Midwest Freewheeling:
Social Cig Is Ready To Bring Their DIY Indie Skate Rock On the Road

On Friday, September 5, Milwaukee, Wisconsin rockers Social Cig will be releasing their fourth studio album Patchwork: A Road Dog Story.

According to their Bandcamp bio, Social Cig is the “’Indie-Skate-Rock’ music project of Filipino American, Parker Schultz. Consisting of contagious authenticity, cheery live shows, and cultivating an original story with an attitude of gratitude, Social Cig is chasing full-circle moments. Leafing through music scenes with an ambitious DIY approach, Social Cig has become a well-rounded grassroots venture.”

A major part of that venture in recent years is a healthy dose of touring for the band. Hence the album’s title. Schultz views his life as a series of chapters, and this latest one has been marked by being on the road with his bandmates. A few years ago, he decided to pursue music on a full-time basis, spending much of his time writing songs and going out on tour. Sometimes he’ll even take his girlfriend Sheila and dog Crabcake out on the road for tours.

“I like to think of my music projects as chapters of my life as they mirror the progression and hold stories and feelings from certain timeframes,” he says. “The last two years I’ve been hitting the road hard after making the jump to doing music full time in the summer of 2023.”

“Since, I’ve done three tours out East, two down South, one out West, and numerous sprints around the Midwest. Touring with my original music has always been a lifelong dream of mine and to finally make it happen has been entirely fulfilling. This album has become a tour diary of my travels & experiences on the road or being back home in Milwaukee.”

The band will celebrate the release with a September 12 show at Milwaukee’s Turner Hall Ballroom, followed by a U.S. tour.

I recently interviewed Schultz for a feature in the September issue of Milwaukee publication Shepherd Express (and will be at their site soon too).The following is an extended Q&A.

That’s just who I am. I grew up in the Midwest and my family comes from owning a small bike shop in West Bend, Mountain Outfitters. I’ve worked there all my life and with my dad being the business owner, I’ve definitely learned a lot about just doing it yourself. And when I was in college and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, I tried out a bunch of things. So, for one, I got really into photography and then I tried to start my own brand, like a T-shirt brand. And just floating around a few different hobbies. Ultimately, I just kept coming back to music and then one that I then realized I can kind of do all of these skills within the brand of Social Cig and kind of run it like a business while being creative in the music creation side. So, it’s kind of just putting all the eggs in one basket and it just really works.

And the marketing of the band and the designing flyers and merch and emailing people and booking shows and kind of the business stuff. But also, I do love making music and performing. So that’s kind of all just tied in from how I was raised, but also the Midwest nice and just being a real person and a real human being and just being friendly has really gotten me pretty far, I’d suppose. And just kind of not taking anything for granted and being cool with everybody.

How has Milwaukee been a big part of that?

Milwaukee is the scene I came up in. Definitely hadn’t ever experienced a music scene before until I started playing shows in Milwaukee. I mean, I grew up playing shows in West Bend with a high school band, but we would play Battle of Bands and some dive bars and charity events and kind of had a whole run of that, but never really felt like there was a scene, so to speak, of people my age.

So, it wasn’t until I got to Milwaukee where I was like, “oh, there’s house shows and there’s people that love coming to the shows and there’s just bands to go see live”. And so just being around that in the early days and being inspired by so many different characters and bands in the Milwaukee scene. And I really think that just kind of seeing what other people do and just bouncing ideas off of each other. It’s a really cool ecosystem of artists and musicians and photographers and just artistic people in the Milwaukee scene that it just all works. So, I definitely wouldn’t be where I am without the Milwaukee music scene and the support it’s given me and Social Cig. And yeah, I kind of owe a lot to the Milwaukee scene, and it’s definitely going to always have a special place in my heart. No plans on leaving anytime soon as well. Definitely plan on sticking around. I love it.

Doing this full-time has been a goal of mine ever since I kind of fell in love with the idea of pursuing it, I suppose. I graduated from college and went to a full-time job in property management. I was a leasing consultant for a few different apartments around the Milwaukee area. And basically, every single chance I got, while at work, to work on all things Social Cig, like admin stuff and just music wise, I took it. So, there’s a lot of downtime in that job. It allowed me to really kind of scheme and just get all my eggs in a basket and just kind of slowly building to where I can make the jump.

And then also just having a decent amount in savings as a safety net, I suppose. But for the most part, I’ve been making it work since the summer of 2023 is when I jumped to full time. But sometimes I’ll pick up shifts at Falcon Bowl. It’s like a bartender. I don’t think I’ll go back to the corporate world ever again. Just sort of the last two years of just doing this full time have been the most fulfilling of my entire life. Well, however long I can keep it going, it is a big goal of mine.

