Photo credit: Kayla Jean
Trapper Schoepp
It’s fortunate that Trapper Schoepp enjoys discussing Bob Dylan so much, because he’s had to talk about him even more than usual this album cycle. The most headline-grabbing song on Schoepp’s new album Primetime Illusion is its closer, “On, Wisconsin,” a love letter to the Badger State that Dylan wrote 57 years ago but never published or recorded.
When Schoepp read about the song’s handwritten lyrics going to auction in 2017, he immediately knew that he wanted to finish and record it. “It just seemed serendipitous, me being someone who is a student of folk music and someone who has loved and celebrated Wisconsin culture for 28 years,” Schoepp said. Even more serendipitously: Dylan’s camp responded to what Schoepp describes as his manager’s Hail-Mary attempts to get Dylan to sign off on the song’s release, making Schoepp quite likely the youngest musician ever to share a songwriting credit with the folk legend.
That may sound like a daunting distinction, but Schoepp says he viewed putting his own touch on Dylan’s song more as an opportunity than a challenge. “That’s the whole idea of the folk process, extending the line, and that’s an idea that Dylan has spoken at length about,” Schoepp says. “Dylan has said that all of these songs are already there; he’s just brushing the dust off of them. So people have asked, ‘Wasn’t it a lot of pressure?’ and I say not at all. It’s folk music, really.
“Especially with this song, it’s so lighthearted, the whole tone of it reminds me of a Woody Guthrie song,” Schoepp continues. “When I saw the lyrics, I just tried to get inside the mind of the singer that wrote this song 57 years ago, and of the character that he was singing from, who was someone who was on the road, homesick and longing for Wisconsin’s finest exports: milk, cheese and beer.”
Schoepp only recently connected the dots that the date written on the upper righthand corner of the song’s lyrics says 11-20-1961, which Dylan historians will note is the same day the singer entered Columbia Recording Studio to begin recording his debut album with John Hammond. And it’s easy to see how the song might have fit in with all the other road songs and travelogues he recorded for that record. On Primetime Illusion, though, “On, Wisconsin” serves as a homecoming, and a means of grounding a great America rock ’n’ roll album in Schoepp’s backyard. Again, Schoepp notes the serendipity: Dylan opens the song in Wauwatosa, which is where Schoepp recorded the album, at Daniel Holter’s Wire & Vice studio.
Wilco’s Patrick Sansone handled production, and the result is Schoepp’s leanest, most driven record yet. Sansone was quick to jump in on guitar or piano when a song called for it—that’s him playing the baby grand on the delirious, Summerteeth-esque “Drive-Thru Divorce”—but mostly he took a less-is-more approach, encouraging Schoepp not to overwork his songs for fear of losing their spirit. “It was 10 days in the studio, no shortcuts,” Schoepp says. “Just a song a day; no bullshit. We were in and out.”
Even ahead of its Jan. 25 release, it’s not going out on much of a limb to predict that Primetime Illusion will be Schoepp’s biggest album yet. It’s received features in Rolling Stone and Billboard, and Schoepp notes that the album has already pre-sold more copies than all of his previous releases combined. But Schoepp has been around the music industry long enough now to know how fickle it is, and how quickly career momentum can disappear the moment an artist takes their foot off the pedal, so he’s preparing for a long stretch of aggressive touring behind the record.
“We’re going to be taking the ‘drive around in motorized vehicles until I lose my mind’ approach for a few years,” Schoepp says. “My manager is a marathon runner. He actually ran two marathons in a weekend once, so him and I have a marathon approach to everything, and this record in particular, because that’s the way the music industry is now. There’s very rarely a quick ascent to stardom. It’s a very, very slow burn for everyone. So we’re going to do all the classic stuff to promote the album. We know that we have to work for it.”
Trapper Schoepp plays an album release show Saturday, Feb. 2, at The Back Room at Colectivo at 8 p.m. with Nineteen Thirteen.
