Trapper Schoepp Interview
Doug Burke:
Trapper Schoepp is a singer-songwriter based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He has performed solo or with his eponymous band or with a side band called Shades with both bands featuring his brother, Tanner Schoepp, on bass guitar. Born in Red Wing, Minnesota which is on the Wisconsin border, Trapper assembled his first band at Ellsworth High School in Wisconsin. The Schoepp brothers migrated east to Milwaukee where Trapper attended the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and released Lived and Moved in 2009. He followed that up with Run, Engine, Run with The Shades in 2012, Rangers and Valentines in 2016, and Bay Beach Amusement Park in 2017. In 2018, Trapper decided to try his hand at completing an unfinished Bob Dylan song from 1961 called On, Wisconsin. Trapper recorded the song and it is on his album Primetime Illusion. Trapper is a nonstop creative tour de force. His passion for his craft has garnered him many accolades and a strong and growing following of fans.
Welcome to Backstory Song. I'm your host, Doug Burke, and today, I am super excited to have with me on the show, Trapper Schoepp. Trapper, welcome to Backstory Song.
Trapper Schoepp:
Thank you for welcoming me, Doug. It's been quite a weekend. I just got back from Sparta, Wisconsin, not too far from the Mississippi River Valley, and there by Viroqua, Madison, La Crosse. And we were exploding apples as a part of my new music video, Little Drop of Medicine. So I'm running on three hours of sleep. I'm running on fumes but I'm very happy to be here. So thanks again for having me.
Doug Burke:
Well, you look great, and we're thankful that you're that dedicated to your craft and your art, and we really appreciate it. Can you tell me how do you explode an apple?
Trapper Schoepp:
I do not have the technical understanding of how it all went. What I do know is there were batteries underneath a table, and then there were wires coming from the said battery that went into apples, and then they short-circuited the battery or something of that nature. I could pull up the video for you on my phone, but-
Doug Burke:
We'll see it when we see the video released. But I've never heard of going out to the remote corners of Wisconsin. I guess it's not the corners, kind of the central part Sparta and exploding apples. So I think there's something on my bucket list to do, because that is my new thing. I have to try exploding apples in Wisconsin. And a lot of your music is about where you come from in Wisconsin. Tell me about when you started writing songs and why did you start writing songs?
Trapper Schoepp:
Why? That's a big existential question we all must face, Doug.
Doug Burke:
Only songwriters have to face the why. Most people don't do your craft to the extent you do it. And so it's like this real existential question, yes, for our listeners.
Trapper Schoepp:
Well, I was actually just listening to a great podcast with Yo-Yo Ma. He said something of the nature of why you make music because it gives life meaning. It gives life purpose and color, and textures. And for me, I grew up in the middle of nowhere, Wisconsin, a little postage stamp-sized town called Ellsworth, which is the cheese curd capital of the world. I think instead of exploding apples, go get some Ellsworth cheese curds. Those are really a world wonder to be sure. Yeah, I grew up in Ellsworth, BMX bike riding, and I fell one too many times to say the least, herniated a disc in my back and my mom signed me up for guitar lessons and said, "Here's a safer hobby for you." So I started guitar lessons like most things. It didn't just click overnight. Of course, it took a lot of energy and time to make it work but you can ... I mean, make it work, that's questionable. You can put in those hours, but if you don't really have the inspiration or the excitement for it, it's not going to go anywhere. After that, I was in my parents' basement watching a movie and I heard that song Hurricane by Bob Dylan. And there was just this conviction in his voice, in this gravelly quality of his singing as he tells a story of his man wrongly convicted of murder. I just thought, "Wow, that is unlike anything I've ever heard." So, I think, yeah, getting injured, discovering the music of Bob Dylan at a very young age, I think, sort of led me down the path of songwriting.
Doug Burke:
But you've got four-studio albums out, well, three out and you're about to release the new one called May Day, and we're going to talk about some songs off of that album. I believe two of the singles are out, River of Disaster. Yellow Moon is out already on this album. But we're not going to talk about those songs. We're going to talk about some stuff that I've had the pleasure of a sneak peek listen to. And the first one is May Day, the title cut, which is the first cut on the album.
Trapper Schoepp:
Well, May Day to start is an old pagan holiday that's tied to the natural world, and also in hopes of a good harvest. You might be familiar with the holiday but typically, it's celebrated by dancing around a maypole, singing songs, doing all these sort of ritualistic dances to bring in spring. It's a halfway point between the summer solstice and the spring equinox. It's about the celebration of springtime and the hopes of a good harvest. The song May Day though, it's tied more towards my birthday which is also on May Day. I was in a bit of a transitional point in my life. I was between houses, between tours. My last album, Primetime Illusion, had just come out and I was about to leave on a European tour. And I found myself in a bit of a questionable housing situation. I had to move my whole life right before leaving for Europe and I thought, "Oh, my goodness. My baby grand piano, where do I put this?" And the morning that the movers came, I woke up with a sense of urgency. And I walked down to my piano and I just played an E chord. The first three notes that ... Those are the first thing I hit. I think I just thought back to what was coming up, where I'd been and I just kind of in my head started writing singing, "I was born on the first day, the fifth month called May. I'm here today to say I need you in the worst way." And I thought, "Okay, that feels good." And then the piano movers showed up. So I had to put the song on pause. It details sort of a transitional point in my life and transcontinental sort of tale between coming and going and that sort of touring musician’s lifestyle.