Your friends and family have helped encourage you to keep writing songs from the start.

Yeah. Ever since I was little, it’s sharing my music and singing in front of people. Even to this day, sometimes I get pretty bashful when the spotlight is on me. But singing for one and just being vulnerable has always been a difficult hurdle, I guess, for any sort of artist. But I really struggled with sharing that and being vulnerable and being confident in my art. So just having a really solid support system and friends I would share my songs, and they would just hype me up so much and be like, “oh, you got to put this out, you got to put it on Spotify”, and all that. I never really considered it before those conversations. So definitely having friends and family to really push me out of my comfort zone and I really wouldn’t be where I am without that.

I guess it’s a lot of, “you got to keep yourself accountable”, whereas you’re not waking up nine to five and showing up and other people are counting on you. It’s more so setting a routine for yourself and no one’s really counting on you unless I have a live show to get to or a rehearsal. But the day-to-day backend of it all is really like, “okay, I am going to sit down for how many hours and actually just work on booking shows for an upcoming tour or plan out a new merch drop or fulfilling merch orders to designing a flyer and just messaging people back on Instagram and emails and text messages.” And then also finding time to work on music and then just creating content and staying on top of making reels and TikTok’s and just staying on top of the social media.

So, it’s just a lot of different folders that I’m kind of tapping into all at once and trying to figure out what routine and methods work best for me. Definitely a lot of learning curves, but definitely still learning and getting better. And it really depends on what’s going on at that time too. Sometimes I’ll be on the road for a month and then get home. It’s just getting back to, “okay, what’s next?” Keeping the momentum going. But I’m pretty used to it (and) definitely prefer not to stay stagnant. I’m a creature of movement, I guess. Just always got to be doing something.

Do you try to write songs at all on the road?

That’s more off the road. I have heard of bands doing that and artists doing that. I’m not on that level quite yet. I think it’s because I’m managing the entire tour as well as being on the tour. Wearing a lot of hats, I think, doesn’t allow me to be in the most creative state. And it’s kind of nice to be soaking it all in. But definitely I’ll be re-listening to old voice memos and stuff I’m working on, but never actively writing or recording for that matter. It’s usually when I get back home.

I imagine there’s a balance with finding time to write songs.

Yeah, definitely. Which was a solid reason why I took the winter off with shows because just doing so many shows, I hadn’t been in that creative songwriting mode in a long time, and my intention was to get an album out this upcoming September. So, I took the whole winter off to just write and record and to work on it. And now it’s at a point where I’m feeling pretty good and shows are picking up again and going to release the album and then hit the road. So, I think I’ll just try to find the spots where I can hang low and just hang out in Milwaukee and just work on music and not be playing shows. That’s when I’m the most creative, recording and writing, and then just finding that balance between playing shows and writing songs.

Yeah, we got Elias Dorsey on the bass guitar, Kai Dee on drums, Isaac Repinski on lead guitar. And then depending on if Anthony [Kopczynski]’s available, he’ll be on keys and doing backup vocals and he also does bass as well. It’s really nice to keep the momentum going if anyone is not available, a lot of these guys except for Kai are in different bands and just life things. So, it feels like I’m in a really solid spot where if Elias isn’t available, I have Anthony on bass.

If Anthony can’t make it, we’ll do a three piece with Isaac on bass or there’s so many different iterations of the live set that I can do where it’s like I could do a solo set, but I could also do a three-piece set, or a four-piece set, or a five-piece with different instrumentation. So, the chemistry is just really solid. I’ve been friends with these guys for years, so it just was natural to have them on. It’s just more of a vibe thing than a musician thing. And they’re all just the craziest [great] musicians on top of that too. But first they’re friends.

How do you think you’ve grown most as a songwriter with this new album?

I think I’m definitely getting better at producing and just kind of knowing what I want and how to use logic better and just always getting better at just learning new things and kind of applying them, whether it’s vocal layering or where I’m kind of mixing all the instruments together and what should come in and just building songs better and just trying to make an overall piece.

I think the quality of my earlier songs was definitely a solid start, but it feels really cool to grow and improve and just have more fun with it. I feel like I’m getting a little bit weirder and more experimental. And along with the experimental just comes more of an expression and just being able to hit different parts that I’ve been missing before and using sounds to express stuff.

