Meet Hawaiian native, Liverpool educated, Eli Smart. He talks to us about his new single, his April residency at Merseyside’s Kazimier Stockroom, and returning to the UK after island life in lockdown.
A love of The Beatles was really all it took for Eli Smart to decide Liverpool was the right place for him to go to university. Such was his certainty that despite hailing from the island of Kauai over 7,000 miles away, Liverpool was the only place he applied. He got in and he went.
“It was a such a trip,” Eli laughs, the confidence needed to uproot your life and move across the world at the age of 18 somehow already evident. He comes across as an easy-going surfer dude, but not the annoying kind. “The good kind of trip though. The healthy kind that keeps your perspective ever-shifting and open to different worldviews.
“Just meeting different people from different parts of the world, it can only help… but yeah, definitely a trip,” he laughs again. His surfer locks and sun and sand infused accent have survived the best part of three years on Merseyside intact, but, as of last week, he’s back on British shores.
Eli’s moved to London. Later this month, his new single, ‘AM to PM’ is out. In April, he’s back up to Liverpool for a residency at the city’s Kazimier Stockroom. Once that’s over, Eli’s off on a UK and Ireland tour, with dates in Dublin, Glasgow, Newcastle and Birmingham, among other cities. He’s got a couple of weeks to try and settle into his new home, before it kicks off on March 24, with the release of ‘AM to PM’.
“‘AM to PM’ is the first tune from this lockdown batch of recordings to come out,” Eli tells me. He returned to Hawaii at the start of the pandemic, and has been back there ever since. “It’s definitely a slower-paced tune, but I think it’s what being on Kauai for two years during lockdown did to my brain.”
Kauai is the fourth largest of Hawaii’s four biggest islands. It’s not just a world away from London and Liverpool, but from almost anything else. “It’s out in the middle of nowhere,” Eli explains, “and you’re probably forced to slow down a bit. I have no complaints, but it is very isolating sometimes. There’s this thing called Polynesian paralysis, where you’re just adrift. I felt a bit of that, and I think this tune captures the charming aspects of it.”
Eli’s music is loosely described as ‘Aloha Soul’ – a genre fusing Eli’s blue-eyed soul with the tropicana of his homeland. This “new batch of recordings” were all made with acclaimed producer Gianluca Buccellati. Having worked with last year’s Mercury Prize winner, Arlo Parks, among others, Buccellati helped Eli’s sound develop during a number of visits to Kauai over the last couple of years.
“I have a studio in my room and [Luca] would come for a couple of weeks at a time, and we would just record loads. Because of the atmosphere and the setting, we were able to just really lock down and hone in some cool sounds. This was like the first time we made something together so it’s really cool – I lucked out really.”
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Now Eli’s back in the UK, he’ll get a chance to really showcase these new tracks in Liverpool next month. It’s become a city close to his heart, and one he hasn’t been able to visit in over two years. “It was such a different environment, but it wasn’t difficult to assimilate. It was fun discovering all the different bands that come from around there, and finding the different little subcultures that I obviously wasn’t aware of.”
There will be couple of months before Eli can really slow down and spend time in London, but he’s now looking forward to starting fresh in the capital. “It’s a totally different scene and atmosphere from Liverpool, and I’m hoping to start from ground zero and kind of do that again.
“I want to find some really creative people in all sectors… just meet new people and be around creatives. I thrive off that. It definitely stimulates me. And it’s such a fantastic city with a lot of history. Just to be here, even just walking around, it’s such a trip.” There he goes again. “There’s an off-license near me called Aloha. I went in and was like, “that’s crazy, Aloha!” And the guy was like, “Aloha, because everybody is welcome.”
