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of the hit songs that helped launch her career was… Love You Like A Man. The song has now become something of a classic with numerous cover versions, notably another high profile cover by Diana Krall.

“Diana Krall’s version paid for my

daughter’s education,” he laughs. “Love You Like A Man has been enormously significant for me – my one really commercial song and it was never actually a hit. But Bonnie sold a lot of records with it and if she hadn’t done it, then Diana Krall wouldn’t have done it so I am enormously grateful.”

Did you know when you wrote it, you’d come up with something special?

“Oh no. I mean, I knew it had a couple of gem lines, like the things you sometimes get in blues lyrics. That line ‘They all want you to rock them just like their back ain’t got no bone/What you need is a man who can rock you/Like your backbone was his own…’ That’s visual. I liked that. I knew I had some good lines but I never imagined I’d written a standard. Not in my wildest dreams.”

There have been numerous other cov- ers, of course. It seems almost every country- blues-rock bar band in the western world has played it at some point and you imagine there must have been a few cover versions of his songs that make him want to tear the perpetrators’ heads off. Apparently not.

“I can almost say truthfully that I’ve never heard a cover version I didn’t like because I’m so chuffed they’re doing it. It’s the ultimate accolade, which demonstrates a song has a life of its own. You’ve generat- ed a song that lives and breathes by itself and can cross the road by itself without you holding its hand. Having said that, I do lis- ten to some cover versions and think they kinda missed the point. So I can be critical… although I’m reluctant to do so.”

almost perceptibly contorted with pain as he re-lives the agony of song creation.

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“It’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever tried to do in my life, but at the same time it’s the most rewarding. The reward is get- ting it finished. Randy Newman once said when asked if he enjoyed writing songs, he said ‘No, what I enjoy is having written them’. It is torture. After 50 years I’ve learned that if I exercise the proper disci- pline then a song will happen, but even now when I’m doing it I get this niggling thing in my brain that says it’s not going to happen. Every songwriter I’ve ever talked to never knows where it comes from and lives in constant fear that it will go away… what- ever it is! When I was young I just let it hap- pen. I just thought the songs will come and I’d get a little inspiration and they did.

“Now I have to be so much more disci-

plined. I don’t write constantly, I write for projects and I start a year in advance and leave the lyrics to last. Then I have to lock myself in a room. I write it on the calendar – today I am going to write a song – and I map it all out. I allocate three hours in the morning to do it. Three hours is all I can take at a time. So I go in the room and won’t come out for three hours whether I’ve written anything or not. Lyrics come last because they are the hardest part.

“I usually work like this for about three months and after a while it gets easier. It’s like being in a gym. Your muscles get toned up and you think ‘I should work like this all the time’ but of course you never do.

he way he tells it, songwriting is an acutely painful process. In fact, he describes it as “torture”. He reaches for another comfort- ing glug of coffee, his face

“But of the three things I do – playing

guitar, singing and writing – I think the writ- ing is the strongest. I’m a words person. I know some people listen to the music and never listen to the words but to me if it does- n’t have lyrics it’s… well it’s not pointless but that’s not what I’m there for. My dad was a words person. Most people take language for granted and never stop to think about what they are doing and the whole history of words. You can use words that have been in the English language for a thousand years and go right back to the beginning and see how the meaning of everyday words has changed and sometimes you can find a place for that in a song and all the meaning of the words suddenly resonate.

“It’s a personal obsession for me. That’s the way I approach it. And rhyme is impor- tant too. That’s what makes it memorable. I always feel I’ve won a big prize if someone walks out of a concert with one of my lines in their heads.

“I couldn’t write when I was drinking. That was part of the despair. And part of what got me out of it. Since then I’ve never not been able to do it and I have confidence that if I approach it in the right way then I can do it. I haven’t mastered it, though. I hope not anyway because that implies there’s nothing left to do.”

Trawling through his back catalogue in search of suitable cases for a re-paint on Still On The Levee able to offer a meaningful insight into the man’s trajectory across the last five decades proved a task too daunting even for the stoical Smither, who handed all responsibility to his producer Dave Goodrich. It must have been painful, you imagine, especially when Goodrich selected as the first track, Devil Got Your Man – the first song he’d ever written.