A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST MID-PANDEMIC
FROM FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX
Simone Schmidt wrote their newest album, due out this spring, long before COVID hit, but the tracks are prescient: “It’s about this moment of feeling like you’re on the brink of collapse, and then collapse comes”
For nearly a year, indie country musician Simone Schmidt’s days have been exhausting. They wake up at 5 a.m. to respond to emails sent to the Encampment Support Network (ESN), a group they started last year, when the pandemic drove people from unsafe shelters into the parks. Then it’s another hour or so attempting to navigate the city’s maze-like bureaucratic system so residents’ tents aren’t removed. By 10 a.m., they’re off to deliver supplies to the sites – food and hot drinks, sleeping bags and first aid kits – and make notes of what residents need for tomorrow. Once Schmidt gets home to their Bickford Park apartment, they edit videos for ESN’s Instagram or practise guitar or do a workout by fitness celebrity Jillian Michaels. There’s usually an ESN meeting in the evening. They’re in bed by 10 p.m. or so. Then it starts all over again the next day.
This is not what Schmidt’s days were supposed to look like. Pre-COVID, the plan was to tour in support of their new album, Fiver and the Atlantic School of Spontaneous Composition. But shows were cancelled and the album’s release was pushed back until this spring – and soon, they were volunteering for 14-hour days with ESN.
In March, Schmidt organized a small group to protest the demolition of encampments under the Gardiner. “At the time, so many musicians and artists I knew were stuck at home and lamenting the loss of their experience, and then there were all these people who weren’t able to go indoors,” says Schmidt. “It seemed to me that it would make sense to organize and do eviction defence.” The group’s scope expanded and they began bringing basic supplies to the encampment sites and advocating for affordable housing.
This isn’t actually a pivot for Schmidt: Activism and music have long been the two main pillars in their life. They have organized with grassroots groups involved in racial justice, Indigenous sovereignty and migrant rights, and have volunteered with housing and anti-poverty campaigns since their late teens, in the mid-2000s. They were brought up in the Catholic left and although they rejected the church, the importance of social justice was deeply ingrained. They also grew up under Mike Harris’s Common Sense Revolution and participated in protests against the Progressive Conservatives. “I grew up thinking of organizing as one of many ways of responding to whatever’s happening – just as music is,” says Schmidt.
Around the same time Schmidt was organizing in solidarity with the support staff at their high school, they were also discovering their love for country music. As a teenager, they would use a fake ID to sneak into the Silver Dollar to see Crazy Strings rip bluegrass on Wednesdays. Shortly after, their brother introduced them to American country singer George Jones, “whose voice just gutted me,” says Schmidt. Listening mostly to traditional country from the 1940s to 1980s, they were drawn to the genre’s emotional storytelling, honest voices, wordplay and strong musical structures, sonic elements that Schmidt honours and subverts in their own songwriting today.
“I just remind myself that one blessing of songwriting is the space to express complexities and emotions that are lost in sloganeering”
But actually entering the country music industry, first as the roots band One Hundred Dollars and later as part of psych rock unit The Highest Order and their solo project, Fiver, was complicated. When Schmidt first started playing country music in 2007, they remember calling out the industry as a white boys’ club – and subsequently losing opportunities to work with agents and labels. They experienced first-hand how being outspoken about your politics wasn’t considered cool or marketable at the time, and how “singing about queerness in country music put you on the fringe.” These early experiences are part of why they’ve been so unsettled to see musicians adopting progressive language as a form of marketing. “It’s frustrating to see white musicians in Canada who have never paid attention to racial justice feel compelled to say, ‘Black Lives Matter’ through a black square on their Instagram profiles without interrogating how they’re upholding white supremacy.”
Schmidt believes that activism should be led by the experiences of those who are directly impacted and that individuals “shouldn’t take credit for movement work in general.” It’s an ethos that contrasts the type of hashtag activism that’s exploded over the past year on social media. This belief is also why Schmidt “recoils from having any evidence of organizing when [they] talk about being a musician,” they explain. “But ultimately, whatever life I’m leading can be heard in the music. I just remind myself that one blessing of songwriting is the space in which to express complexities and emotions that are lost in sloganeering.”
That’s especially true of their forthcoming album on You’ve Changed Records. They wrote these tracks while working on 2017’s Audible Songs from Rockwood, a conceptual album sung from the perspective of real women imprisoned in a Kingston asylum in the 1850s. The songwriting for Audible Songs was rigorous and rigid, so when Schmidt felt exhausted by the narrow scope, they’d take a break and write about the contemporary world – and the lyrics, disguised by humour, wordplay and double meanings, were often political.
