Preparing for takeoff

STRUM UND DRANG Smith has never considered himself a professional musician.

A couple of weeks ago, the 29-year-old Lincoln Square resident who performs as Sad Brad Smith found himself singing and strumming songs for a group of journalists dining on chateaubriand aboard a 767 American Airlines jet destined for Los Angeles. It was the press junket for Juno director Jason Reitman’s new film Up in the Air, and the only tune anyone on the plane was familiar with was “Help Yourself,” an affecting piece of melancholic folk-pop that Smith wrote for the film at Reitman’s request. What’s more, the movie hinges on the virtually unknown Chicagoan’s song: Playing for two minutes over a dialogue-free wedding montage, it highlights the thawing of Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), a corporate downsizing expert whose life spent in airports and hotel rooms has left him feeling isolated.

“At the press event, I played a couple of real short songs so I could just get it over with and sit back down,” Smith recounted last month while sipping coffee at his kitchen table. It’s not that he’s uncomfortable in the spotlight. But, he says, “this is something that I certainly never aspired to.” After graduating from DePaul University Theatre School, the Highland Park native was making a little money acting in storefront shows and making sandwiches at Panera Bread. From 2007 until December 2008, he and his roommates ran Heart of Gold, a polished off-the-radar venue out of their finished loft space in Lakeview. That’s where Smith began seriously recording music, yet he only performed infrequently at small coffee shops around town. “Performing was something that I would do if someone asked me,” he says, “but I didn’t want to inconvenience anybody by playing for them if they didn’t want to hear.”

One night in the fall of ’08—on a tip from Smith’s old friend who is Reitman’s brother-in-law—the Thank You for Smoking director saw Smith play at a local coffee shop. “I don’t know which show it was or where it was at. Jason didn’t come up to me afterward or anything,” he says. “I didn’t even know he was there, and I’m glad no one told me he was coming.”

Soon after, Smith received an e-mail from Reitman asking him to write a song for Up in the Air. Using a vague outline of the movie’s plot and characters, Smith wrote and recorded “Help Yourself” at Heart of Gold in under a week and sent it off.

A year later, Oscar blogs began buzzing that “Help Yourself” would be a contender for Best Original Song. Smith later admitted to having some of the chord structure and the melody before Reitman contacted him, a violation of the strict Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences stipulations for the category. “Paramount explained that other studios are going to be seeking to get you. And so I didn’t want to be bogged down with having to explain stuff when I knew that the reality was, under the strictest definition of the rules, it didn’t qualify. It’s still eligible for the Golden Globes,” he says, grinning. “Which would be something.”

Awards, however, are not what Smith wants. “If Up in the Air gets me enough attention from even a small subniche in our society who will buy my album”— Love Is Not What You Need, which he plans to release in 2010—“and affords me the ability to not have a day job, keep making music, and be able to eat and buy cigarettes, that would be awesome,” he says. “I think that that’s realistic.”

“Help Yourself” is available on iTunes. Up in the Air touches down at AMC River East Friday 4.

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