Eric Schmitt interview
Eric Schmitt on Teaching Songwriting and Recording Wait For The Night To Tape
Eric Schmitt is a Louisiana native, songwriter, and musician who recently released his album, Wait For The Night, which was recorded on an eight-track tape machine at Clay Parker’s studio in Gonzales, Louisiana, where Parker was also the recording engineer and co-producer. Schmitt really flexed his muscles as a multi-instrumentalist on acoustic guitar, harmonica, piano, electric piano, electric guitar, and lap steel, while Parker supplied bass, organ, electric and acoustic guitar, percussion and backing vocals. Several musicians from the local community also contributed, bringing depth and range to the emotive tracks that act like snapshots from wider narratives, many of which capture the flavor of modern Louisiana life.
Eric Schmitt has released three previous solo albums, and has performed with a group of Baton Rouge songwriters known as the Levee Road Revue, but on top of these things, he teaches in the English department of Louisiana State University where over the past couple semester, he’s been able to instruct songwriting courses. I spoke with Eric Schmitt about the experience of teaching songwriting to college kids, his own mode of songwriting, and to what extend our lives tend to permeate our work.
Americana Highways: I hear that you teach. What age group do you teach?
Eric Schmitt: I’m at LSU, so I’m a college instructor, and I teach three composition classes and a songwriting class. That’s kind of new, from the last couple semesters. Last night, a bunch of students from the past few semesters had a little show that I set up for them. It was good.
AH: That’s awesome. That sounds like the kind of class that probably took some doing to set up with the administration and get them to allow it. Is that true?
ES: Anytime you create a new class, there’s some bureaucratic stuff that you have to go through. Someone else had the idea for it, and they were running it through those circles, then they approached me about teaching it. It’s an English department class, but I thought, “We can’t do it if we’re not also doing the music. It’s got to be both music and writing.” So I said, “This is how I have to do it.” So far, it’s going okay.
AH: I’m so glad that you brought the music side in, too. Any teaching of young people is a good thing, and I commend you for that. It seems like the most important thing of all time right now is to get young people to look critically at the world around them and not just accept everything that’s being thrown at them.
ES: Thank you. That’s right. All of us can go through life without really thinking, accepting the world rather passively. You want to have a role in shaping it too, so you have to understand it to do that.
AH: When you’re asking students to write songs, is it totally wide-open, or do you direct them towards autobiography to help them develop their personal voice?
ES: It’s not quite autobiography, because some of them, especially as English majors, they write some poetry, or have done fiction writing. They come in with some lyrical ideas, but have no concept of how to put it into musical form, so what I’ve started doing these past two semesters, is to start them out with old blues songs. We listen to a few and we look at the 12-bar blues pattern. I say, “You’ve got to write a song that fits this.” Then, the formal, structural stuff, with verse and chorus, is what we talk about. Then, I make them write one of those. It’s pretty wide-open.
Through the semester, they’ll write songs, and we’ll workshop them, but we’ll also look at things like perspective, and listen to songs about the point of view of the narrator. For a week, we focused on the strong use of concrete details and the narrative element. I encourage them to be autobiographical if their song sounds too generic, but it’s tough, because I kind of wish I had two levels, like a beginning, and an advanced level. Giving them deadlines is important, because you learn by doing it.
AH: Writing songs is not necessarily the same thing as getting up and performing them. Was having that show last night a bit of a hurdle for them too, breaking the ice?
ES: There are a couple who have learned to play guitar during the semester, as they were writing songs. Sometimes they collaborate with someone else to help them. There were a couple of them who I’d work with a little extra because they were learning guitar, and I’d show them how to get started, playing some things, showing them shortcuts for thinking about chord relationships. Some of them were very new to playing guitar, but two of them did it anyway last night, and they pulled it off. But they were all really nervous! We just had fun, though, and they all did very well. It was really very impressive.
AH: It is impressive. How does this fit in with your own songwriting? Do you have to make time for it and set that aside?
ES: The songwriting stuff, and my music stuff, was never really considered part of my teaching worklife, so it’s great to put them together. But the way I create, it’s kind of chaos. The only thing that’s not chaotic about it is that I make myself do it most days. I just kind of let it happen. It’s difficult, because how do you teach that? I also didn’t go to grad school for songwriting, so I didn’t have any training in how to critique things. I try to do things that get students thinking, and wondering, “What is it in a song that moves you?” If I could just give them a formula, I guess we’d all be rich! But if you do follow a formula, it’s not very interesting, anyway.
AH: It seems like a great idea to ask students to notice different types of things during different lessons, because I find that happens to us throughout life. We suddenly notice something in a song that we’ve known our whole lives, something new that speaks to us. Life experiences seems to cause that.
ES: That’s right. Suddenly, a lyric has a different resonance than it did before.
