Q&A: Camille Schmidt is Learning What It Means To Be a ‘Good Person’ On Debut EP
READY TO TAKE FLIGHT — Camille Schmidt releases her debut EP, Good Person, after years of collecting songs and building the strength to share them. The 16-minute project is brimming with the type of honesty that comes from so deep within the subconscious that it feels almost like a dream. Uniquely positioned with an MFA in fiction writing, Schmidt’s confessional lyricism floats atop a current of winding acoustic-driven arrangements, occasionally submerging into swells of heavier production.
The Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter has used music, along with other forms of creative writing, as a means of understanding the material world, the world she has created in her mind, and the bridge between the two for the majority of her life. Growing up in the middle of the woods in upstate New York, Schmidt found herself curious about nature, spending hours connecting with the plants and animals she came into contact with. Examinations of nature continue to be explored in lyrics throughout the EP, notably on “Bumblebee Drinks Lavender” and “Bird on a Telephone Wire.”
Good Person was recorded at Phil Weinrobe’s Sugar Mountain Studio in Brooklyn. The entire EP came together in four days, with the song arrangements created in the studio and recorded predominantly live. Weinrobe, a frequent collaborator of Adrianne Lenker, uses this unique recording technique to get artists in “the pocket,” or a flow state, where the music can take control and the musicians can surrender to the process. The EP features guitar from Sam Talmadge, drums from Pele Greenberg, and bass by Eli Heath.
Schmidt performed an EP release show at Purgatory in Brooklyn earlier this month. Taking the stage with her band, the keen songwriter was able to emulate what it might have been like in the studio recording these songs. She played the entire EP, save for the piano ballad “Red and Blue,” along with unreleased and highly anticipated tracks from her upcoming album, currently being recorded in LA.
We sat down with Schmidt in Crown Heights, Brooklyn to chat about the EP over an artichoke frittata and burrata salad. Read the interview below.
LUNA: The EP is titled Good Person. What does that mean to you in this context?
SCHMIDT: It comes from the song “Bumblebee Drinks Lavender,” where the lyric is “If I wasn’t addicted to the idea of god, tree, friend, mother, and good person / I could let myself love and be loved all the way through.” I’m not a fan of when albums are named after a track title, but I feel like there is an idea in [“Bumblebee Drinks Lavender”] that relates to the EP as a whole. A lot of my life has been spent toying with the idea of what it means to be a good person, not necessarily in terms of morality. I frequently found myself trying to become whatever a good person means in any situation, which has stopped me from being my full authentic self. Now I want to be a good person according to my own internal compass rather than the compass that was shown to me when I was younger. This album is a search for an internal compass that directs toward good [people] and holds that with all of its complexities.
There’s a lyric in Tomberlin’s “Tap” where she says, “I’m not a singer, I’m just someone who’s guilty.” When she talks about that song, she talks about how as musicians we put blame on other people in our songs. I think that this is actually an important thing for us to be able to do in music because when we write and sing we get to be in this childlike state. We don’t always get a space to say anything with no filter in our constructed society, but at the same time, it’s important to reflect on your own complicity in all of these situations. When I first sit down to write, I will let whatever comes out come out but then at some point, I’ll try to make some room for the complexities of each situation. As my grandmother likes to say, “It takes two to tango.”
LUNA: You tell quite a few stories on this EP through the imagery of nature. What drew you to this form of storytelling?
SCHMIDT: Stick with me, I promise this will come together. In the Bible, the description of God creating the earth and lightness and darkness is kind of like somebody describing the experience from conception to childhood to adulthood. When there’s lightness and darkness, I feel like that’s when you’re in the womb and seeing shadows. Then there is the birth, which is scary. Then, childhood is like the Garden of Eden, and then there is a point when you’re ejected from the Garden by realizing you’re a sexual being.
There is also the realization that your parents make mistakes and are not the fantasy of who you thought they were. The “god,” aka your parents, has an angry side. Thinking about that, my Eden was the place I grew up. There were a lot of things that were difficult in my childhood. Most of the beautiful moments, and when I felt the most peace, were when I was wandering barefoot around the 20-acre woods where I grew up — smelling plants, touching leaves, figuring out what plants I could eat, learning the smell of a caterpillar versus the smell of a ladybug. There was a whole inner world I developed there that was a safe place for me to go into when other things were hard. That’s something I still come back to in my writing.