Also working with a sound engineer has been big, Jake “Beanboi” Henbest mixed and mastered a lot of my recent music, specifically my last EP, In The Pocket, and he’ll be mixing most of this album and then mastering this whole album. It’s been great to work with him. But yeah, to answer the question, I think it has improved my songwriting, hopefully. We’ll see.

What do you like most about the band’s name? What’s the story behind it?

I was kind of looking for an artist’s name for a long, long time, just kind of obsessing over it around 2018. I was going under Arcilla Kid for a while. My middle name is Arcilla, and it’s like my mom’s maiden name and all of our cousins have the same middle name. So, I thought Arcilla Kid could be cool, but that wasn’t really entirely resonating with me, and I kind of wanted to have an artist’s name that could also be thought of as a band or a group or an idea. I didn’t want it to be Parker Schultz. I wanted something that would kind of tell a story and fit the brand of my music. So, when I was living in a college house with a group of dudes, we would have a bag of tobacco in this drawer.

And when we had people over, sometimes we would bring out these already filtered tubes where you stuff the tobacco in. And so sometimes we would have parties, and we’d have people sit around the table and we’d all stuff these little filters with tobacco, and we called them Social Cigs. They were just for only social [gatherings]. We didn’t really smoke them any other time. And one day I was working on campus, and my friend Ryan came over and she’s like, “I just had the craziest night of my life. I just smoked a social cig with Young the Giant.” And that was the moment that I was like, “Social Cig, that sounds super cool.” I looked it up online to see if there were any bands or anything under it and it was available and kind of went from there. It just had a good ring to it and checked all the boxes.

The band has an album release show at Turner Hall Ballroom in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on September 12th. How do you feel about getting to play there? What should people expect from the show?

I’m super pumped. It’s going to be probably for me, the biggest show of my life, it’ll be kind of an ode to when we played Turner Hall two summers ago, August of 2023, we did an all-local bill there and we headlined, and it was just such a crazy, crazy night. It felt like that was just all the things in the local scene leading up to that moment and for all of the bands involved on that night too. It’s just like we’ve all kind of continuously been working and hitting the road a lot more and really just getting after it.

So, this is kind of like for me, a return to Turner Hall and just celebrating and I want to put together a really special Social Cig show with maybe some really cool visuals and live show sort of aspects to it with different instrumentations. Maybe there will be some backup singers and banjo for a few parts and live horns. And I’ve been kind of piecing all that together along with the album and just trying to make it really special. And that one’s with Moonglow and the Dead Bolts will be on that show, so it’s going to be a big one. It’s going to be a lot of fun.

You’ll also be doing some more touring this year. Can you talk a little bit about that tour? How does your approach to this one compare to past ones?

Every time I play and revisit an area, it gets easier to book because I’ve met more people out there, which is really, really nice and satisfying to feel like I’m growing bases and communities outside of the Midwest. We’ve done the East Coast three times now, and I feel like I know a lot of people out there just from those tours.

But this will be the second time I’ve headed out to the West Coast, like San Diego and then back through Denver. It’s going to be a pretty big one doing it solo with [my girlfriend] Sheila and [my dog] Crabcake. So, I got the backing tracks as well as an acoustic set prepared. It’s a lot easier to be on the road and travel and stay with friends financially as well. It just kind of all just works a little bit better and we’re going to be on the road for two months, which is kind of our goal. So, end of September to late November before taking a little bit of a holiday hiatus.

I’ve been joining forces with some friends that I’ve met that kind of have some ideas of the scene and the different bands as well who are helping out with some booking. I would say it feels good that I’ve been out to the West Coast before, so I’ve been reaching out to people who I’ve played with in the past or stayed with and just some older friends and getting it all together. So, it should be good. It should be a really, really solid run and (I’m) excited to get back to the Pacific Ocean.

You can follow and listen to Social Cig at the following links:

Instagram: Instagram.com/socialcig/

Facebook: Facebook.com/socialcigmusic/

Spotify: Social Cig on Spotify

YouTube: Youtube.com/@socialcig

Bandcamp: Socialcig.bandcamp.com

Additional Info: More Links

Joshua M. Miller

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Joshua is co-founder of Scummy Water Tower. He’s freelanced for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites, including: Rolling Stone, The Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, Guitar World, MTV News, Grammy.com, Chicago Magazine, Milwaukee Magazine, MKE Lifestyle, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, A.V. Club, SPIN, Alternative Press, Under the Radar, Paste, PopMatters, American Songwriter, and Relix. You can email him at josh@scummywatertower.com.