AH: Does that happen with you on your own songs? Do you notice different things over time?
ES: First off, there’s a revision process that takes place even as I’m performing them. A lot of times, I’ll go out and play a song for six months before I go and record them. I play it, noticing what feels good, and what doesn’t feel good, what rolls off the tongue, what doesn’t. I’m revising things, so they can kind of change. But over time, my relationship with songs might change, because I’m hearing it connect with crowds. That experience might change how it feels to me. There’s something about the way that the song now has a history with people listening to it and liking it that I also feel while I’m playing it.
A lot of my songs aren’t super autobiographical in a literal sense, though everything, even “fiction,” obviously your own experiences are coming into it. There aren’t a lot of songs that are intimate and confessional, so I don’t have that experience where that kind of song takes on new meaning later which other writers might.
AH: That makes sense to me because when I see this album, it feels like snapshots taken out of stories. Even the songs that are even from a more “I” perspective, speaking to a “you,” feels like it’s taken out of someone’s life story, but not necessarily yours. The song “My Red Door” is one like that, with an “I” and a “you” perspective.
ES: That’s an interesting one. That’s one where my life experiences kind of crept in through the back door, which is usually how it works for me. Chris Smither is a great writer, though he sometimes jokes about his writing when live. He was down here in Baton Rouge one time, playing, and he’s go this expression, “You know, songwriting is like having a conversation with a part of yourself you’re not really on speaking terms with.” [Laughs] I think that puts it well!
Anyway, the funny thing about “My Red Door” was that it was the usual thing, where I say, “Okay, I haven’t written a song in a few days. Let’s get some coffee and let’s get to work!” Then I sit, and look at the window, and I look at my guitar. I was just playing around with chord positions and different spots, and I think the words just started coming out. I think, originally, I was thinking this was more of an upbeat song, about a missed encounter or date gone wrong. But then, as the chords were more rich, or more beautiful then that, then the line came about “your old shoes.”
Of course, I’ve had family members pass away, and I’ve seen that. My sister had cancer and died when she was only 50 years old. I’m the youngest of 9 kids, so it’s going to start happening more. I remember going to see her when she was sick, and she knew she wasn’t in good shape, but she had these rituals. She was religious, so she’d take a rosary and walk up and down this path. You could see on this path where her feet had just worn it down, so I thought about these rituals.
I’ve also seen my parents, and other people, deal with this grief afterwards, so the song kind of became about that. There’s an “I” and a “you,” and it’s not really me, literally, but there are those ways of thinking, like, “What are your rituals to handle that?” It’s a little perspective game, but it’s also that you can’t run away from your life, that will creep into your songs.
AH: There’s the weight of that human reality. Grief is almost like the elephant in the room for people. It’s a silent sort of presence in people’s lives that doesn’t get talked about, and it has that long tail that goes on for so long.
ES: Yes, and it’s like, “What do I do?” People do practical things to keep moving, and the world keeps moving on around you, so you have to go on somehow.
AH: It reminds me of how during Covid, everyone started cleaning their houses and doing practical things just to stay occupied. When you can’t deal with something, a manual task is the instinct. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. The music is somber but really beautiful on that.
ES: For me, the music on that song was a little bit of a stretch. I was moving up the neck and doing different chord inversions. There are little notes in the chords, suspensions, that happened just because of the way that I was playing the guitar. I just liked the way that it sounded. It started with me playing around with different sounds, and as I came up with that first line, a melody suggested itself. The strings on it are a cello and a violin, and that came later.
Clay is a fabulous musician and songwriter as well, so I just recorded that one of me playing the guitar and singing, and then Clay said, “We know this guy who plays cello…We know this guy who plays violin…” So we brought them in and added that. But really, that guitar sound kind of drove the musical styling of the piece. It could have survived, really, without the strings added on.
AH: Did you take a particular approach to recording with Clay?
ES: Clay’s kind of old-school, so it’s a tape machine, and that’s how we start. There’s a limited number of options that you have, so you have to be smart and selective. In fact, on one song, that has a bit more going on, we got down to the end, and he and I were doing tandem guitars as an add-on. I said, “Man, do we have any more tracks left for some back-up vocals?” He said, “Nooo.” So I said, “While we’re recording these guitars, let’s just sing real loud.” So we sang real loud. [Laughs] I think that was for “Midnight Song.” I like that we had to be selective about what went in. There’s not so much a sound difference on this album, but it has a lot to do with the choices that you make. With digital stuff, you can do a thousand takes, but it was fun to record the way that we did.
That’s amazing! Thanks for chatting with us, Eric Schmitt. Find more information here on his website: https://eric schmitt music.com/home
Check out our review of his album here: REVIEW: Eric Schmitt “Wait For The Night”