Hello reader,
How are you today?
Today, we’re excited to talk about a great artist you might be already familiar with if you’ve followed SWT from the start: Milwaukee, Wisconsin singer-songwriter Trapper Schoepp. Schoepp was the first artist we featured as part of our Water Tower Sessions series two years ago. You can watch the session below and interview here.
Schoepp has spent the past decade-plus crafting rock, folk, and Americana songs that draw on influences such as Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, and Bob Dylan. He’s opened for artists such as The Wallflowers, Old 97’s, The Jayhawks, Frank Turner, Three Dog Night, Soul Asylum, Tommy Stinson (of The Replacements), and Social Distortion.
Below is a run down of the releases he’s previously released:
- Run, Engine, Run (2011 – Good Land Records/2012 – SideOneDummy Records reissue, released as Trapper Schoepp & the Shades)
- Rangers & Valentines (2016 – Xtra Mile Recordings)
- Bay Beach Amusement Park EP (2017 – Xtra Mile Recordings)
- Primetime Illusion (2019 – Xtra Mile Recordings)
- May Day (2021 – Grand Phony Records)
- Siren Songs (2023 – Grand Phony Records)
On September 19, Schoepp will release his most personal album to date: Osborne. The album’s songs draw upon his experience last year getting treatment for substance abuse at the Hazelden Betty Ford Hospital in Minnesota.
Schoepp, now in his mid-30s, had struggled with his dependency on prescription painkillers and substances since his early 20s. It stemmed from the medicines he took to recover from spinal decompression surgery. The pills were a way to treat the pain but soon became an addiction.
“What started physical turned psychological and it’s a vicious cycle when you’re treating pain with addictive substances,” he recalls during a recent interview. “The lines get blurred when there’s real physical pain involved. I got sober from those medications starting in 2019, but the root of my problems remained. I filled the void in other ways, which led me to Hazelden.”
“I tried white knuckling it for years. You just reach a place of surrender where you gotta ask for help and it’s ok.”
Schoepp was previously familiar with the hospital as he had played at the hospital for an event called Hazelfest. His former drummer Jon Phillip (who also has played with The Benjamins, Paul Collins’ Beat, and Limbeck) went there and knew “it was no joke.”
“They have developed a ‘Minnesota Model’ approach to rehab that’s more intensive and involved than some facilities,” says Schoepp. “They treat the whole person and not just the addiction.”
Despite this intense treatment, he felt comfortable there, largely in part to the brotherhood he felt with other patients at the Osborne unit where he was being treated.
“When you’ve fought the same battles as the guy next to you, you can’t help but feel a deep connection,” he says. “I don’t want to romanticize it, though.”
Music was his additional form of therapy. He says he left his phone at home and brought a CD player Walkman and listened to music whenever he could.
“I cranked Queen and Cat Stevens and found strength through the music I grew up loving,” he says. “It was not my intent to write any songs when I was there, but my reflections came clearest in lyrical form.”
One of the songs that spawned from this experience was “Wildfire”. We’re excited to put the spotlight on the song for you today.
Below, you can watch the song’s powerful video, which was filmed at night in various locations in Milwaukee and features shots of Schoepp and Milwaukee fire-eater and instructor Abby Wildfire. Schoepp says in a press release that it was “filmed on 16mm and directed by Nels Lindquist, I have to say I’ve never been prouder of a music video.”
Schoepp says the song helped set the tone for the rest of the album. It was the first track he wrote where he “turned the focus inward and tried to capture what I was going through at the moment.”
“It spoke to the madness I was going through and I felt a need to be real and raw,” he says. “It’s sort of the human condition, always wanting to move forward and seek. And then I think we live in an age of anxiety. America feels like a high-speed chase that you’re on, but I’m trying to learn to slow down. I’m not been doing a lot of reading in Buddhism and trying to slow my role a bit. It’s not easy.”
With lyrics such as “I’m a wildfire/burning out of control” and “I’m a high-speed driver/but I got nowhere to go”, Schoepp lets his vulnerability hang naked while expressing his desire to find a better pace of life.
I’ve always been a fan of Schoepp’s authenticity and honesty as a lyricist, but the song and album hit on a different level. It’s been great to watch him grow and develop as a singer and I admire his courage to turn the spotlight inward. Further enhancing the song is a great cinematic, retro-sounding and catchy rock and roll melody driven by drum machines and synths. It has engaging sonic twists and turns including a short spree of hand clapping. I look forward to hearing it live as I think it’ll be an emotional moment during his live show.
Speaking of live shows, Schoepp says that he went on tour shortly after getting out of rehab and began writing the album’s songs after returning home.
“I’ve had a hard time slowing down,” he says. “I’ve been on the run for a lot of my life.”
He decided to focus on the new song ideas and set aside those he had previously written. “They didn’t speak to where I was at that moment,” Schoepp says. “The album captures a specific period in my early recovery where I felt the need to be honest.”
