He was looking at the present.
Across nine original songs, Smith confronts a world increasingly defined by division, uncertainty and the erosion of common ground. The album’s title leaves little ambiguity about his concern, yet the music behind it is considerably more complicated than a declaration of frustration. Smith is not interested in making an outrage record. He is interested in what happens after the outrage—when arguments have ended, positions have hardened and people still have to figure out how to exist alongside one another.
“I care very deeply for the world and its people,” Smith has said. “I knew I had to express what I was feeling, but not in a way that added to the fracture.”
That idea becomes the key to the entire project.
There is no shortage of music capable of capturing anger. Smith understands that. What …this is not ok… attempts instead is more difficult: confronting the forces pulling people apart without reproducing the same hostility. The record questions division without turning disagreement into spectacle, and its strongest moments come when Smith shifts attention away from ideological positions and toward their human consequences.
“World Is a Wheel” opens the album by considering the cyclical nature of change. Turbulent eras can feel unprecedented while they are happening, but history has a habit of repeating its tensions in different forms. For Smith, whose career has stretched across more than four decades of cultural and musical transformation, that perspective comes with lived experience. He has watched trends emerge and disappear, industries reinvent themselves and generations develop new languages for familiar anxieties.
The wheel keeps turning. The circumstances change. Human behavior can be more stubborn.
Smith takes that observation into more immediate territory with “Cry for America.” The title suggests a political song, and concern about the country’s divisions is clearly present, but Smith avoids the obvious route of reducing the track to partisan messaging. There is disappointment here, but no attempt to package a complicated moment into an easy slogan.
Instead, the song is driven by concern for what polarization does to people.
That distinction gives Smith room to operate beyond conventional political songwriting. …this is not ok… is less concerned with identifying which side has won an argument than with asking what remains when the argument itself begins consuming the possibility of understanding.
“Orphans” brings that question closer to the individual. Themes of vulnerability, abandonment and belonging move through the song, expanding the album beyond public discourse and into something more intimate. When communities fracture, the damage does not remain theoretical. Somebody eventually feels forgotten. Somebody loses a sense of security. Somebody ends up searching for a place to belong.
Smith keeps returning to that human scale, and it prevents the album from becoming weighed down by its own subject matter.
Then comes “Level Ground,” a song whose title captures perhaps the clearest expression of what Smith is trying to locate throughout the record. He is not arguing that people must erase their differences or manufacture agreement where none exists. The idea is simpler and, in the current climate, perhaps more demanding: disagreement does not have to eliminate respect.
Common ground, in Smith’s writing, is not sameness. It is the space where difference can exist without stripping away humanity.
That distinction matters because …this is not ok… could easily have been built entirely around disillusionment. Instead, the record gradually searches for a way beyond it. “A Life In Love” moves toward more personal emotional territory, while “From the Ashes” closes the album with renewal built directly into its imagery.
The sequence gives the project an arc that becomes clearer as it progresses. Smith begins by observing recurring instability, moves through national anxiety, vulnerability and separation, then gradually redirects the conversation toward connection and recovery.
He does not make recovery sound inevitable.
That is precisely why it works.
Hope on …this is not ok… is not treated as a shortcut around reality. Smith has already acknowledged that reality in the album’s title. Instead, hope becomes an alternative to resignation—a decision not to assume that because something is damaged, it must remain damaged.
Musically, Smith brings decades of experience into the record without allowing that history to overwhelm the songs. Americana, blues, roots, folk, soul and rock move through the project, sometimes distinctly and sometimes bleeding naturally into one another. Genre has never been a particularly useful limitation for Smith, and here those traditions function more as ingredients than categories.
The album was recorded between Austin and New York, two cities with meaningful connections to Smith’s musical life, and produced by Smith himself. Julie Slim, Alex Ruiz, Joe Morales, Guy Forsythe, Ange Kogutz, Tony Perrino, David Webb, Hank Soto, Greg Holt and Ernie Durawa are among the musicians and vocalists contributing to the sessions.
There is an appealing contradiction in the construction of the record. …this is not ok… examines disconnection, yet it was built collaboratively. Smith may be writing about the difficulty of maintaining common ground, but the music itself emerges from artists sharing a room, an idea and a purpose.
That collaborative instinct is hardly new to him.
Across his career, Smith has performed with, opened for or recorded alongside artists including B.B. King, Sheryl Crow, Trey Anastasio, Gregg Allman, Los Lobos, Johnny Winter, Buddy Guy, Adrian Legg, Ed Gerhard and Portishead. It is a list that stretches across scenes and generations and illustrates how comfortably his career has moved outside rigid genre lines.
His work away from the stage has been equally significant. Smith has spent years as a producer, recording engineer, author and educator, including serving as a senior instructor with the National Guitar Workshop. After moving from New York to Texas, he continued developing and mentoring musicians through Austin’s 6 String Ranch, the studio and creative facility he co-founded.
Those roles reveal another side of his relationship with music. Producing and teaching demand more than knowing how to play. They require listening—understanding what another musician is attempting to communicate, knowing when to offer direction and recognizing when the better choice is simply to create space.
That same instinct can be heard throughout …this is not ok….
Smith does not overcrowd the album with answers. He leaves room for listeners to bring their own experiences into the songs. That might be one of the clearest signs of where he stands after 20 studio records. An artist early in a career often has something to prove. Smith has spent more than four decades doing the proving.
At this point, the question is what he wants to say.
And what he wants to say is not comfortable.
Something about the way people are communicating—or failing to communicate—is troubling him. Something about the speed with which disagreement becomes hostility has become impossible for him to ignore. The title …this is not ok… is therefore less an attempt at provocation than an acknowledgment that silence would feel dishonest.
But Smith also understands that simply shouting louder would defeat the purpose.
That tension gives the album its identity. He wants to confront division without feeding it. He wants to express disappointment without settling into cynicism. He wants to recognize anger while refusing to let anger dictate the entire conversation.
In a cultural environment built increasingly around immediate reactions, that kind of restraint can carry its own force.
Smith’s approach does not suggest neutrality. Empathy is not the absence of conviction, and compassion does not require pretending that every circumstance is acceptable. The record’s title makes that clear. There are moments when an artist feels compelled to say that something has gone wrong.
The harder question is what comes after saying it.
For Smith, music still offers one possible answer. Not because a song can repair social division on its own, and not because a guitar can resolve arguments that extend far beyond a recording studio, but because music can create an encounter. For several minutes, strangers can occupy the same emotional space. They can hear the same voice, sit with the same question and perhaps emerge with slightly more willingness to consider another perspective.
That may sound modest compared with the scale of the problems …this is not ok… addresses. Smith’s career, however, seems to have taught him the value of modest possibilities.
After more than 45 years, he does not appear interested in pretending music possesses powers it does not have. What he does believe in is its capacity to communicate.
Twenty studio albums into his career, Matt Smith is not looking backward for reassurance. …this is not ok… finds him paying attention to what is happening now, confronting the discomfort rather than escaping it and searching for connection in a moment when disconnection often seems easier.
The album does not promise that everyone will find the same level ground. It does something more credible: it refuses to stop looking for it.
And after a lifetime spent making music, Smith appears convinced that listening is still a worthwhile place to begin.