Doug Burke:
I really like the three-chord piano intro and also the way it plays against the backbeat of the baseline. And the baseline gets even more clever throughout the song, I found, and really you don't normally focus on a baseline in a song listen, and in this one, it's really, really subtly complementary in a way that catches your attention.
Trapper Schoepp:
Yeah, that's my brother, Tanner Schoepp. He's sort of been my musical comrade since birth, of course. We've been getting into trouble for about 10 years together. Yeah, that's him with the baseline. And we wanted the drums to definitely have a deep pocket, a deep groove sort of similar to all those great '80s Bruce Springsteen songs. So bravo to my brother, Tanner, and then Jake Bicknase on the drums. They found a nice pocket for that song for sure.
Doug Burke:
So the chorus is, "You're a bad drug, it's time to kick it. Honey, I've been evicted." Is there someone this was motivated by? Was there a muse of some sort behind this feeling of moving on and trying to kick a habit, if you will, of a drug?
Trapper Schoepp:
Yeah, I mean, we're always trying to kick certain habits, aren't we, Doug?
Doug Burke:
Yeah, I think that's part of life, right? We're just trying to get rid of the bad and just have the good left.
Trapper Schoepp:
Yes. I mean, that the whole spirit of May Day, the holiday. It's like a time for rebirth. It's a time to sort of start over. I had that in mind for sure.
Doug Burke:
Have you always felt that because your birthday is on May Day? Like every year, my birthday is, it's like not only a celebration of my birthday, but it's a celebration of, this year is going to be my rebirth.
Trapper Schoepp:
Yeah. Well, not so much.
Doug Burke:
No. Just another birthday, huh?
Trapper Schoepp:
I mean, in terms of everything that's happened in the last year and beyond, I think most of us are sort of reevaluating and sort of looking at things in a completely different way, sorry to be vague. But with all of the pain of the last couple of years, it's the time to sort of start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I don't want to speak prematurely, we have a long way to go with the pandemic to be sure. But I think in this year particular, I feel that myself and many other people who have endured this pandemic are really hoping for some relief.
Doug Burke:
Yeah, I hope this is a rebirth. I hope the May Day album is a huge success for you. It deserves a listen. And I hope the audience grabs it. I really felt the jangly guitar work on this song is particularly compelling especially the way you kind of take it out also with that same echo of the three chords on the piano and this long ... Is this a synthesizer note?
Trapper Schoepp:
Yes. So there's a three-note riff on the piano, and then the guitar is done by one of my guitarists, Quinn Scharber. We were done recording in the studio and about to send the thing off to be mixed, and I thought we really need to rethink the guitar part on this song. I sent the tracks off to Quinn and he tracked it within one day at his home in Bay View here right outside of Milwaukee. And so that was a last-minute addition that I'm so grateful for. I think we were going on for sort of a jangly, a little bit of Mark Knopfler, and sort of some of The Smiths in there. And then there's one-note synthesizer, and I think we spent like a whole evening just trying to get the synthesizer tone. And also there are certain things that recording the album in the pandemic and having a bit more time on our hands allowed us to really focus on the tones.
Doug Burke:
And what's the tone of May Day?
Trapper Schoepp:
The tone of May Day. Oh, man, that's a good question. I mean, I think darkness and light. There's a whole sort of sugary, and then there's salty. It's a sort of juxtaposition between the two. I mean, that's a savory album though. I think on this album, there are four songs in minor keys. I don't know that I've done that before. I was saving that for 2021, I guess, after all, we went through. But yeah, there are like four songs in minor keys. And then songs like May Day are more sort of bright and jangly. I think it does kind of seesaw back and forth between the major and minor keys in a way that feels representative of the lyrics and also sort of the cultural moment we're having.
Doug Burke:
Well, let's talk about another one of perhaps slightly darker songs on the album, Hotel Astor, which is a famous hotel perhaps in several places. Why did you call the song Hotel Astor?
Trapper Schoepp:
Yes. So I mentioned May Day and kind of what I was going through at that time jumping between different houses. I was living at the Hotel Astor in downtown Milwaukee and it is a historic haunted hotel that has an air of an old Stephen King novel like The Shining. The long dark hallways, there's a certain kind of just scent that lingers in the air. The lights are flickering. It's one of those places you can't really shake. Once you leave, every time you walk by the place, you kind of just get a certain sense of ... A little feeling goes down your spine.
Doug Burke:
Is that a good feeling or is it ... Yeah, if you like horror movies.
Trapper Schoepp:
Yeah, when I described it, not necessarily as good.
Doug Burke:
But some people love horror movies. That's a feeling they go for in the movie. You want to have that feeling. You mentioned tone earlier. The one-tone note I wrote is this song is haunted. So you got the haunted tone in this song.
