Stephen Montoya
For Lisa Renee Smith, music has been part of life for as long as she can remember. She grew up in southeast Arkansas, singing before she could talk, learning the Delta blues and gospel that flowed through her father’s house. Later, in the River Valley between the Ouachita Mountains and the Ozarks, she added alternative rock, progressive metal, hip hop, and dance pop to her personal soundtrack. Those early influences led her to the University of North Texas, where she earned a degree in Jazz Studies and met her husband, bassist Jacob Smith.
Now a fixture in Fort Worth’s music scene, Smith balances multiple roles — solo performer, member of the all-female “super group” Homebody, and bassist in Mighty Dark To Travel, a punk-country hybrid. She’s also part of Songbirds, a songwriting collective that has become a hub for Fort Worth musicians to swap songs, explore craft, and navigate the business of music.
Her path to this point has been anything but conventional. “I tell people I’m a full-time mom and part-time musician,” she says with a laugh. She left her job at Half Price Books when her son was about one and dove into music full-time. At first, that meant wedding bands and corporate gigs, which she describes as “a good check. It paid well, and it was a fun thing to experiment with, but I had to drink a lot of vodka to get me through it.”
Stephen Montoya
Eventually, she decided to focus on the music that felt authentic.
“At some point I was like, 'I want to play guitar again, so I’m going to try to play guitar in as many of these bands this year as I can,'” she says.
Feeling isolated as a new mom, Smith found her community on Instagram. “Back then, I was like 'I’m going to follow all the local musicians in Fort Worth, and anytime somebody has a daytime gig, I’m going to pack my kid in the car. We’re going to see your brunch gig and I’m going to make connections,'” she recalls.
That determination led her to Simone Nicole and Jesse Spradlin and eventually to the creation of Songbirds.
“You’re coming in, you’re playing songs that you wrote for each other, you get to know each other really well,” Smith says. “It’s so personal… You’re just being the most vulnerable that you possibly can be in front of each other.”
Today, the group meets monthly at Southside Preservation Hall, combining creative prompts with discussions about songwriting craft and the music business.
“It’s just such a fun hang,” she says of Homebody. “But yeah, that’s a lot of harmonies for sure.”
In every setting, she brings a commitment to connection — coaxing a crowd into song at a restaurant or harmonizing with friends in a living room jam.
Stephen Montoya
Her original music is also booming and starting to find its audience. “Foxhole” and “Rest Song,” both recorded at Echo Lab with local producer Matt Pence, will appear on an upcoming EP, This Side of the Mississippi, arriving this holiday season. Ahead of that, she’s releasing a standalone single, “Haunt Me,” just in time for spooky season in October.
“I try to approach it from a place of generosity,” she says. “I want to push it out in the world because I made this art and I want to be generous with it, but I am not really looking for a quantity of listeners as much as quality of listenser.”
While cover gigs pay the bills and offer a stage, her songwriting is where she stakes her claim — her art, her expression, her gift to the world.
Through it all, Smith moves with curiosity and courage. She refuses to wait for permission, letting music guide her life instead of following any prescribed path. In Fort Worth, she has carved out a space that is unmistakably hers — fearless, collaborative, and alive with sound.
“I just want to keep making art and sharing it with people who actually care about it,” she says. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a hundred people or ten — if it connects, that’s enough for me.”
