Back in August, we talked with Trapper Schoepp about songwriting, recovery, and his then-upcoming album Osborne. Now that the record’s out in the world, we caught up with him again to dig deeper into his creative process, the challenges of recording the album’s most vulnerable moments, and what it means to write without guardrails.
Twangville: As a songwriter, what comes first for you? Is it the melody or a lick or the words?
Trapper Schoepp: Well, I suppose it’s a bridge. On both sides you have clues to whatever song you’re trying to answer, right? Often times I find myself on the side that is lyrical first and that informs the tone of the music. I got into it thinking that the melody and the music need to be more informed by the lyrics. I don’t have a more exciting answer but it’s typically lyrics first because I do think of myself more of a writer than a songwriter, and it just so happens a song is the vehicle.
Twangville: That would make sense. If you’re focusing on words first, the music has to complement what you’ve written. You need to have the words to figure out where you are going.
So when you start to work on the music, what instrument do you gravitate toward? After the pen or pencil, of course.
Schoepp: I’ve found it’s been the piano because you have different octaves and different zones that you can hop to and find what will be suitable for the lyric and the voice. As someone who’s been writing songs on a guitar since I was 16 years old, having that scene change is really important. I wrote my last album, Siren Songs with a guitar that was tuned to open D, kind of like Joni Mitchell and old blues and folk artists used to do. I think when you are getting outside of the G, D, C, mindset, the answers become less obvious. When you’re working with a detuned guitar or a piano, which is not my native instrument, that can be more exciting and more inspiring.
Twangville: I get it. You’ve been writing for a long time at this point, so you’ve already got that process down pat. It’s almost like you need to find ways to challenge yourself in the creation of a song. If you look at footage of the Beatles or other artists, they often started on guitar, but toward the end of the Beatles, all of them were using piano to compose songs. You would see Paul sitting on a piano, cranking out something, whereas before he would grab an acoustic and knock out a song. I do think the piano is a better compositional tool than a guitar. Guitars are just more fun.
Schoepp: It’s like the left hand is the anchor and the right hand is the ship, to speak in metaphor. I find that the right hand can navigate and match the mood of the lyrics better than the left hand.
Twangville: That makes sense. I’ve been going back through some of your discography and when I listen to your earlier songs, it’d be hard to miss the country and early rock and roll roots. So what bands and artists were your earliest influences?
Schoepp: Some of the earliest influences? Well, Bob Dylan. He is the master of what I’m trying to do. He’s at the top of the mountain. And I think that, as a songwriter that can be really daunting to look up at that mountain and say, “Well, that would be a nice place to be.”
Then you want to scale that mountain, but you can’t get to the top. So, you find artists that like, say a Gram Parsons, a country artist who put country and rock into bed together in a way that that people hadn’t before. Artists like the Byrds and early artists that Bob Dylan inspired by his songwriting. And you say, okay, that’s something I could do.
So you climb that part of the mountain for a bit, and on this latest album, finding artists like Suicide who use drum machines to build songs around. And then you find artists like Ozzy Osbourne, who is just so vulnerable and has such a voice in the song “Symptom of the Universe”. And so you lean into that. And then there’s hip hop, you know, artists like NWA, who just said exactly what they wanted – no censorship, no guardrails, no fear or hesitation, and that’s really inspiring too. So yeah, a lot of different music inspires me.
I think it’s just the trick of songwriting is to inspire yourself. Those artists at the top of the mountain, like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen have offered so much to the world through their music and their songs, but it’s very hard to get there.
Twangville: You’ve been writing since you’re 16. How do you think your songwriting process has changed from when you’ve started out to now? You’re a much more experienced artist. You’ve been on tour, you’ve written in bands, you’ve written alone.
Schoepp: Well, I think when you when you start writing songs, the canvas is completely empty, and that’s really freeing, because you’re taking your lived experiences up until that point, and it’s all fresh color and fresh ink. And I think there’s perhaps less fear in a way, when you haven’t done it before. The intent is really pure and innocent. And when you write and you write and you write, that inner critic gets stronger and you have to fight that. You have to fight that imposter inside of you. You have to fight that voice inside of you that says, “Don’t repeat.”
