Profile: I didn’t have any grand designs of being a perfumer when I was a kid. I didn’t have any interest in gardening or plants and herbs – it was an acquired taste. As a kid, my time was consumed by music and books. I took piano lessons from an early age, and then played the French horn in the school band. In a small town in West Texas, there wasn’t much to do, and I didn’t have many friends who shared my interests. So I spent much of my time pouring over sheet music I had rifled through from my grandmother’s collection, or reading any book I could get my hands on.
It was in my 2nd high school, however, that I was hired by a group of friends to play drums for their punk band, and they began to show me, through a fusion of punk and ska and grunge and rock and roll, what my small town had been missing. For the next six years, my life was consumed by performing in bands and promoting indie music. I played in four or five different bands in a subculture that shared band members so rampantly nobody knew what was going on until a bill was announced. If you’ve ever read a single issue of Rolling Stone, you’ll know this usually ends in drama. But that’s another story.
The original Sweet Anthem studio in Capitol Hill
Meredith and her husband Phil
And then, one curious day, I learned that perfume making and music have such faithful similarities. I was entirely bewitched. I had no idea that I could play the scents in chords much like I had the piano keys in my youth. Some notes had louder bangs than others, much like the drums of my young adulthood. I heard melodies that I had never heard before, and began to compose new kinds of songs with a rather insatiable fervor.
Sweet Anthem was, in a word, reformulated. I began in a small, Ballard bedroom with just a few notes, and let friends in those trading communities have the first whiffs. Whether they were just being nice then is anybody’s guess, but they urged me to set up shop. Since then, Sweet Anthem has taken over computer desks and second bedrooms in Capitol Hill while I moonlighted as an Etsian.
When my husband Phil and I got married in 2010 and he moved in with me, we knew that Sweet Anthem wouldn’t last much longer in such a small space. We bought a live/work loft in West Seattle in August 2011 where I now concoct my fragrances from a fully operational lab behind my flagship retail store.
True, it’s a far cry from publishing zines and chapbooks and playing drums in punk rock bands, but it feels like I was destined to be here all along. After all, I still tell stories and make music every day!
Lou Reed
Favorite artist: For probably obvious reasons, my favorite art form is music. It’s the fabric of much of my life, and I would be remiss to not mention a musician here. My favorite musician is Lou Reed – front man of the Velvet Underground. If anything, Lou Reed was one of the greatest storytellers of rock and roll history – few pale in comparison – and he pioneered an honest, earnest form of rock that still keeps me tapping my foot and left a legacy in so many modern musicians and artists that I love. (An aside, my married name is Tucker, and my old nickname used to be Moe, since I played the drums – after Moe Tucker from the Velvet Underground. It should come as no surprise, then, that there are about 4 VU-inspired fragrances in my catalog.)
Most of my fragrances are music-inspired, hence Lou Reed as favorite artist (and, well, the name Sweet Anthem) – there are several Velvet Underground inspired fragrances. I don't generally divulge which is which because I like to leave a bit of mystery, although my most recent fragrance, Joan , was based on Joan Jett, whose "I Love Rock and Roll" was #1 the week I was born.
On American perfumery: While I have daydreams of Grasse, I can’t imagine being a perfumer anywhere else – and certainly not outside the Pacific Northwest. Tama’s recent Ca Fleure Bon piece about the Sisterhood of West Coast Perfumery pretty much sums up my thoughts on this subject. There are so many pioneers on the left coast that have come before me that have paved the way so I can do what I do without much worry. And I’m so thankful that my boutique allows me a way to support the American perfume community alongside my own creations – we sell fragrances by other indie perfumers like Nikki Sherritt, Ayala Moriel, Ellen Covey, and Charna Ethier – I just can’t imagine being anywhere else!
–Meredith Smith, Perfumer and Owner of Sweet Anthem
For our draw Meredith is offering four 10ml vegan eau de parfums of your choice to one CaFleureBon reader (her collection has 16). To be eligible please leave a quote that resonated with you or what you found fascinating about Meredith's profile and the four edps you would like to win. Draw closes May 20, 2012
Editor's Note: If you live in the Seattle area, stop by and meet Meredith and visit her perfume boutique (for more information http://www.sweetanthem.com/). Meredith loves literature and Russian history as well as music. (There are three fragrances that have a Russian context – Anton, based on Anton Chekov's "The Cherry Orchard"; Catherine, based on Catherine the Great; and Peter, based on Peter the Great).
We announce the winners only on site and on our Facebook page, so Like Cafleurebon and use our RSS option…or your dream prize will be just spilled perfume.