Milwaukee singer/songwriter Wolfgang Schaefer has a new record out. It's understated. On the disc itself there is only his name. On the front cover, there is a photo of a typewriter with a sheet of paper, mostly blank. Behind it are some books, mostly unidentified.
On the back there is a nearly identical picture, but one that lets a little more information slip: song titles, the names of musicians and the identities of some of the books.
The five songs lasered into the CD are like that, too. They are quiet, simply adorned with acoustic guitars, some bass, banjo, percussion and a keyboard. But even that list makes it sound busier than it really is.
No, Schaefer isn't aiming for the kitchen sink approach. He's written a range of folk-ish songs that aren't dull and certainly aren't samey. While "The Mirror and The Lamp" swoons with what sounds like a bowed cello and "Love In Losaida" lopes in early Dylan fashion, a song like "This Time Is" lays a cinematic melody over a simple, slowed, reverb-laden beat.
While Schaefer is content to let his music speak simply and softly, he himself has got a lot to say about his work. So, when sitting down to write this, I decided to let him tell you his own story, with only gentle prodding from me.
OnMilwaukee.com: Tell us a bit about your background. Are you a Milwaukee native?
Wolfgang Schaefer: I am a Milwaukee native. I grew up here, went to high school here. I always loved it here. I breathed easier here. And no matter where I was, however long I stayed, I was always from Milwaukee. I mean I never became detached from Milwaukee.
OMC: And the road to this CD, is it your first?
WS: It is. First of many. But it wasn't a road with a car or a bicycle and a knapsack so much as it was a skydive. With no lesson. Like, maybe I'll figure out how to open this thing. Smile, jump, hopefully you can hug someone when you hit the ground, where ever it is.
OMC: Do you perform with the same band that's on the disc?
WS: No. When I started, it was strictly a solo thing, the performing. Me and a guitar and a couple harmonicas. The guys who played on the disc are some of the best people I know and some of the best musical minds I know. I was really fortunate to have them contribute. But everybody on the recording is doing their own thing in some capacity, making art in some way, playing music or writing novels. Or both. Beautiful things.
I was tentative at first to enlist other people to round out the live shows. I had never played with other people before, and playing solo developed into kind of a thing, like I was just supposed to play these lonely songs alone.
But I remember playing for the first time with my brother, Benjamin, who's this incredible resource of percussive elements, and music in general. He can do anything, really, but what got me was his textural addition, his subtlety and atmospheric expansion.
He was so dialed in to what I was trying to express through these songs that when we finally played together, just initially screwing around, seeing what comes of it, I was floored. I remember thinking, holy shit, that's how this is supposed to sound! That's what this song is, like I was playing it all wrong. And he was really jazzed about it, too.
So we just sort of decided at that point that we should be doing this together. But we were living in different cites. He was living in Nashville at the time, playing in another band, and I was still in Chicago.
We played a show last April or May in Milwaukee at Art Bar in Riverwest. It was our first show together. And I don't know when exactly, I can't remember, but somewhere around then we looked at each other and nodded and sort of wordlessly made this decision. A couple months later, we went to Nashville, packed him up, went to Chicago, packed me up, and moved to Milwaukee.
And that's how we perform right now. Just the two of us. I play guitar and harmonicas and sing and he adds the percussion, with this unique, stripped down kit, and generally with just his hands. He never uses sticks. Maybe the occasional brush or mallet, but it's essentially the two of us vibing off each other, which I love. It lends a lot of dynamism to the shows and gives the songs the opportunity to change and to evolve with each performance.
WS: I moved away from Milwaukee for college. I went to the University of Arizona, studied literature and fiction writing, and then moved to Chicago, initially to write stage plays and fiction. After school, a group of us, these writer friends of mine from Arizona and San Francisco and other places -- poets, playwrights, story-writers -- moved to Chicago to keep writing. Writing, writing, writing, it's all we wanted to do.