Trapper Schoepp:
I was living at The Astor for a few months, and one of my friends text me and says, "Hey, do you want to go on a ghost tour of downtown Milwaukee?" And I'm like, "Oh, I feel like I've been living a ghost tour of downtown Milwaukee. Why not?" We're doing this walking tour of downtown Milwaukee and it's slowly creeping and circling back towards the Hotel Astor where I was staying. I'm thinking, "Oh, no. Please don't let this end at the Hotel Astor." And the tour guide goes, "And now, we come upon one of the most haunted and historic places in the city of Milwaukee, the Hotel Astor." And I thought, "Oh, okay, I knew it."
Doug Burke:
Did they go to your room? Or you're like, "I got to go to my room. This is the next thing that's coming."
Trapper Schoepp:
She told this really poignant story about there is a fire at the Hotel Astor in 1935 and it took the lives of a nurse and her deaf patient that lived in a room across from her. When they found her, I mean, this is really tragic and haunting, but she was outside of his room and there were like marks on the door from where she had repeatedly hit and scratched the door to try to wake the deaf patient of hers. And so I thought it was so really tragic, but haunting and sort of there was a cinematic quality to it and just the imagery I couldn't get out of my head.
Doug Burke:
I couldn't either, like someone trying to save a life like that in that situation, feeling so helpless in that set of circumstances.
Trapper Schoepp:
Yes. So I ended up writing sort of a re-imagined love story. I used a lot of creative liberties with it. I definitely was a bit haunted by that story. After hearing it, I sort of made peace with the ghost of the Hotel Astor by writing that song.
Doug Burke:
This story puts the chorus in such a different context for me. It doesn't always happen. This happened a little bit with Granville Automatic on our show where all their songs are based on historical events. And this one where you're saying, "Now, I wish I would have told you that I loved you from the very start." This is such a feeling of regret, of not having told people that you love them.
Doug Burke:
Maybe COVID has helped us understand that that's important, that we do this every day to people that we love, so we don't have that feeling of regret when something like this surprisingly happens to you.
Trapper Schoepp:
Yeah. I think this whole album too is made with a sense of urgency that other albums of mine weren't made with. I mean, when the pandemic hit, certainly every moment felt very raw. You learned to refocus your energy on what feels most important for that moment. And for me, since I was 15 or so, I found a lot of peace and hope in writing and creating, and recording songs with my band. Yeah, we all got together in a safe way at a nice studio in town to do this thing. And if you weren't singing, you're wearing your mask. It was really safe, productive time for our band for sure.
Doug Burke:
One of the things I found interesting about this song from a songwriter’s standpoint is the way you end on a single guitar note that comes out of the chorus. It's a very nontraditional way to end a song. And I don't know if that was a conscious idea or like ... I often have found that how to begin and how to end a song and when you decide or know that a song is done are important components to songwriting. And so why did you choose that ending here?
Trapper Schoepp:
Yeah. I mean, it sort of feels like a tag or sort of just a callback to the chorus in a way after that bridge outro. But I think most of my songs fit into a bit of a verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus end formula and I think this song took some different experimental twists and turns, and then ended with half of that chorus bit. Yeah, I don't know exactly the why.
Doug Burke:
For me, it really felt haunted. It felt like this sort of life ended in the middle unexpectedly and yet, it lingers on in this sort of haunted way and it contributed to the whole haunted tone that I felt in the song and you captured brilliantly. I got to thank you for this gift to us.
Trapper Schoepp:
Yeah, I like your interpretation, Doug, and I think to the-
Doug Burke:
I do the best I can.
Trapper Schoepp:
... the more experimental section with the guitar solo and the drums sort of getting the bit out of the pocket, I wanted to represent the fire and the flames and the chaos of that moment. Yeah, and we did some really unique production, a couple of unique things with that song now, you're refreshing my memory. There's a piano in the main room while we were recording the drums in the live room. And we taped down all of the D piano keys because the song is in the key of D. So we took the electrical tape. We taped down all of the piano keys, and then we put a brick on the sustained pedal so that when noise and vibrations would hit the piano, all of the D keys in the piano would sort of make this hum, this haunting sort of hum.
Doug Burke:
Perfectly tuned to D.
Trapper Schoepp:
Yeah, perfectly tuned to D. So we miked the piano up as well as the drums. So it was sort of like there was a ghost playing the piano. Yeah, I mean, it's very, very subtle but it's definitely in the mix. But it's a sort of a natural scent lingering way deep in there. I mean, if you're listening on headphones in the right sort of environment, you might be able to hear it. But that was a fun experimental thing that again, we might not have done if we were in normal times.
Doug Burke:
I think that means that the ghost of the Hotel Astor of Milwaukee is in the key of D. It has to be. It has to be in the key of D.
Trapper Schoepp:
More likely D minor.
Doug Burke:
More likely D minor, yes.
Trapper Schoepp:
Hotel Astor revisited.
