After Minnesota homecoming, Your Smith returns with her first new song in six years

Usually, a musician’s or band’s excuse for taking a long break between songs and albums is writer’s block, personal problems or general slackerism. Caroline Smith had a few other things hold up her recording career over the past half-decade, including moving from Los Angeles back to Minnesota, becoming a mother and opening a restaurant in an old saloon space in downtown Stillwater.

With the start of the new year, though, the longtime Current radio darling of “Magazine” fame and former Lizzo collaborator appears ready to start a new phase as a singer/songwriter under her adopted moniker Your Smith. She dropped her first new song in almost six years over the weekend, a lightly groovy, Nilsson-flavored breakup ditty called “Change of Heart.”

“How many feelings can you throw to the dogs?” Smith sings in the new tune, which she recorded with help from fellow east metro Twin Cities musicians Hippo Campus. The band’s utility player DeCarlo Jackson provided the bouncy trumpet part that builds in catchiness over the course of the song.

Smith addressed her collaborators in social media posts announcing the song’s release: “Thank you for pulling me out of my musicless hole — it is because of them Your Smith survived the pandemic,” she wrote.

In another post that co-stars her 2-year-old son, she movingly opened up about her mixed emotions and stress as she returns to the music realm, writing: “Finding a way to get motherhood and music to fit in this little life of mine has been one of the greatest challenges of 2024.”

Smith stepped back onto the stage starting in December 2023 at First Avenue celebrating the 10th anniversary of her hit album, “Half About Being a Woman.” Earlier that year, she and her husband, Adam To — formerly a chef at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Los Angeles — became the proprietors of Howard’s Bar, housed in the longtime home of Whitey’s in downtown Stillwater.