Riding the Amtrak Crescent: A Chance Encounter with Artist Pat Smith
{Photo of Patrick Smith on Amtrak Crescent. Antionette Kerr/Davidson Local}
By Antionette Kerr, Publisher – Davidson Local
This week, somewhere between New York and home, I met a man wearing a silly hat and Dwayne Wayne–style glasses on the Amtrak Crescent. His name was Pat Smith, a musician headed to his second home in New Orleans. For anyone who grew up in the ’90s, Dwayne Wayne was an icon—a cool, quirky reminder of a different era. Those flip-up shades felt like home to me before Pat even said a word.
He was booking a show over the phone when our conversation began—the kind of easy train talk that happens between strangers who already share a rhythm. Naturally, the journalist in me couldn’t resist. Like always, I asked a million questions for no reason at all—just curiosity and conversation rolling down steel tracks. Truthfully, I was being a little nosey, and he was still kind to me, although I kept staring.
When he wasn’t answering my questions, Pat was busy scribbling songs into a notepad—a rhythm all his own, the click of the pen keeping time with the train. We talked about many deep things quickly—the kind of topics that skip small talk and head straight for the marrow. Art, faith, coping, and creation. Somewhere between one question and the next, I found myself listening to his song “Beauty of Life.”
That song felt like a still moment in motion—a reminder to breathe in the gray instead of running from it. Anyone who knows me knows that Dave Matthews Band’s “Grey Street” has long been my unofficial theme song. But Grey Street is about avoiding the gray. Pat sings about embracing it.
One lyric caught me completely: “You’ve been too busy searching for sunshine, never took time to find the beauty of rain… too busy searching for perfect to find the beauty of life.” It’s a line that lingers—softly convicting, gently true.
There’s something both broken and brave in that idea. His album “Functioning? “—and yes, he insists on that question mark—lives in that fragile space between coping and creating. The cover shows him seated at a piano, bottles for an audience. It’s raw, real, and perfectly poetic.
{Functioning? album cover. Contributed Photo}
Pat shared stories from his time in the Navy, including living underwater in a submarine for five months—a quiet, pressurized world that forces a person to sit with their own thoughts. Maybe that’s where his patience for the gray was born. I shared one of my own poems with him—about hurricanes and love lost, and how sometimes survival itself becomes a kind of art.
When Zillions Magazine described “Beauty of Life” as “a warm, grounding breeze that reminds us of life’s true beauty in the messy, magical middle,” I nodded. That’s exactly what it is—a song that doesn’t beg to be perfect, just honest.
Pat is a Navy veteran, graduated from high school in Elizabeth City. I imagine as a storyteller, Pat carries truth like an instrument—always in tune, never afraid of the dissonance.
Maybe the beauty of life that day was simply this—two travelers, a train, a song, and the courage to sit in the gray together, somewhere between New York and home.
Antionette Kerr is the publisher of Davidson Local, a journalist, and a lover of good stories, road trips, poetry, and train conversations that turn strangers into stories worth sharing