“I like the poetry of song because it allows me to step outside of the black-and-white thinking that high-stakes organizing can often encourage,” says Schmidt. “Songs allow for the beauty and humour of multiple readings – these things are essential to my survival.”
On “Sick Gladiola,” a modernized version of the old country trope of the small-town boy who goes to the city seeking fame and fortune, Schmidt muses, “Do you ever wonder what might have come of Alberta if her finest children weren’t forcefully purged to the coast?” On “Paid in Pride” Schmidt sings about the aspirations and struggles of a trophy wife. And on the album’s first single, “Leaning Hard (On My Peripheral Vision),” to be released in early March, Schmidt criticizes politicians who use progressive rhetoric calling for change while maintaining the status quo. “It’s about the idea that people can say whatever they want, use the language of reconciliation and feminism, and actually enact policy that further dispossesses people.”
To flesh out the songs, Schmidt worked with talented improvisers Nick Dourado (lap steel, piano, vibraphone, saxophone), Jeremy Costello (bass, synth, vocals) and Bianca Palmer (drums, percussion). Over three songwriting sessions in rural Nova Scotia, Schmidt taught the group the songs – some fully formed, others just choruses or verses – and recorded the trio as they jammed freely. Re-recordings of these original improvisations would end up on the final songs, as well as new jams from the studio.
This process was arduous, but it reinvigorated Schmidt. “Dourado, Costello and Palmer’s approaches to music changed my life. They allowed me to push melodies and the vocal work in a way I had never been able to before.”
For the most part, Schmidt’s hectic COVID routine has kept them grounded – or as they put it, kept them “from fucking losing it” – during these chaotic, uncertain times. But recently the relentless grind of being ESN’s operations coordinator and de facto liaison between the city’s various departments and encampment residents is taking its toll. They’re also grieving a record cycle that will be very different from what they had envisioned when they were recording these songs three years ago. “I spend a lot of time making records that sound as good as they can and then the notion that you’re supposed to [listen] to it through an iPhone speaker in your room feels very strange,” says Schmidt. “I love to tour and play shows with my friends. I really miss it in a way that I could never have imagined. So how do I feel now? I’m totally confused and unmoored.”
At the same time, Schmidt recognizes that how they were living pre-COVID wasn’t sustainable either. They were working too hard for too little, and were seeing their musical mentors and friends being pushed out of Toronto due to rising rents. Paradoxically, the musicians who stayed were forced to tour incessantly to support themselves. Their upcoming album was written before the pandemic, but the overall theme feels prescient. “It’s about this moment of feeling like you’re on the brink of collapse, and then collapse comes,” says Schmidt. “Some of us remain suspended with an amount of security, [while] more people in our vicinity are in a state of collapse.”
In retrospect, nearly a year into the pandemic, Schmidt realizes the reason they threw themselves single-mindedly into ESN is because “it felt like the crisis was one of the only certain things.” ESN is now a 180-member network of neighbourhood committees that are close to operating autonomously, which means that Schmidt can slowly take a step back from some of the day-to-day operations and begin to shift their focus back toward creative work.
We don’t live that far from one another, but because of the stay-at-home order and increasing case counts, we’ve been doing our interviews over video chat over the last weeks of January. In the background, I can see pieces of paper stuck to a wall. Schmidt tells me they’re poems by the American poet George Wallace. His great-granddaughter is making a film about him and asked Schmidt to write songs based on his works.
It’s one of the creative projects Schmidt currently has on the go. Another is a painting for their nephew, which depicts a collage of colourful buildings with big clownish grins. “If you were eight and you got this from your genderless uncle-aunt, would you be like, ‘What the fuck?’” Schmidt asks me. I admit the faces are a bit scary. They laugh and put it away.
And they’ve been writing a bit throughout the pandemic, too, though it’s sometimes unsatisfying. “My writing is so succinct right now because I have to do so much clear communication [with ESN],” they say. “I don’t like it. I can’t exit the imperative mode.”
Schmidt goes through times of feeling overwhelmed by the ways COVID has exacerbated the opioid and housing crises, and the government’s indifference in addressing either. “But I’m also grappling with loss in every aspect of life, including my collective musical practice, which felt vocational, and was also my main means of coping,” says Schmidt.
Without music, a part of their identity was lost. Eventually, those pieces will return – like jam sessions, tours, new songs – but Schmidt also recognizes that their life will never be the same.
“I think this is just the beginning of our new life, and I’m just trying to get strong and orient myself. Who knows what that means for a writing practice? Songwriting is incidental to life, and it usually comes in ways that are unpredictable,” says Schmidt. “So far my experience is that trauma is always left to be grappled with consciously and subconsciously, and most definitely that impacts life – and my writing too.”