Doug Burke:
So a different tonal song from the album is Paris Syndrome, which opens with some fingerpicking on acoustic guitar. But I actually had to look up what Paris Syndrome was because I didn't know that this is a thing. And this is a thing that Asian cultures who visit Paris actually get primarily because of the severe form of a culture shock when they find out that the city is not as beautiful or idyllic as they had expected it to be. Now, let me read you the symptoms on this. The syndrome is characterized by a number of psychiatric symptoms such as acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution, derealization, depersonalization, anxiety and psychosomatic manifestations. And I was like, "Oh, my god, I thought it was just a song about wanting to be in Paris or what Paris does to you." Like Paris Syndrome is this ... Did you know when you wrote the song?
Trapper Schoepp:
Yeah, I mean, of course. I was in the van on the way to Paris on tour. I had never been to Paris before. I was looking forward to it. I loved Paris. It was really a magical tour stop for sure. But in the van right there, we had talked about this Paris Syndrome, this rare but real psychiatric condition that happens to people when their expectations of City of Lights are not met. And I guess at one point, there was a Paris Syndrome hotline like a 24/7 hotline. But I just thought it was so sort of ... People go into experiences visiting a city such as Paris, and they think of it as being ... The lighting is just right. The cobblestone roads. There's the painter. There's someone sipping wine on the street corner and lovers dancing. And the food is great. Yeah, I mean, I think that sort of feeling of being let down can be so universal. And I thought in terms of this song, there's "Fact, fiction, fantasy, you and me, I wanted to believe." That's one of the lyrics in the song, but I thought it was a great metaphor for relationships, getting into certain things, and then realizing they're entirely other and there are nods to Romeo and Juliet later in the song. And then there's ... I mean, what are some of the lyrics?
Doug Burke:
"He drank that poison way too soon. She slept through the pale afternoon."
Trapper Schoepp:
I think that can be a feeling we're all having right now with ... I don't want to say it's related in any specific way to the pandemic because it's not. But I think we're all feeling disconnected from each other. We're all feeling lost. We're all feeling pretty delusional right now, and feeling as if we're living in a bit of an alternative reality. So, yeah, that song came out of that feeling for sure.
Doug Burke:
And knowing what I know now about the motivation for this song, it changes it for me. I have to listen to it again one more time. Is this about any particular person or persons in your life? Or is it amalgamation?
Trapper Schoepp:
Yeah, I think it should be more universal.
Doug Burke:
But I think in every relationship, there's this notion that you have an idyllic view of the other person and we tend to let each other down in small and large ways in life repeatedly just because that's the nature of life, whether it's forgetting to pick up something at the grocery store or something more serious. But in this song, you take it to another level with this Paris Syndrome of like it can make you crazy, actually psychosomatically crazy almost in your mental health state. Pretty powerful.
Trapper Schoepp:
Thank you. Glad you like it.
Doug Burke:
Anything else you want to say about Paris Syndrome?
Trapper Schoepp:
I guess it's the end of side A in the album and its one that, I think, it's one of the more sparse tracks that I have. It's just me and my brother. We sing the whole song together. There's some pedal steel in there and then the producer of the album or co-producer, Ian Olvera, plays some really, really gorgeous piano. I really was grateful for all of his contributions to the album and in particular his piano playing which is so sparse and minimalistic. But when it hits, it hits. I really am grateful for him and his contributions.
Doug Burke:
Let's talk about a song that's given you a fair amount of notoriety. But actually, in researching, you made me really feel like even though you've traveled the world playing and are going to continue hopefully to start traveling the world on tour again for us very soon, you come from Wisconsin, and there's a real sense of place to your songs. And this song is called On, Wisconsin. And I'll give our listeners a little background so that you don't have to say it, Trapper. But this song was written in 1961 lyrically by Bob Dylan. It was discovered later, and it happened to be written when he was visiting Wisconsin and the next day, he answered an ad to share a ride back to New York City with two people. And he left Wisconsin and never recorded this song that he wrote and sort of in his night or brief, brief time in Wisconsin. And from that car ride, he landed in Greenwich Village and sort of the rest is history on Bob Dylan, which our listeners know. But you have co-written a song now with Bob Dylan and he has given you a co-write credit, which is just an amazing thing for me to be in the presence of. But tell me more about On, Wisconsin.
Trapper Schoepp:
Yes. So, Dylan's last stop was Wisconsin. And something that I'd learned later was he actually wrote that song the day he went into the studio to record his first studio album with Columbia Records. So, I think that song was in some ways intended to be on his first studio album, Bob Dylan.
Doug Burke:
Yeah. It's just titled Bob Dylan. It's the eponymous Bob Dylan. I have a first pressing.