You have more turbulence as you’re in that creative process, and I think of trying to get to that place of no fear they talk about in Buddhism, that beginner’s mind. I try to get to that place more and more where there isn’t that critic inside of you, where there isn’t that aspect of doubt, because I think that can really get in the way.
For me, I think it’s not always the case that you get better at songwriting. I don’t think it’s that at all. You know how they talk about the 10,000 hours to master something? I don’t know that that’s always applicable to songwriting because I think you do want to keep that childlike joy of discovery inside of you. You want to do something you haven’t done before. You don’t want to repeat. You don’t want to become a parody of yourself in songwriting.
And I think my heroes have been emblematic of that. I mean, you look at Bob Dylan, who really started by singing songs that gave voice to the voiceless. He was singing songs about the disenfranchised like “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”, “Who Killed Davey Moore”, “The Death of Emmett Till” – so much of what he wrote were songs about other people. And then fast forward 20 years. He was writing songs about being saved himself, right? And now today, I think he’s just this musical chameleon. He’s really hard to pin down, right? I think that’s cool and that’s inspiring to me,
Twangville: That would keep you from getting bored with what you do. There’s pleasure in the process of creation but you don’t want to be doing the same thing in the same way over and over and over again, because then it’s a job. You want to be like when a young child starts drawing something on a piece of paper, every time for them, it’s something new.
Schoepp: I’ve been working recently with a team here in Milwaukee that writes music that’s more geared towards television and movies and the idea there is to not be so specific in your songwriting. So instead of mentioning a 737 you mention a plane. Instead of mentioning Interstate 80, you mention a road. That’s kind of an interesting new challenge, to try writing songs that are more universal. I’ve trying to write less specific and more abstract.
Twangville: So when we last spoke, you said the new record was a continuation of your recovery process. I was wondering if you were writing these songs while you were in treatment or did you write them when you were home?
Schoepp: Ah, plot twist, you’re always in recovery.
It’s a long, long road. And I think I wrote those the songs for the album when I was taking the first steps on that road and had a completely clear canvas that I was working with. The intent was to write without fear, without censorship and without guardrails.
I think that that’s a unique perspective to write from, because in the past, I’ve written a lot through other characters, through other metaphors. When you strip that all away, you’re left with the truth and you’re left with yourself, I think there is a lot to work with there. And that’s new for me, at least in an artistic way. That raw vulnerability is new for me because I think by nature, I’ve been more of a folk singer and I’ve tried to write through characters. To write while looking more inward is a challenge.
Twangville: I would imagine it would. If you’ve crafted a story about somebody else, there may be parts of you in that story, but when now the focus is you, and you’re unveiling that to everyone, anybody hearing the song, you know, or when you’re performing it, it’s like you’re up there naked on the stage. There’s nothing’s protecting you. And not every artist will do that, so it is brave to take that step.
It’s like the difference between Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. If that if you ask Keith Richards about himself, he’ll tell you whatever happened or whatever he did with no filter. With Jagger, not so much. He keeps it to himself, and you probably won’t ever know his story while he’s alive. Everybody has a thing they need to do to be able to create the music that they make.
So now, what was the hardest song on a new album to record?
Schoepp: So there’s a song called “The Osbournes”, and that was one that I wrote the first day I was in treatment in the Osborne unit. I basically wrote it as quickly as the words could hit the page, and we recorded the song once as this punk rock, more Ramones style track. It sucked a lot of the feeling out of it. It sucked some of the surrender out of it. And I think that’s the song on the record where it’s kind of threw my hands up in the air and gave up.
And so what we did is we set up a few microphones in the control room with me and the producer, Mike Viola, and we sat, you know, just a few feet from each other, and I played the song on the acoustic guitar as quietly and simply as I could, in a way that I hadn’t done before, so that you had that sense of discovery while I was cutting it to tape. Mike also had that because he had never played the song before. And I think that is a really beautiful way to capture a song and a feeling. It is that that place where you’re still figuring it out.
