Photo Credit: Destiny Frack
In recent years, Milwaukee native Erik Shicotte has come to understand the outlaw lifestyle and the words of outlaw country greats such as Waylon Jennings.
He relates to the sentiment on Jennings’ song “Working Man Blues” where he sings, “I keep my nose on the grindstone, I work hard every day/I might get a little tired on the weekend, after I draw my pay/Then I'll go back workin’, come Monday morning I’m right back with the crew/ I'll drink a little beer that evening/Sing a little bit of these working man blues.”
When he’s not performing, Shicotte is an ironworker and travels around the country building fire training towers. His guitar is usually not far away on these pop-up jobs around the country. So, after a tiring day of work, he’ll use his experiences as springboard for writing new songs.
“My songwriting is mostly a tongue and cheek account of my experiences,” Shicotte says. “I’d have to describe it as determined and introspective, but with an air of yearning and uncertainty, placated by the cornerstone of imagery and the ability to laugh at myself.
“I like to try to balance the things that hurt or are hard to understand with wordplay and different methods of structure and rhyme, perhaps as a coping mechanism to help me figure out my actual stance on what I'm writing about. The vast majority of my songs so far are about things I’ve done, felt, seen, or believed in.”
This week the singer will release his new EP Miss’ry Pacific on Shooter Jennings’s label Black Country Rock Media. The songs on the EP were written and recorded at various locations around the country (including Paradyme Studios in Madison and Shady Pines Studio in Portland, OR). He often wrote wherever his work was. He also did some work on the album virtually due to the pandemic.
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Traversing New Territory
The collection of music marked his first time “filling out the ‘band’ sound on my own songs.” He recalls discovering that on the fifth song on the EP, “Silver.” While on a job in Hillsboro, Oregon, he recorded the song to a click track on his phone of just himself and his guitar and sent it to Aaron Goodrich in Nashville.
“[Aaron] called me one day just before they all started tracking and with an eye roll from my foreman, I stumbled around my words trying to explain the noises in my head for half an hour,” he recalls. “Lacking the proximity and the vernacular, I basically told him that I just wanted to hear what they felt while playing along, which is kind of a tall order. He was very gracious and organized the players … and they tracked mostly live, coming back with a complimentary and cohesive sound for me to work with.”
“I then went into Shady Pines in Portland to record my acoustic and vocal parts for Silver, which despite COVID protocols, was effective and efficient. From there we just rinsed and repeated the same process wherever I was at the time and piecemealed the whole thing together.”
The Shepherd Express caught up with the singer recently to talk about outlaw country, his Wisconsin roots and how his non-musical jobs help inspire songs.
In what ways did outlaw country music most influence you growing up and entering into adulthood? What are a couple of your favorite memories?
Coming up I wasn’t all that immersed in the outlaw vein, though I was exposed to a lot of traditional country in the amalgam of music my folks would play. Vivid memories of rolling through the Northwoods as a child while Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline crooned remain the foundation of who I am musically. My father would pirate tracks in the earlier days of file sharing and they'd be the soundtrack of almost every drive, whether it was a grocery run or the summer trip to the Black Hills.
As I grew and changed, I began to expand and dive deeper into the traditions I was raised on (from Fleetwood Mac to The Weavers) and started to find B Sides and the catalogs of those who actually wrote the songs I’d come to know. I bought a DVD set of “The Johnny Cash Show” about the time I was getting booted out of catholic high school, which spurned my initial dive into Waylon. The freedom and escapism that came from my first real taste of Outlaw Country was crucial in that time as I bucked and kicked my way through my education. I had always known who Waylon was, but that was when I started to wonder and understand what that meant.
How has Milwaukee and Wisconsin most impacted you musically and how you approach outlaw country?
Being a ‘Sconnie is firstly very important to who I am and how I operate. The exposure to different kinds of music here is vast. The blend of cultures around Milwaukee is a symphony of diversity, even within its little pockets and cliques. I mean hell, there's still a market for polka here. You almost have to learn to appreciate a little bit of damn near everything.
As a common theme, things do tend to get more twangy the further out into the fields you go, and outlaw is more prevalent in rural Wisco. Given our propensities toward both individualism and community here (and drinkin’ for both good and bad), you find the stories and roots of a lot of what country means to me. Hard times, folks needing help, folks giving help, folks feeling stuck while having an appreciation of their situation, and of course the visions of small town midwestern glory.
What does it mean to be releasing the new EP on Shooter Jennings’s label?
It means I might just be doing something right. I feel very honored to have this thing picked up by such a legend. I've been trying to figure out what that all translates to, but at the core I'm just very proud to have created something that’s tapping the vein I want to be in. I’m a big fan of Waylon and Shooter both, and to have Jennings blood on this record is truly a dream come true.
Why did Miss’ry Pacific feel like a fitting title for this collection?
Miss’ry Pacific is just a slang name for the Missouri Pacific Railroad, which wound up claiming the title for the first song on the EP. The MoPac, as it’s affectionately known, was one of the roads that inspired the song and is one of many bygone lines to haunt my one-track mind. The EP took the name for being one of the strongest songs in the tracklist, as well as keeping the theme of movement. My good friend Ted is a talented artist as well as a bona fide railroader, so the cover and theme felt natural. Railroads occupy a good portion of my mind, and if/when we record further, that will be a recurring theme.
There’s a theme of traveling through the EP. Why was it an important theme to convey? What other themes and messages do you hope to convey with these songs?
Traveling has been part of my livelihood the last handful of years, and long before I always had a big ol’ penchant for the road. The lion's share of my writing is about people and places I’ve been, things that have happened in them, as well as my own perception of the holistic power I find when I’m traveling. Each song really has its own theme, but they're all tied together by motion.
“Miss’ry”is about hopping a train that I was born too late to ride, “Kansas City” is about heartbreak and escapism, “Niners” is about making it out of Wyoming alive, “Flint” is about yearning and trying to keep moving, “Silver” is a song of survival on the road, and “Die” is looking back at some of the things I’ve done did. Introspection, desire, love, hurt and runnin’ are the things I hope come through on the listening end.
Besides music, you’re an ironworker and you travel around the country building fire towers. How did you get interested in those jobs and how would you describe typical days? Did you learn those jobs in Milwaukee/Wisconsin?
I wound up working these towers through a guy that knew a guy basically. I’ve gotten a number of different W-2s over the years trying to make enough to keep playing guitar, but this one I feel a lot more natural doing. I actually did learn most of this particular type of construction in the state, with my first two jobs being in Oak Creek and Fond du Lac. The days are usually a lot of sweat and a lot of cussing, as most job sites are, we build them tip to tail so there’s a multitude of different types of work I might do day to day.
My favorite days are red iron days though, when we fly our structural steel and the skeleton of the building standing when you turn around and look back at the end of the day.
How do they inspire you musically? Do you think your hard work gives songs more authenticity? What do you like about working during the day, playing music in a hotel or wherever at night schedule?
The work provides experience and cognizance. I’d like to think maybe the work makes me worth it, as in that my energy conveys something genuine, whether it be imagery or understanding. In the end that isn’t really for me to decide. I write for me because I have to. I’ve come to understand that it's an instrumental part of my interaction with my heart and mind, and even if it's not always a shared sentiment with a listener, I hope it still resonates. Working like this doesn't always make for a decent writing environment between lodging and the endless march of minutes in the hour, but it does feel awfully right when I’m putting my mind to a melody.