Trapper Schoepp:
Oh, nice. So I think the song was meant to be a bit of a travelogue, sort of a way of showing where he had just come from, I don't know, I'm not going to get mad of the 20-year-old Bob Dylan, I guess. So the song is about this drifter kind of trying to get back home to Wisconsin in some way. And me being a citizen of the world running all over with my guitar, I think I felt, "Okay, I've been there before for sure," and Dylan is one of my favorite songwriters. How I discovered the song though, I was scrolling through Rolling Stone or Facebook or Twitter, whatever, and I saw this link. And the headline was Long Lost Lyrics About Wisconsin Up for sale $30,000. And I thought, "Well, I don't have $30,000 but maybe I could finish the song." And I finished the song. I booked the weekend at a studio and it was just like that. I added a chorus to it and give it sort of a train beat because I was imagining this drifter sort of being rocked to sleep in a train car and I kind of put this ... a bit of a waltz to it, like a train going down the tracks. So, yeah, we put the song out there. There was a little bit on it in Billboard and Minnesota Public Radio and then a bit of radio silence for a while and then my manager sent me an email one night that said, Dylan, has it now. And that's all the email said and I thought, "Man, what? Come on, man. I mean what does that mean?" And then I caught up with them later and he said, "I got the song to the people that need the song, basically. And it's in their hands now." Then months and months and months went by, and I was in the grocery store and I got an email that said, "Bob Dylan has approved the joint publishing of On, Wisconsin with Trapper Schoepp, or whatever." And I just walked around the grocery store, grabbed everything I had ever wanted in a grocery store, spent like $300.
Doug Burke:
Because you were hungry or you thought the royalties were going to lead to retirement, or you're celebrating?
Trapper Schoepp:
Yeah, exactly, celebratory. But yeah, I mean I talked about how Bob Dylan was an important part of my origin story as a songwriter and then to share the writing credit with Bob Dylan in a song about my home state, it's stranger than fiction.
Doug Burke:
I knew that On, Wisconsin was the University of Wisconsin Badgers fight song. And I only knew this because I read this Wall Street Journal reporter Jason Gay who went there. And he works evidently with all these Michigan people and they're, from a sports standpoint, a little louder than the Wisconsin Badger people according to Jason. And he always talks about On, Wisconsin, their fight song. So I listened to that, and then I listened to your version and I was so grateful that they're very, very different. But you're setting the music to a lyric sheet that Bob wrote about the state you come from, about a place called Wauwatosa where I understand you found the recording studio that could accommodate the sound you wanted. I had to look it up. It's a western Milwaukee suburb of 43,000 people, so it's not a tiny place in Wisconsin. It's like a real suburb of sorts. Is that accurate?
Trapper Schoepp:
Yeah. It's an old post office, this recording studio, called Wire & Vice. And the really funny thing was Bob Dylan and the lyrics he wrote, "Wow Wow Toaster." The town is called Wauwatosa and so there were just so many jokes about the toaster and all that. And actually the other day, I was talking to some guy about, I was doing a TV spot. We were talking about music and I said something about Bob Dylan. And he said, "Oh, you know, I heard Bob Dylan has a song about Wow Wow Toaster." And I thought, "Oh, man, I'm familiar with that song, actually."
Doug Burke:
Yeah, I co-wrote it.
Trapper Schoepp:
Yeah. I didn't like go to end of it.
Doug Burke:
So, here's something for you, Trapper. Wauwatosa is named after the Potawatomi Chief Wauwataesie, and it is the Potawatomi word for what?
Trapper Schoepp:
I don't know.
Doug Burke:
Firefly.
Trapper Schoepp:
Oh, wow. Very interesting.
Doug Burke:
Are there a lot of fireflies in Wisconsin?
Trapper Schoepp:
Yeah, I supposed. I guess I don't know about a lot or a little, I mean.
Doug Burke:
Do you remember them at night, like in the suburbs of Milwaukee? Are they large fireflies?
Trapper Schoepp:
Yeah, I grew up in the country. So, yeah, I would say a fair amount of fireflies.
Doug Burke:
And it happens to rhyme well in the song.
Trapper Schoepp:
Yeah. They'll be like On, Wisconsin part two, Firefly, I don't know. We'll see.
Doug Burke:
If I can motivate you to write us more great songs, I would love it. So, what's it like setting these lyrics adding a chorus and coming up with the melody? Where does the melody come from?
Trapper Schoepp:
Where does the melody come from? Sometimes, you just feel as a songwriter that you're just sort of brushing the dust off something else or you're a vessel for it. But I do think like songwriting, it's like anything else. You spend a lot of time listening to music. That's sort of the input and then the output is your song. And with folk music, I mean, you lift a little from here, you lift a little from there. That's what you come up with. But the music is already there. You're just sort of the vehicle for it.
Doug Burke:
Interesting. It's so organic for you and a lot of people. Not everybody has this skill, this organic natural talent that you do, Trapper. So, it's like not to be taken for granted. I can't wait to see what comes up.
Doug Burke:
Let's talk about Ogallala. And I have to say this is one of your more upbeat songs from an earlier album, and I love it. It's based on The Lord of the Rings, in part.