For “Bumblebee Drinks Lavender,” I was in Berlin for the summer with a friend, but I was experiencing these intense waves of depression and anxiety. I was sitting on the terrace of the place we were staying and looking at this lavender plant that the bumblebees were coming to and I was thinking how crazy it is that they get to experience that. How powerful is it that they get to fulfill their purpose in a way that brings them so much joy? I definitely have a fantasy of nature in certain ways that don’t necessarily account for all of the horrors of nature.
There’s also a philosophical place my mind goes because I have this sense that nature has all of the answers. Not necessarily answers in the way that anything can be solved, but I mean there are parallels to us. We feel so disconnected from everything around us but we are no different from every part of it, even the things we build. We act like phones aren’t nature, and in a way, they aren’t, but we are nature, so how could we create anything that isn’t nature?
We don’t look at the hive a bee makes and try to argue that it’s not nature, but rather its home or place of work. When I think about that it makes me love the things we create. Going back to the biblical connection, even phones I think are a form of consciousness that we’ve created in our own image the same way God has created everything in his image, theoretically. It makes me feel connected to myself when I feel disconnected.
LUNA: “Fakeout Ending” is a standout track on the EP. Can you talk about the process of recording that?
SCHMIDT: “Fakeout Ending” is the oldest song on the EP, and it’s a song I didn’t expect to record. Everything was recorded live with a band, and Phil Weinrobe, the producer, told me not to come up with a tracklist. He was like, “Every day when you come in, just play whatever song you want to play.” We recorded in four days, and on day three I was deciding what song I wanted to sing. I hadn’t thought about [“Fakeout Ending”], I didn’t think we would play it because it was from so long ago. Then it came into my head so played it and it felt so good to play with the band. It felt exactly the way I feel and have felt for so long about the things I make and put into the world.
It captures the feeling of writing a song and how that song can become a container for all the things I’m feeling in a way that is so exciting. I’m able to finally make myself understandable to myself. But what used to happen was as soon, as I showed the song to someone and felt they didn’t like it, the song would be ruined for me in a way that was hard to come back from. It would make me not want to play the song anymore, even though it was so meaningful to me. This was frustrating because songwriting was supposed to be this thing that was healing but then I couldn’t allow it to heal me or be the thing I created it to be because I was combining my eyes with the eyes of others looking at it.
[“Fakeout Ending”] felt so true to my experience of songwriting that I realized I wanted it to be on the EP. This is what I was going through on a meta-level. I sort of put it out there as a reverse hex or charm, for me to remember that it’s so easy to ruin the things you like by showing them to people. I wanted to be forced to come back to this song to confront it over and over and decide not to let other people’s perception of my music ruin it for me.
LUNA: This was your first time working with a producer and other musicians in a studio. How did you get to a place where you were comfortable enough to do that?
SCHMIDT: When I graduated college in 2018, I moved into a house in Brooklyn with other musicians. There were like seven or eight of us, and everybody had gone to music school. They were such talented people and that was both amazing for me growth-wise and also so scary. I had such bad imposter syndrome. During the first two years living there, I spent so much time writing music in my room, not showing anyone. When the pandemic hit, there wasn’t a lot to do so I was like, “Maybe you guys could practice your instruments to a song I wrote?”
Eventually, I got a little more comfortable and I started playing shows. I don’t remember the first show I played; I was in fight or flight. Over time, I got more comfortable, began playing live with my band, and decided I wanted to record the music we were making. I was talking with my friend from college, Theo, and he was like, “I just saw Adrianne Lenker’s producer [Phil Weinrobe] posted on Instagram that he has some open time in his studio and is looking to record with people he hasn't recorded.” So Theo pretended to be my manager and cold-emailed Phil and sent him my music and Phil was like, “Yeah, I would love to work together.”
Theo had heard me play a few times and for whatever reason liked what he heard from me in college and was like, “Hey, I want to practice my filmmaking — can I just come take videos of you singing?” He came over a few times, I think this was in 2020. This was the most depressed I had ever been, but it was this beautiful moment where I felt so supported. I’m still so grateful.
LUNA: That early support is something so special. What was the experience like in the studio?
SCHMIDT: Being in the studio was nerve-wracking, and even listening back to some of the songs I can hear that in my voice a little bit. At that point, I was still focused on my voice sounding good, because I had this thing in my mind where I thought I had a bad voice and had to work really hard to make it sound good. As opposed to what I am doing now, which is just singing in a way that feels physically good.
