much that she allowed it to change who she was.
“The guys were really trying to hide things from me,” she says. “One of the guys had an alcohol problem, and it was affecting his marriage. One of the guys didn’t want me to know he smoked.
“My identity was so wrapped up in being a lead singer in this band that things I normally would have stood up for, I just started sweeping under the carpet.”
Smith had always stayed away from substance use; she’d known people who had smoked, drunk alcohol, and used drugs. Some of them had ended up in rehab, and one had dropped out of high school after he was arrested. “That kind of thing just scared me away from it. Not me—no way,” she says. “To this day, I haven’t even tried a cigarette.”
She had thought her fellow band members felt the same way. When she discovered the truth, Smith tried to ignore it. But the problems didn’t go away, and in the end, they led to the band’s demise. The guys kicked her out, her mother told Smith she didn’t like the person she’d become, and Smith felt as though her life had fallen apart.
“Our dreams crumbled,” she says.
 Smith decided to turn her back on music. She signed up for a monthlong study-abroad class in Guatemala and spent a few weeks hauling cinder blocks up a muddy mountain to build stoves for families that couldn’t afford the appliances.
“It was a really life-changing event for me,” she says. Volunteer work is an immediate cure for someone as self-absorbed as she’d become. “The focus isn’t on you anymore,” she adds.
Meeting the people, seeing their poverty, and working to help them ignited a fire inside Smith. When she returned to school, she realized that she wanted to see and learn more. Her junior year, she signed up to study in Africa for the first semester. The impact of that experience was tremendous, as Smith experienced some of the challenges that many Africans face every day.
“For three weeks we studied poverty and development, and we lived it: we lived on one U.S. dollar a day,” she says. “You wrap your head around that for four months, then come back to the United States right around Christmastime! I walked into Wal-Mart to get school supplies for next semester, and there were two aisles of pens! I was like, I just need something that writes.”
“Two years had gone by, and I hadn’t touched music,” Smith says. “I told my whole family and college campus, ‘I’m never doing music again.’”
But then one morning she woke up with a new perspective. Maybe, she thought, music wasn’t wrong for her—maybe she’d just been approaching it the wrong way. She decided that if she had the opportunity—if a door opened to her, so to speak—she’d give it another try.
That very afternoon she went to her college’s “battle of the bands” audition to support some friends, and the door opened: the festival director spotted her and told her that a band had dropped out, and he needed someone to fill their slot. He asked Smith if she could be ready to go on in five minutes.
She said yes.
With a friend accompanying her on the guitar, she performed at the battle of the bands—and won. The prize: two weeks later she got to sing on the main stage at a local music festival.
Her childhood idol, tobyMac, was headlining—and his bus rolled in just as Smith was performing. Some members of his band listened to Smith’s performance, asked her for a demo disk, and played it for tobyMac. The next thing Smith knew, she was talking to the musician she’d loved so much as a kid that she didn’t even know that there were other musicians out there—and then they were discussing tobyMac giving Smith a contract to record with his label, GoTee Records.
“I don’t think I’d ever dreamed, when I was a little girl, that my childhood idol would offer me a record deal,” she says with a laugh.
After the release of her album Not Afraid, Smith has a contract to release three more albums on GoTee Records. She’s approaching music the right way this time, she says—not focusing on the attention she gets from it, but sharing her thoughts, her feelings, her point of view with her listeners through her words and her voice. And she can’t wait to see where the next open door will lead.
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