Singer, songwriter and guitarist Chris Smither enjoys the irony in the title of his latest recording, Live as I'll Ever Be.

As he points out in a conversation with Audiosyncrasies host Mark Hellenberg, if it's a recording, it can't be live.

"I was intrigued by the basic contradiction of a live recording," says Smither. "It just made me think a whole lot about what I actually do. What I really do is stand in front of people and carry on this very ephemeral dialogue that's here at the moment and is gone. It's all very Zen, it's very impermanent. So what do you make of that, I don't know. But I like the record. It conveys a sense of who I am and what I do."

Smither joined Hellenberg in late August for an conversation in Ohio University Public Radio's studio that also included Smither performing some of his songs. Smither says he hopes that his recordings lead listeners to his live performances.

Chris Smither has been a performing songwriter for more than three decades. The son of a college professor in New Orleans, Smither started playing music as a kid in the Crescent City. After winning a battle of the bands as a teenager, Smither joined Boston's acoustic music scene in the '60s where he fell in love with the guitar styles of some well-known blues guitarists.

"The first players that I listened to seriously were country blues players," said Smither. "And the very first of those was Lightnin' Hopkins. The second one was Mississippi John Hurt. So, if you put those two together, you get a combination of very funky rhythm, combined with a kind of rolling syncopation that pretty well encompasses three-quarters of my style."

While in Boston, Smither forged lifelong friendships with Bonnie Raitt, Eric von Schmidt (whose cover art, above, graces Chris' new album), Jim Rooney and others. Raitt recorded Smither's "Love Me Like a Man," which has since become a signature tune of hers and, as Smither points out in the interview, now a blues standard.

Smither has released 10 recordings. His first albums, I'm a Stranger, Too! (1971) and Don't It Drag On (1972) were released on Poppy Records (reissued in 1997 on the Collectibles label). His third recording, Honeysuckle Dog, with Lowell George and Dr. John, was never released, having been lost in a corporate shuffle involving Poppy Records and United Artists. Smither's next release would not come until 1985.

By the '90s, Smither was on a full-time schedule of recordings and nationwide tours, with recent releases on the Flying Fish and Hightone labels. He is also featured in The Guitar of Chris Smither -- Arrangements in Contemporary Blues Style, an instructional video available from Homespun Video.

Our sincere thanks to Chris Smither, Hightone Records and Young/Hunter Publicity for making our Audiosyncrasies studio interview possible.