When I went into the studio, Phil and I had been working for a few months leading up to it. I would send him songs and he would give me suggestions on edits to make. We talked a bit in the weeks leading up and he was like, “Don’t have a tracklist. Just have a bunch of songs that you could do and don’t show any of your songs to your band because we want you guys to come up with arrangements on the spot and for everything to feel really in the moment and of the moment.”
Then on the first day, he told me to play whatever song I wanted to play and the band would learn it. I was so nervous; I sang so quietly, that everybody had to come closer. When I finished, he instructed everybody to pick up their instruments and try things out. We would work through it a bit, he would give notes, then he would be like, “Okay, let’s record,” and we would play through a few times and he would decide when we got it.
We couldn’t listen, and we would just move on to the next song. I think it was good that I couldn’t listen to anything back because I would have been self-critical. He was obsessed with us getting into “the pocket,” so we would essentially just play until we were in a flow state and then we would record from there. We recorded 10 songs in four days like that. Then I got the mixes back and on two songs; we didn’t really get what I wanted.
LUNA: Was that disappointing for you?
SCHMIDT: It was really disappointing when it happened because I had this fantasy, and because I couldn’t hear the songs back, it allowed for this fantasy of what the songs could sound like to build. Listening to those songs now, I think they’re fine. I’m not as critical anymore, but they weren’t what I was looking for sound-wise. I also was still learning what I wanted and didn’t want in the studio. We were moving really quickly and sometimes I had the language, but other times I didn’t know how to verbalize what I wanted. Now, I feel more confident in my ability to say that something isn’t working.
So there were a few songs that needed to be rerecorded, and I did that but it still didn’t feel right in part because they were recorded in a different moment than these original songs, they had a different feel. So the project ended up being an EP rather than an album. Looking back I’m so happy with this because it became quite clear pretty quickly that Good Person was really an EP, while the project I’m working on now is an album. To use language from the EP, it really did feel like I was a bird on a telephone wire and now it feels like I’m taking off. The process of making Good Person was so fun, though. Those four days were some of the most fun I’ve had in my life, I’m not kidding. It felt like we were finger painting in the best way.
LUNA: Do you think you’ll record the album in a similar way?
SCHMIDT: It’ll be different. I’m halfway through making the album. With this album, I wanted to co-produce it. I feel like it’s fun for the pendulum to swing in a different direction. It’s not live at all. It’s individually tracked in a way that gives us a lot of control over each sound. It’s much more electronic which is really exciting to me. I might like to do a live album again at some point but right now this feels really good.
LUNA: On top of songwriting, you’ve also been writing fiction for the majority of your life. How do the two modes of storytelling inform each other?
SCHMIDT: There’s often something I’m doing in my fiction that I want to do but don’t understand how [to do it] yet in my songwriting, or the other way around, and I feel like they are speaking to each other. The main genres I write in fiction are surrealism and magical realism, and I’ve come to that in the past two years. I was writing … realism in college and at the beginning of grad school. Now, my stories are about people turning into trees. Music sometimes feels freer than fiction because I didn’t spend six years of my life in school learning about songwriting. I felt like I could say anything I wanted in songwriting in a way that I couldn’t in fiction.
In “Bird on a Telephone Wire,” I talk about drinking a potion and turning into a bird, which is a kind of transfiguration I found myself exploring two years later [in fiction]. The main connection between the two is that I will come up with a phrase and not know which form I want to explore it in. One of those is the first line of “Bird on a Telephone Wire,” which is “I’ve lived my whole life in shame like a child in the corner back turned away.” I originally wanted to use it for fiction but it already had a rhyme in it so I went with it and it sort of unlocked the rest of the song for me. A lot of my fiction and songwriting comes from things I overhear on the street.
LUNA: Knowing what you got out of the formal training you have in fiction, would you consider taking a class on songwriting ever?
SCHMIDT: I signed up for the Adrianne Lenker songwriting class and went to the first session, but I realized I’m at a point where I don’t want anyone telling me what to do, even if it’s just suggestions or gentle guidance. For so long I was in a phase where I was like, “What’s the right thing for me to do?” so I could get an A+ in every aspect of my life. Now I feel the opposite, and I’m in the rebellious phase that I never got to have. I’m going to write exactly what I want and nobody is going to tell me what to do. Maybe at some point, it could be fun. But right nowI have a lot to get out and I’m finding the answers to most of my questions about both songwriting and life from a place within me. It’s a place I haven’t had access to in a long time. And it feels good to be here.