Trapper Schoepp:
Yeah. I thought it'd be fun to focus on some of the sense of place songs for this. So, we were coming home from a long tour, coming home for the holidays. And we thought we could get from Los Angeles to Milwaukee in one straight shot which is not smart on a lot of levels. We were driving through the great plains in Nebraska in a blizzard and a semi-truck in front of us jackknifed off the road in this terrible snowstorm. And my manager, my brother, Graham, our guitarist at that time, I think we all kind of looked at each other and thought, "Oh, no, that could have been us." We took the first exit we could. It was this little town called Ogallala. True to its name, la-la, we sort of began to go la-la after a few days of being stranded in this town. They shut down the interstates actually. The blizzard was so bad.
Doug Burke:
Wow. I mean because that's Interstate 80. That goes from New York to California, they try to keep that open for the commercial truckers who obviously, one of which caused the blockage of the road to begin with. And so probably it was good reason that they closed it down. They don't close it down lightly, I will say that.
Trapper Schoepp:
We got our room at the Super 8, four guys, one room. Our guitarist and my brother, Tanner, went to go see that movie An Unexpected Journey with Martin Freeman where he sort of leaves home and he's off on this grand journey.
Doug Burke:
He's Bilbo Baggins, right? In the movie, he plays Bilbo Baggins legendarily.
Trapper Schoepp:
I think the great about seeing movies and reading books, listening to music is part of you put yourself inside of those characters. I mean that's what makes any movie relatable as you find yourself in the characters. And I think the lyric is, "I felt like Martin Freeman when he was first leaving". That's a nod to that character in the movie, for sure. But I think those were three of the longest days of my life in that Super 8 Hotel at the end of a very long tour. Actually the night before, I got sprayed with a fire extinguisher we opened for Social Distortion at Disneyland.
Doug Burke:
That's a little bit of an oxymoron. Social D at Disneyland, Mike Ness and the crew.
Trapper Schoepp:
Yeah. Actually, he was really sweet. He watched our set or part of it from the side of the stage. Some guy grabbed the fire extinguisher and just lit me up.
Doug Burke:
The punk crowd is a little different than some of the other crowds. But you think the punk crowd at Disneyland might calm down? But no, I guess.
Trapper Schoepp:
Yeah. I mean punks at Disneyland, I mean it's a juxtaposition if there ever was, paradox. But yeah, that was definitely a very strange few days of my life in Ogallala.
Doug Burke:
So, you'd left from Disneyland. You drove and you got stuck in Nebraska in Ogallala in Nebraska which is ... I did look up the population, it's a few thousand. You were there three days. This one break I find so haunting, I'm going to read it. "I watched the news at nine, saw a car that could have been mine. It was crushed like a can. 'Travel safe,' said the weatherman." I just love that break. It's like a nightmare. And you guys avoided it, thank goodness. But like we all see that on the news when these accidents happen and think there, but for the grace of God go, "That could have been me behind that truck."
Trapper Schoepp:
That's sort of like a callback to the Martin Freeman movie, putting yourself in different people's shoes if you will.
Doug Burke:
Did you write the song in the Super 8, or did you wait until later when you're on the road and like, "I got to write a song about this three days and all the la-la"?
Trapper Schoepp:
Yeah. I think like most songwriters, you sort of make notes along as you go. I remember writing bits and pieces of it down committing some that are just a memory. And then actually, I finished it. I did a demo of it when we were stuck in another snowstorm in New Jersey. The following year, I was staying in my friend's little apartment in Cherry Hill, I think, New Jersey.
Doug Burke:
Outside of Philadelphia?
Trapper Schoepp:
Yeah. I finished the song in that snowstorm under really strange circumstances as well. I'm just remembering that day, in particular, was really strange because I was staying at my friend's house, and we came in really late at night in the big duffle bag that I was traveling with on tour. And I had a big glass sort of jar or glass container of grape juice. I was walking up his stairs and when I got into his apartment, I realized, "Oh my goodness, the glass broke and there's a grape juice all over." And the next morning, I woke up and it's the day I finished the Ogallala song. There were like cops everywhere and people at the apartment were thinking that there was blood all over the apartment complex. That was just grape juice. I came in so late at night I didn't realize it's like all over the stairs and everything. There is this like really thick sort of dark blood-like juice. I'm like, "Oh, my goodness, I don't know why that thought came to mind."
Doug Burke:
There seems to be a recurring theme. You blow up apples. You write songs about haunted hotels, and you finished this song in the second snowstorm after the cops think that some grape juice is a bloody murder. There's a thread here.
Trapper Schoepp:
It's not a great thread, to be sure. One of my friends calls me like a chaos magnet, and I don't know if it's like me, I'm the chaos or what it is.
Doug Burke:
That's the River of Disaster song, isn't it?
Trapper Schoepp:
River Called Disaster. That's one of the new ones on the album.
Doug Burke:
Is that autobiographical about the disasters that have occurred in your life, or not really?
Trapper Schoepp:
Sure. I mean you take a little bit from here, a little bit from there, for sure.
Doug Burke:
Let's talk about one of your earlier songs because I actually think this is my favorite, Ballad of Olof Johnson. I just loved the upbeat, hard-driving rocking sound that you got out of your band on this, very much to me inspired by bands like The Band. And Bob Dylan, who we've already discussed his influence on your music, almost a Maggie's Farm feel in the beginning if I'm catching it right, inspired by this. Let's talk about this... This is really one of my favorite pieces that you've written so far. I can't wait to hear more from you. I can't wait to see you live, perform with your band. But tell me about Ballad of Olof Johnson.