“Destigmatizing these issues is a part of getting through them, he continues. “It’s harder to avoid it than just to address it head on.”
While the songs deal with a serious subject matter – including the Black Sabbath-like “Satan Is Real (Satan Is a Sackler)” that rages against the Sackler family’s role in the opioid epidemic – Schoepp offers glimmers of hope and light amongst the darkness.
“Recovery is a challenge, but it doesn’t have to be gloom and doom,” he says. “There’s a middle way with it all…Art is no doubt therapeutic. It’s a way to channel the darkness into light.”
Schoepp recorded the songs in a California church with the help of Mike Viola and Tyler Chester.
“Mike is a pop guru who has worked with artists I love like Fountains of Wayne and Andrew Bird. He has a great energy and vision, which helped me zone into what kind of album I wanted to make,” says Schoepp.
“We were in the church choir room, and it was a really inspiring space…We would sit in a circle around a drum machine, set an arrangement and split off into isolation rooms to play along to it live to tape. The core of the record was done live to capture a performance, rather than just layer and multitrack.”
He says that the late Ozzy Osbourne, who also received treatment at the same hospital, was a major inspiration for him. “Ozzy was a spirit guide for much of the album,” Schoepp says. “Ozzy’s vulnerable spirit made him a heavy metal healer. He approached his art without fear.”
Adds Schoepp, “I’ve had my share of highs and lows since getting sober. It’s not a linear healing journey. It’s a daily reprieve.”
How success as musician can lead to challenges:
You’re always chasing that next song. You’re always chasing that next. You’re always chasing that next song and it can feel like chasing your own tail.
Whenever you kind of succeed in one way, you’re always holding yourself up to that standard. And music is an art. It’s not a sport. It’s not something where you do have to hit a quota or you don’t have to, it’s not a race. But I do feel like we live in this age that has really made people more anxious and there’s just so much going on in the world and it’s easy to lose your footing. Addiction can be a real distraction and you kind of get caught in a web of your own bullshit. And that’s the danger there.
Music is one of the few jobs where you show up and it’s almost expected that you partake in drinking or otherwise. It’s one of the very few jobs where it’s okay to be a mess, and that’s dangerous for sure. So, it’s not been totally easy to get back into the flow of it all, to be honest.
Writing “Kentucky Derby”:
I was at a hotel in Florida and this guy at 9 AM was drinking a Corona by the pool, and he offered me a Corona, and I said, “no, I’m good. Thank you so much.” And I said, “I’m working through this.” And we had this beautiful conversation, and it led me to writing the song “Kentucky Derby”.
It’s kind of about that race, but always kind of feeling like you’re stuck in this race. I think that song is really representative of that, and the one that I feel most connected to on the album because it’s about someone who has really put everything on the line and has really put themselves out there and has kind of taken a lot of risks and gambled a lot of themselves. I think that was a song where I inhabited this idea. I just wrote it all free form, all in one sitting, flowing stream of consciousness.
On Writing “Satan Is Real (Satan Is a Sackler)”:
It’s heavy musically and heavy from a social standpoint. The opioid epidemic ravaged America, and there are a few people who would say that it hasn’t affected them or a loved one. And this Sackler family, one of their names is literally Mortimer and they have blood on their hands, and they normalized a path of healing that created a lot of addiction and pain and horror. The courts found them liable for all of their sins. And there’s no dollar amount that can sort of patch over that or make it right. And I think part of me just really felt a need to say something because I really feel for the survivors and the families and the victims, and like I said, the opioid epidemic, it touched me in a way that it caught me in the crossfire of trying to treat chronic back pain.
And it’s a crossfire of when you take one of these pills, it feels like the answer in the moment to all your problems. And it’s ironic, these opioid medications are necessary for many people. I don’t want to villainize them and don’t want to come from a holier than now perspective with recovery because I think that a lot of people can handle themselves just fine. That wasn’t the case with me, but I do think it felt right to say something.
On Performing The New Songs Live:
It was really difficult to lean into that pain. And it still is. When I sing these songs, it’s not easy because I’m not inhabiting a character and I’ve done that so much in my career where I sing about other people. To break down those walls and really lock into what’s going on internally is difficult. It’s very difficult because I haven’t been all that vulnerable in the past in my songwriting. It was really standing naked there. It was like standing stark naked with your truth. That’s not easy.
You can follow and listen to Trapper at the following links:
His website: TrapperSchoepp.com/
Facebook: Facebook.com/trapperschoepp/
Instagram: Instagram.com/trapperschoepp/
YouTube: Youtube.com/@TrapperSchoepp
Apple Music: Trapper Schoepp on Apple Music
Spotify: Trapper Schoepp on Spotify
Bandcamp: Trapperschoepp1.bandcamp.com/
You can find a list of Trapper’s tour dates here.
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.