We were immersed in art, meeting other writers, but also actors and dancers and directors and musicians and visual and performance artists. We were obsessed by it. We lived for months, at least four of us, in a two bedroom apartment in Wicker Park, working at coffee shops and restaurants and where ever, and stayed up all night reading and writing in this mad, giddy-fest of a workshop, sleeping on couches and floors and recliners, if at all. I'd tip-toe out at like four in the morning to go open this cafe where I'd make coffee and write story ideas and scenes on receipt rolls. It was something else, really.
But eventually we started taking different jobs and moved into different places and, personally, I hit a wall. A wall or something like a wall. I wasn't writing, almost ever. I took a job at a law firm, thinking I'd want to pursue a career in the field. I thought I should go to law school, set up a life for myself as a lawyer of some indiscriminate, ignoble practice, so why not grab a job as a paralegal, stash away a bunch of knowledge and experience and cash?
So I did that for a couple of years, working for a firm in Chicago that had the worst of intentions. I was participating in something I didn't believe in, feeling like a criminal, and doing repulsive, monotonous, robotic work for an inherently evil corporate defense firm, and it really took a toll on me. They paid a lot of money, which seemed nice at first, I guess. But it wore on me. So of course, toward the end of my tenure there, I started getting really antsy.
I had years of undocumented experiences and unwritten stories birthing themselves and then festering and rotting in my head and I needed to do something about it. I realized at some point that I could do a good portion of my job with a Blackberry pretty much anywhere. I couldn't take days off at a time to get back into writing, but I needed that outlet. Soon I discovered that I could hang out in the john with a couple notebooks, write as long as I needed, undisturbed and still reply to e-mails.
One day while sitting there, notebook on my naked lap in the bathroom on the 56th floor of the Sears Tower, I scribbled some words that turned into the first song I had ever written. And then it was on, that light switch. I started writing incessantly, just like that, in the bathroom at work. It was my favorite place in the city of Chicago. The bathroom at work. My sordid little secret.
And I had a beautiful guitar, this old Martin my father bought a long time ago and passed down to me. I knew how to play, sort of. I used to played Bob Dylan and Jack Elliot and Woody Guthrie songs, songs I was raised on. I'd play them to myself to pass the time, but I never played seriously or ever cared to write songs. I just never weighed that option.
And now I was constructing words and stories and characters with music in mind. Phrases that came to me had melodic flows and cadence and rhyme schemes and weird old rhetorical features. It was all I could think about.
And then I got laid off. And I had these songs I had written while shirking the living devil and sitting on the toilet at work. And I recorded them. Whenever and where ever. Some parts in Chicago, in kitchens and bedrooms and studios, some parts in Nashville at my brother's house, some parts in my parents' basement in Milwaukee, where ever there was a microphone and something to plug it into.
And any time my brother came back north he would help me realize my ideas and engineer and record. And this EP is what came out of it.
OMC: Are these from sessions that produced more music that will be released?
WS: The songs on this EP were selected for the relationships I felt they shared with each other. The songs, I think, develop a certain personality when you play them enough or hear them enough. Or at least, I suppose, maybe more truthfully, we assign aspects of a personality to them.
But regardless, you can see how the songs interact with other songs. How they move along together. How one sets up the next or how they might surprise you with contrast. I thought these five constructions operated well within that framework, the framework that demands continuity while simultaneously celebrating the seeming drifts.
And yeah, there are all kinds of songs, written and unwritten, that will find their way to another release quite soon. We're working on a larger project right now and I couldn't be more excited about it.
OMC: You've got an impressive list of upcoming gigs. Have you been playing far and wide for a while or is this your first excursion?
WS: This is actually the first branching out I've embarked upon. I spent a year and a half or so playing clubs, never straying too far from Chicago and Milwaukee. And I'm ready as hell to take it to foreign ears. I'll be traveling with my brother and with Pezzettino, who philosophically meshes quite well with our sentiment. There's nothing we'd rather be doing.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
