Listen to Benny James and Alex Smith live at Cerveza Jack’s!

Benny's music is best described as a mixture of Americana, country, and soul.

Benny is one of a new breed of American singer songwriters, who are setting the stage for the next generation of American Music.

Alex Smith

As a pitcher on his high-school team, Alex Smith could have gone on to play baseball in college but his “hobby” of playing guitar and for playing for the masses in high school took over and he decided to pursue hits – far from the baseball diamond. Concertgoers who have seen the personable, charismatic 23-year-old command a stage, or watched his inventive videos of acoustic renditions of everything from Red Hot Chili Peppers to A Thousand Horses, already have a sense that he made the right call.

Smith is the product of two generations of musicians, with his father and grandfather both influencing his interest, albeit indirectly. Until his early teens, Alex had little desire to follow the same path his father had as a working musician, mainly because, he says, “it was kind of cliché.” The youngster even quit piano lessons, a decision he admittedly still regrets. But even as a toddler, he recalls being influenced by country music. After moving to Nashville, Smith was introduced by his manager to superstar Vince Gill, an iconic performer whose songs were a constant source of pleasure during his earliest years. Still, while country music had been imprinted on him early on, he had no desire to play an instrument, even though his dad owned a plethora of guitars. It took a “virtual” instrument to finally turn things around.

“I was about 13 when [the videogame] Guitar Hero came out,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘Well, this is kind of fun! I wonder what it would be like on a real guitar.’ One of my buddies had a guitar at his house and I learned ‘Smoke on the Water’.” Armed with a baby Taylor his dad gave him, the teenager voraciously studied other players’ YouTube videos and quickly advanced his natural skills. During his junior year at Holy Savior Menard High School he progressed to playing guitar for school masses. By the following year he was also beginning to sing.

Although he had relocated to Lafayette, La., to attend college, for the first couple of years music was merely a hobby, something to play for his buddies around the house. That changed, however, when he took note of some friends who were playing around Lafayette and making good money for just a few hours “work.” Picking up a gig at a pool party at the apartment complex where he lived, fate intervened when he was spotted by the manager of a local daiquiri shop, who offered to let him play a one-hour show there. Smith packed the house, and the one-hour set became a three-hour showcase. “It kind of snowballed from there and I played everywhere in Lafayette after that,” he says.

Alex recorded his Fear of Missing Out EP at Nashville’s prestigious Blackbird Studios with producer Ryan Sutton.