Francis Arant and Jan Lamberton Smith Release ‘Yellow Flowers’

Yellow Flowers is a nice new album of song-poems sung by Cuyama’s Jan Lamberton Smith with words written by her son, Francis Arant. Smith’s latest is a quieter, more intimate affair than the rootsy flare she’s known to fire up with her band Cuyama Mama & The Hot Flashes. With softly strummed guitar floating above faint, watery organ, mama Smith threads son Arant’s plaintive poetry with the cozying home-knit weave of a hand-sewn beanie and the yearning of a long-held secret. It’s like walking wistfully through Cuyama Valley on a peaceful afternoon, as yellow-tipped puffs of rabbitbrush sway in the barren badlands under the cradling autumn sky.