Eric Schmitt – “Little Bird”
Americana Highways brings you this premiere of Eric Schmitt’s song “Little Bird” from his forthcoming album Wait For the Night, which is set for release on April 11. The album was produced by Clay Parker and Eric Schmitt; recorded by Clay Parker, and mastered by Todd Pipes. “Little Bird” will be available on January 31.
Musicians on “Little Bird” are Eric Schmitt on vocals, acoustic guitar, harmonica, and electric piano; Clay Parker on bass; and Paul Buller on mandolin.
Americana Highways had a brief mini chat with Eric about the song. The premiere appears just beneath the interview.
Americana Highways: How did you approach writing this song?
Eric Schmitt: With “Little Bird,” the lyrics came first. And by that, I mean all of them. That’s not usually how it works for me, but I wanted to try something different. And one day, I wrote the words in a notepad in one quick motion.
AH: What is the song about?
ES: Well it goes back to the spring before, when some mockingbirds nested in a Japanese Magnolia right off our front porch. The nest was too high to see directly down into, but it was low enough to see the little beaks reaching up in the air and screaming for food. In the afternoons after work, my wife and I would sit out on the porch and watch the birds do their thing. The parents would go off and gather food, and then they’d make their way back, stopping in different places along the way before eventually delivering the grub to the little ones. I might have been thinking of my own mother, who raised nine kids and wore herself out doing it. That might have something to do with the last line: “The old bird says she’s been singing too long.”
Anyway, not long after those mockingbirds were gone, I found a tiny hatchling wriggling around in our gravel driveway. It was doomed to get smashed by a car, and so I put a little bed of grass in a shoebox and set it up on a stool on our porch. The poor thing was maybe as big as my thumb, just a tiny little bald gray sack. It couldn’t really control its head. I tried to feed it some mashed up bugs and worms, but I knew that if its parents didn’t claim it, she was not going to make it. I kept looking up into the trees hoping for a sign of an active nest or an anxious mother, but it wasn’t to be. I went off to work and back and she was still lying there, all limp and feeble. So I took her out back to a little hole in the ground where earlier I had rooted around for some worms. I gently laid her in there, got a shovel, and in one quick motion, sheered off her head. I buried her right there where her last meal had come from.
Most of the lyrics have nothing to do with that last part. But it was this awful little memory I was thinking about while the lyrics fell out of me one day in a rhymed and metered rumination on the cycle of life, and on the terror and beauty of it all.
Thanks for chatting with us, Eric. One element that strikes you immediately in listening to Eric Schmitt’s songs is his vocals – they sound like a blend of old timey bluegrass singers stirred up with Neil Young somehow. Eric’s a bit of a tenor with the depth of raw folksy delivery, and sounds perfect with strings.”Little Bird” is a mixture of analogy and downhearted observation and the song is quite memorable over acoustic guitar, harmonica and mandolin.
You can find more details here on his website. https://ericschmittmusic.com/