I just saw a studio note sheet of Bob Dylan from the early 60s where he had tried to record the same song like 15 times over, and then he recorded, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” in one take. And I think that there’s something to that. That sense of discovery that can happen when you strip everything else away and you’re just left with the words, the music in yourself. It really forces you to be in the moment and be present and I think that that can be a really hard trick to pull off in the studio. Because often times you multi-track songs to death. You go over it so many times, and you lose the essence of what you were trying to say or do in the first place.
Twangville: I get that because you’re taking some of the juice out of the song by doing it over and over. You put more on it and more on it to try to “fix” it whereas if it’s stripped down, it feels more real. It’s like there is less artifice.
Schoepp: Yeah, I would say one of my biggest struggles has been overcooking, leaving things in the stove for too long.
Twangville: When I wrote my first book on cocktails, I tell everybody that I would have never finished that book without my editor, because the editor was like, “Okay, it’s done. You can’t do anything else with it. If it’s not on the page in the next 24 hours, it’s not going to be published”. So then you have to finish and wrap it up and get it to a place where it can be released. And I think it’s hard, whether it’s writing or making music or painting, to know when it’s done. When can I leave this thing alone and not touch it again and not think “Oh, that lick is wrong.” “Oh, I maybe I could do this lyric better.” “Maybe, I could sing it better.” Maybe you can’t. Maybe it is what it needs to be. Right here and now in in this form, whatever it is,
Schoepp: A deadline can be very inspiring, yeah.
Twangville: So if you were going to walk a new listener through your catalog. Do you have particular songs or albums where you would say “Listen to these songs of mine?”
Schoepp: Well, of course, the new album but I do think the Siren Songs album as well. We did that mostly live at Johnny Cash’s cabin. To me, that album has a lot of fearlessness to it. In that album, we didn’t play to a click track. We recorded 14 songs in seven days. It happened very fast. It was a flash. And I think that that album just has a lot of heart and soul to it. And I think that album is more telling stories of other people and places, but there’s a lot of me in there. I think that album really captures that folk singer in me, and this new album is more of a wild ride.
Twangville: When I met you, you were playing a lot of songs from that album, and you were working on or you hadn’t recorded the new album yet. My early impressions of you were seeing you play the songs from the prior album. And then I was listening to Osborne and talking to you about what was going on because the two albums are different. Obviously, it was the same person as your voice comes through for both of them, but you’re in a different place for one album versus the other. And then I’ve been going back to some of your other albums and I’m thinking that it reminds me of early Wilco. Was it with the Shades?
Schoepp: Run Engine, Run, yes.
Twangville: That one reminded me of the very first Wilco record. It reminded me of tracks off of that. I do think your two picks work because they show two different sides in the same artist.
What are some of your favorite songs to cover? I’ve noticed you do a great Tom Petty but I’m sure you have songs you like to do. So are there artists you like covering, or songs you love? And how do you pick?
Schoepp: Sometimes it can just be me being reactive to the crowd. Like at a show I played in Amsterdam, they kept asking for Bruce Springsteen, and I think they wanted that sort of thing. They were heckling very drunkenly. So I said, “How about Merle Haggard?” So we did more American country stuff, like Merle Haggard and Hank Williams.
But then, you know, there’s stuff you can take a lot more liberties with, like say, the Velvet Underground where you can get so abstract with it. You can get you can mess it up so much, and it’s still there. The original pieces are in place, in a sense.
Twangville: The Velvets are interesting in that way, because you think of the first couple records and they can have a song which is beautiful and crystalline. But then there are ones that are sharp and jagged and will cut. And you can, depending on how you arrange it, you can make the really pretty song more jagged and you can take the rough song and you can kind of make it sweeter.
Schoepp: Yeah. Petty is fun, though, because it seems all those songs are hits. It’s fun to play the hit song from time to time.
Twangville: Speaking of time. Thank you for once again taking time to speak to me
Schoepp: Thank you, Kurt for the questions and for digging into the music.
About the author: Paralegal by day - writer and podcaster by night. When does he sleep? Only the Shadow knows!