A city that can sorely afford to lose key underground music figures does just that this week, when Las Vegan Jacob Smigel says goodbye to his lifelong hometown. The 26-year-old folk-rocker isn’t heading for the greener industry pastures of Southern California or seeking out a town with a more responsive independent scene, however. Smigel leaves for Glendale, Arizona, where he is set to begin medical school this fall.
“I’ve always been interested in both science and art, but I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to do something artistic or something scientific,” Smigel explains during a break from packing. “Then I started working for an ambulance company as an EMT while I was in college, responding to 911 calls with paramedics, and through that experience I realized that an artist and a scientist are kind of the same. They have the same goals in mind—to create something new, to have attention to detail and to make bonds with other people. An ER physician might treat a patient for 20 minutes that are meaningful and powerful and change their life, and I felt the same way onstage, making anonymous connections. So I realized that I could be a doctor and at the same time have artistic energy and funnel it into other things.”
Smigel “retired” his musical project, for the foreseeable future, with a pair of local shows June 23 and 24, the first at Denny & Lee Magic Studio (sharing a bill with out-of-towners Jana Hunter, Castanets, Deer Tick and Diego Perez), and the second at his house, where several friends paid tribute by covering songs from his four home-recorded albums “Las Vegas is this huge melting pot, but the musical community is so tight-knit—there are probably only 500 people in town that know about the underground shows—and my last shows were very special because a lot of those people were there, playing my oldest songs,” Smigel says. “It was really touching.”
The final Vegas shows came at the tail end of Smigel’s most extensive round of touring, two separate jaunts with Providence-based Deer Tick (John McCauley) that ultimately saw the two musicians playing nightly in one another’s bands.Though Las Vegans aren’t likely to see him onstage again anytime soon, Smigel leaves behind a set of unique albums: 2003’s Animal Diseases (recorded in mono and themed around—yes—animal diseases); 2004’s Full Grown and Talking About Fountains (on indie label Not Not Fun Records); 2006’s Eavesdrop: A Wealth of Found Sound (a 40-track collection of anonymous recordings discovered in thrift stores and Dumpsters, dating from 1965 to 1986, complete with 30 pages of self-penned liner notes); and 2007’s New Mexico (an amalgam of songs, field recordings and spoken-word material relating to Smigel’s annual camping trips to that state). All can be purchased at Zia Record Exchange or through jacobsmigel.com. “I always wanted my albums to go deeper,” Smigel says. “I wanted them to be immersive.”