Trapper Schoepp:
The lyrics come from a family legend, which is my great, great, great grandfather. His name is Olof Johnson and he came from Sweden to America around 1900 with his wife, Olivia. And they were traveling through the Dakotas and they encountered this terrible blizzard. And what did Olof and his wife Olivia do? They literally dug a hole into the South Dakota earth, flipped their wagon over that hole in the earth. And they lived out the whole winter there, so the accommodations were not as good as the Super 8 in Ogallala. But they made it through it, and they made it to spring. And I think being a Midwestern songwriter and tying things back to May Day, my new album, there is this element of the promise of spring that keeps people in the Midwest ... I mean people everywhere, thinking forward and trying to get to the next season in the summer even. It's like it's so hot. I wish we could just have the fall. In the winter, it's like, "Oh, it's so cold. We just need to get to the summer, and we'll be fine." There is that element of always thinking ahead and to warmer weather. But in terms of the music, it is definitely that 1965 Bob Dylan-inspired sound. And we did that album down in Nashville and really some top-shelf players on it. It's Spencer Cullum Jr. playing the pedal steel guitar. I remember him wearing what he referred to as his Dylan dots that day, like a polka dot shirt that he was wearing to the CMA Awards that night that he was playing at, young British fellow, and then his partner in crime, Jeremy Fetzer, on the telecaster. But yeah, it's a really fun song and it sort of is another one of those songs where it feels like it's right on the edge of falling apart the whole time but it kind of holds together somehow. And yeah, I mean the chorus bit, "The wind went, ooohhh, all night" and there's kind of the different harmonies in there, it's a little intentionally hokey and fun like an old band song or something.
Doug Burke:
But it's not completely fun. There's still this haunted element to the fun. It's like the wind of the Midwest, and I guess this is North Dakota, but Wisconsin, Minnesota, the winters ... Nebraska in Ogallala ... are harsh and long. And this chorus is different for you because it's like really compact and short in words but it says a lot to me melodically because it's, "The wind went ooohhh all night, he'd cry ohhh in fright." But the second ohhh, you don't go higher. You go into a lower register of the note.
Doug Burke:
And it makes you feel like, "Oh, my god. If I could just make it through the night, like if I could just make it through this winter and somehow get to that spring ..." You know what I'm saying? Because normally, you'd go up to like to punch the chorus crescendo up. But you dropped it down and it's so noticeable. Am I reading this the right way?
Trapper Schoepp:
Yeah, of course.
Doug Burke:
What was your thought behind the design there?
Trapper Schoepp:
Well, it was probably more of a logistical thing, like oh, I don't think I can make my voice any higher because it's already like a falsetto. So, yeah, I mean part of it was probably just, well, I can't really get me higher, so go down. That was probably it, to be honest.
Doug Burke:
It sounds great. And Harding County, where is that?
Trapper Schoepp:
Yeah, North Dakota somewhere. But yeah, that's where they dug that hole on the ground and then they survived the winter, and here I am. So go, Olof for staying strong through the winter. I'm sure his wife just had it up to here with him to say the least. He was actually a gardener to the king of Sweden, so it seems like he had a pretty good gig back in Sweden, but they came to America as a part of the Homestead Act, which would give people free land for settling in certain places, I believe. But they came to America in hopes of sort of starting this new life for themselves as immigrants. And I think too, I definitely thought it was a beautiful immigrant story, immigrants today really have such a hard time even getting into America, and settling in America, and trying to make a new life for themselves. So, I think there's something really beautiful about that, that the immigrant's tale of trying to get somewhere new and start a new chapter.
Doug Burke:
Interesting. Well, you left Olof in the final sort of verse. "He came up and didn't make a sound. And he ran and he ran and he never was found." So, you sort of left him as this ghost-like roaming the North Dakota Harding County plains, I think, of sorts. Again, you leave him in this ghostly way with the guitar jam and the piano rolls taking us out.
Trapper Schoepp:
I think that was sort of a western, like a callback to an old western like the sunset never was found, sort of like rides off in the sunset kind of vibe, for sure. But yeah, I understand why that lyric might have stood out to you for sure, but that was the intent at least with that.
Doug Burke:
So, he lived happily ever after?
Trapper Schoepp:
That's sort of the ... We don't know, yeah. But the music video is so entertaining for that song, an eight-bit Oregon Trail-inspired music video. So, I don't know if you remember ever playing or had kids that played The Oregon Trail computer game, but it's like an old game where you travel along the Oregon Trail. It's a callback to that video game and it uses Olof's stories. So, go check out that music video. It's really absurd and fun.
Doug Burke:
The one song that kind of grabbed me from your work with The Shades was Twenty Odd Years.
