Lucy Vollhoffer
As an accomplished composer and producer, Shevy Smith has been making her mark on the music industry for many years.
She began her career as a teenager with a publishing deal in Nashville, and has gone on to earn accolades, including a ProMax Gold award and an Emmy nomination for her work as a composer and producer. In 2023, Smith added a new project to her ever-growing list of achievements with the launch of a first-of-its-kind music discovery app, Ultimate Playlist. In partnership with the Arizona Lottery, the app offers a free, incentivized listening experience with daily cash raffles to help empower artists while boosting direct fan engagement. We chatted with Smith about growing her multifaceted career, developing an app, and her unwavering commitment to all things art.
Lifelong Passion: I am from a town in central Kansas called Haven. It’s farm country where we raise wheat, soybeans, alfalfa, Longhorn cattle, and lambs. I began my singing career on horseback. I was the little girl in a fringed outfit, yodeling and performing the anthem at local rodeos and county fairs. My parents also started me early in piano, so I was learning to read notation when I was four years old, around the same time I was learning to read words. I ended up picking up guitar pretty naturally because of that foundation. We weren’t much of a TV family, so I would sit in my room with Dolly and Emmylou cassette tapes. My brother won tickets to a Matraca Berg show, so seeing her on stage delivering her own genius songs was my first concert experience. It never occurred to me that I would not attempt to do the same thing. Around 13 years old, a cassette of my original songs I’d recorded by overdubbing parts using two clock radios and some headphones found its way to a producer in New York named John DeNicola. Turns out he was legit, brilliant, and kind. Next thing I knew, I was recording in NYC with him and rad musicians like Shawn Pelton and David Mansfield. One thing led to another, and an attorney named Rosemary Carroll wired me into Nashville. I ended up signing at 17 with a publishing company Celia Froehlig and Robin Palmer owned at the time with Famous Music and they became my fairy godmothers of songwriting. They had me working with Liz Rose and Chip Matthews and people who are absolute titans of this town to this day. I still have great gratitude for those who guided my early path.
Building a Career: I released some independent albums and toured colleges pretty heavily throughout my early 20s. Around that time, I was ready to explore a different scene and moved to Topanga Canyon outside of Los Angeles. I started a kids’ songwriting program and naturally segued into production as it was easy to grab an interface with nice preamps and a compressor and just set up shop. A few years later, I met Khalid Jones, my co-founder of the Ultimate Playlist. Khalid is a blue-flame thinker who was an early pioneer in esports, among other things. We immediately found rapport in our conversations surrounding industry best practices and whether they really were the best. We were particularly fixated on the song promo options for artists in the very crowded marketplace. We wanted to build something that would serve as a tool for the working-class artists who face a myriad of challenges when trying to capture attention. Through lots of trial and error, we landed upon the concept of incentivized listening and gamification of streaming audio. We quickly built an MVP and applied for the utility patent. As it turns out, being a career musician and a startup operator requires the same skill set— an irrational desire for success and an endless reservoir of resilience.
The Art of the App: The Ultimate Playlist is a mobile app which incentivizes users to listen to entire songs and provide feedback in exchange for the chance to win cash prizes. It isn’t much different from traditional ad models with commercial radio, except that we are pushing the dollars straight through to the end user, who is also likely to be a ticket-buying fan. We were able to refine the tech with our incredible development team led by Marco Coronado. Incredibly, the Arizona Lottery was also trying to reach a younger demographic and establish a presence in the mobile app market given the limitations of a government agency. They came on as our excellent strategic partner in 2021 and powered the national launch in 2023. I think Khalid and I are most proud of the dignity and power it gives the artists who appear on the 40-song-per-day playlist. It allows artists to reach human fans, have access to stratified data with which to make smart decisions, and offers democratized programming as the playlist order is different for every single listener. The Ultimate Playlist has been a dream come true. To have a big idea and then have the parts assembled to execute it is so rare but wildly rewarding. Khalid and I created it after noticing the same pain points as everybody else. The market for releasing music is brutally crowded. The ways to promote on playlists are antiquated and siloed. We didn’t want to disrupt as much as we wanted to add more options to the menu.
Many Hats: I love that my life has allowed me to make everything art. Tech is art if you approach it that way; so is dinner, so is an outfit, or a conversation. I think keeping a sense of wonder about what is possible or what feels like a win in the near term is a good way to keep a satisfied mind. Right now, I am a veritable walking hat rack. Production-wise, I have to be conscious of the amount of time my tech company and the app allow for the mental submergence needed to execute well on a music project. So, lately, I’ve really focused in on two artists with whom I can spend time and develop a sound palette. I have a fun, grungy project in the works with an artist named Lucy Voll, who is just a stunning talent. I’m also working on the pre- production of a conceptual poetry album with a poet named Jazmine Williams, who is based in LA. Both of those projects are more slow kitchen simmers put together very carefully without the rush I was used to while working in TV and film. It’s the most enjoyable chapter of my production career, without a doubt. I’m also producing a sound sculpture with the Nashville Pantheon [a talented group of artists and curators] at the Downtown Presbyterian Church as part of a large-scale site-specific installation I have there called “Symposia.” The recording involves sampling sounds that range from choral voices to textile spinning wheels in the chapel space and arranging the pieces to present the listener with a novel experience using a known modality.
No Place like Nashville: Nashville feels like my college town even though I never attended university. I came of age here and fondly remember the old maps. I was lucky to be here for the golden age of Music Row when everyone would write two verses and a chorus and then take a break for lunch at Sub Stop or Jackson’s and then go back to finish the bridge. After 15 years in LA, I really feel like I stepped into an evolved version of that warm and supportive scene still alive here. I know we don’t run the same routes we once did, but so many of the same people have held it down here, and I run into them all the time. It’s lovely. When I pondered moving back, it felt like moving home. The only difference is now we are having a nice glass of Sancerre at Lou or something. We’ve all evolved!
Bright Future: Khalid and I have great hopes for Ultimate Playlist. On a personal level, my excitement is through the roof about an art curation team I’ve formed with my friends Ashley Layendecker and Joshua Edward Bennett. We are programming imaginative and elevated art experiences in the Nashville Pantheon chapel space downtown, and we have some very unique shows on the docket. I stay obsessed with making things, and I’m excited to continue the productivity level we’ve established. It feels so good to fall asleep tired.