Sonny Smith began playing Jimmy Yancey covers on piano in little mountain town clubs of Colorado when he was 18. These piano gigs led him to Denver and then into Central America where he busked up and down the Telemanca Coast with a couple friends in a band. At this time he was working on screenplays which ultimately broke apart into long-winded songs with characters and dialogues and plots. Sonny’s early CDs include This Is My Story, This Is My Song, released in 2002, followed the next year by Sordid Tales of Love and Woe, Sweet Lorraine featuring Jolie Holland on harmonies.

In 2000, he wrote and directed his first short movie "Kid Gus Man." In 2005, he garnered a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts to write and perform the play The Dangerous Stranger, and received a residency in 2006 from the LAB in San Francisco to produce part two of the saga, “Stranger Danger!" Sonny also wrote "Steppin' Out," a column for the New Mission Newspaper, in addition to publishing stories in various literary magazines.

In 2005, Watchword Literary Magazine commissioned Sonny to produce One Act Plays, a CD that includes Edith Frost, Neko Case, Miranda July, Jolie Holland, Andy Cabic, Virgil Shaw, Mark Eitzel, John Dwyer and Mekons’ Rico Bell, among other talented artists. Following this was the release of Fruitvale, a collaboration with Wilco’s Leroy Bach and other Chicago musicians that features songs Sonny wrote about his then neighborhood in Oakland.In 2009 he released Tomorrow is Alright (soft abuse/secret seven) with his band Sonny & the Sunsets, a loose collective of musicians including Shayde Sartin & Tim Cohen of the Fresh & Onlys, Tahlia Harbour of Citay and The Dry Spells as well as Sub Pop recording artist Kelley Stoltz. The Sunsets now include Ryan Browne, Tahlia Harbour, and Kelley Stoltz. In 2009 he acted in a short film by Robert Arnold All Animals. In March of 2009, he gained another residency through The Headlands Center for the Arts to begin a large project called “100 records” in which 100 artists make 7” record covers of fictional bands that he supplies the music for. The show debuts for a five week run at Gallery 16 in San Francisco in April 2010.

While Kelley Stoltz's nigh-religious reverence for all things Beatles, Beach Boys and Kinks has been at the fore on recent albums Below the Branches and Circular Sounds, his new album, To Dreamers, blends a bit more post-punk abandon into its layered everyman pop. Tasteful horn adornments blow against tom-tom beats and 12-string guitars meet reverbed mellotrons, under Stoltz's warm vocals.

The album begins with "Rock & Roll with Me," a big beat electric invitation that fades into the melodic stirrings of "Pinecone," a gently moving Pacific breeze. Later, the deceptively ethereal pluck of "Ventriloquist" is coupled with heavy lyrics, "Seems like there's no one at all who's speaking for me." The motorik élan of "Keeping the Flame" and the electric whirring of "Little Girl" offer new moods, and it's clear that To Dreamers has maintained the kaleidoscopic core of sounds heard on Kelley's previous records, while making inroads into new sonic terrains.

As on prior albums, Kelley plays most of the instruments heard on To Dreamers himself, though two of the songs here were recorded by Kelley and his band live in the studio. One of these is a cover version of the '60s nugget "Baby I Got News for You," by "Big Boy" Pete Miller, who performs on the recording, dusting off the very valve amps and guitar used on the 1965 original, to add vocals and fuzz.

Kelley, now a veritable godfather to the burgeoning San Francisco under/over-ground (folks like Thee Oh Sees, Sonny & the Sunsets, The Fresh & Onlys), has blazed a path since the late '90s as a home-recording guru and multi-instrumentalist.

No slouch on the live front, he was asked to open the Raconteurs first US tour in 2006, toured the USA and Europe with the Dirtbombs in 2008, and through a twist of volcano ash-cloud karma, was the support act to childhood heroes Echo and the Bunnymen, in 2010. His songs have been used for international ad campaigns for Volvo and Marriott Hotels, as well as in television and movies.

I would wager that the entire reason behind music itself is to dream. From the young kid strumming a tennis racket along with the Ramones, to the box seats at the opera, the goal is the same. What music does and should do is allow us to lose ourselves and be transported, to find the mystical land where milk and honey meets Xanadu. See where you go with this new Kelley Stoltz record—an album of tunes oddly familiar and yet surprising, like a dream itself.

Extra Classic is a band from San Francisco, Los Angeles, CA and Lawrence, KS: Adrianne A Verhoeven, Alex deLanda, Josh Adams, Josh Miller, Aaron Deer, Dustin Kinsey, David Wetzel and Jake Blanton.