Trapper Schoepp:
Yeah, I'm happy to talk about that. I wrote that in college. I had this music professor named Dr. Martin Jack Rosenblum. He was actually the poet laureate of the Harley-Davidson motorcycle company. It's like Beatnik poet. He has a lot of really larger-than-life-sounding spoken word albums, just renegade biker poet kind of guy. And he was one of my music professors at college, and we took a songwriting class with him where basically it's like a song workshop like every week, you'd bring in a new song or something like that. And there were never assignments. There was never any ... It just kind of felt like a fight club sort of vibe, underground society yet in otherwise formal university. It's so cool, and some of my favorite memories of education were in that class. I mean, it's just so fun every week.
Doug Burke:
He's passed away now and he recorded under The Holy Ranger?
Trapper Schoepp:
Yeah. That was his stage name. But I was in this class with him, and I don't know if I had written this song, I was writing a lot of songs at the time. And I think discovering a lot of old folksongs like, "The auld triangle went jingle-jangle," that old Irish song, and then Sing Me Back Home by Merle Haggard. Those kinds of old prison ballads, I mean that's a whole genre in itself, the prison ballads.
Doug Burke:
And this is in that genre. This is about a man on death row who spent 20 years in jail and coming to terms with it?
Trapper Schoepp:
That's exactly it. We had this brilliant violinist named Gina Romantini that played on that song. And she went on to ... When we toured at The Wallflower, she started actually playing with them. After that, she plays with this Irish band, The Mahones. And The Doobie Brothers, I guess she toured with for a little bit. But that's kind of more of an Irish folksong and then it ended up in this TV show called Kingdom and that's on Netflix now about MMA fighters. And so people have kind of found their way to my music through that show and that song kind of being in the soundtrack of that. So, that's been kind of interesting for me because, I mean, it's a song from so long ago.
Doug Burke:
It's interesting the legs of that song for me because I had to listen to it three times, I found it so compelling. And first off, you put yourself in the first person of this man who's clearly done something to put himself on death row and has been in jail for 20 years, and it seems like the end of the line is coming up. And when I kept listening for was, what's your stance on the death penalty and what this man's future holds for him, what he thinks of it in holding for himself? And all he wants is one more day, right? And I realized I'm never going to learn Trapper's stance by listening to the song because you don't tell us your stance. And I'm not asking you to tell us your stance on it, but what was your thought process around how to deal with the death penalty in a song?
Trapper Schoepp:
Oh, man, there's a lot to unpack. I mean in short, I don't think there are a lot of people that are really excited about the death penalty in any regard. I mean we have so many famous movies and sort of examples of the death penalty like Shawshank Redemption, Green Mile, all these famous prison movies. Yeah, I don't know that this song, of course, is in any particular stance on the death penalty. It's more trying to get inside of a fellow who, like you said I think, is coming to terms with his crime and what's he's done and he sings in the song "All I ask for is one more day". I think there is an element to that sort of even though he's coming to the very end, he's trying to find some value in each day he's given, to put it pretty vaguely. But yeah, I don't know, man. I'm like I haven't sung that song in probably 10 years, so it's funny to bring it up. I'm trying to go over the lyrics in my head. But yeah, I haven't like sung it in so long.
Doug Burke:
The notion of wanting one more day and how we all should try to lead each day well, if not to the fullest, but well especially in this pandemic which hopefully is kind of coming to a vaccinated close at some point and herd immunity close. I think for all of us, I had to listen to this several times. I found this song so compelling. And it wasn't even one you had suggested I listen to. I was like, "Oh, my god. This is a great song."
Trapper Schoepp:
Thank you so much. I appreciate that.
Doug Burke:
And I want to thank you for sharing these insights and coming on.
Trapper Schoepp:
Yeah. Thank you so much, and like I said, sorry if I was a little scattered. I'm going on like three hours of sleep from all the apples and the explosions and fun stuff. But I think you'll get a kick out of the music video we're putting together for that song that we didn't mention but called the Little Drop of Medicine.
Doug Burke:
Okay. So, I can't wait. I got to watch the Little Drop of Medicine video when it drops and we see the exploding apples.
Trapper Schoepp:
Doug, I'm so grateful that you had me on and that you've spent some time trying to get to the bottom of why I wrote these songs because I'm wondering that the same thing too. But it is a real joy to get to write songs and perform them and talk to people like you about them. So, thanks again.
Doug Burke:
And we can't wait to see you on Muz-TV, our new TV show which is going to launch soon on an over-the-top television channel near you. Can't wait to tell our audience more about that. I have to thank DJ Wyatt Schmidt. You can listen to him out there on Twitch and Facebook live and lots of places. His Friday night shows are killer. I encourage everybody to listen to him. MC Owens and Lauren, our social media directors. From the Berklee School of Music, we are always grateful for your support. Follow us at Backstory Song on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. We're posting regularly and our two social media directors are doing a lot there. And we will have more to come on Muz-TV, our new TV station that we're launching. And hopefully, we'll get to see Trapper give us some live performance video for our new TV show Muz-TV. Thank you, Trapper, for coming on the show.
Trapper Schoepp:
Cool. Thank you. We'll see you there.
