“Something besides yourself to love”: Austin music legend Bob Schneider on his latest album, “In a Roomful of Blood With a Sleeping Tiger”, non-autobiographical songs written with autobiographical emotion, and why he shouldn’t rule the world. BobSchneider.com Bob on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook Collective Effervescence essay by Adam Grant – New York Times Contact Nancy to set up Thank-You Project Event this fall! Don’t forget to share your GenX Halloween stories! More here… Since we talked about his ’99 song “2002” so much in our convo…here it is: Thanks as always to M. The Heir Apparent, who provides the music behind the podcast – check him out here! ***This is a rough transcription of Episode 106 of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast. It originally aired on October 5, 2021. Transcripts are created using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and there may be errors in this transcription, but we hope that it provides helpful insight into the conversation. If you have any questions or need clarification, please email dj@midlifemixtape.com *** Bob Schneider 00:01 I want to be Will Rogers at some point in my life, where there’s nobody on earth that’s not a friend of mine. Nancy Davis Kho 00:08 Welcome to Midlife Mixtape, The Podcast. I’m Nancy Davis Kho and we’re here to talk about the years between being hip and breaking one. [THEME MUSIC – “Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent] 00:32 Hey there and welcome to Episode 106 of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast, where we have so much going on today. I’m Nancy Davis Kho, and I’m the host and creator of the podcast, and there are two things I want to tell you quickly and then I promise we are getting right into the interview. First! We have another Listeners’ Stories episode coming up next time and I need your stories! You know how this works. I give you a topic, you guys write in, record yourselves, drop me a comment, and whatever prompt I give you, and this time it is: GenX Halloween. I KNOW you have something to say: your ‘70s, ‘80s, and ’90s Halloween memories. The kind of stories that our Gen Z kids and our Boomer older siblings just couldn’t relate to. Maybe it was the smell of those plastic masks that your parents bought you at the drugstore. Remember those in the cellophane boxes? Maybe it was the lady around the corner that everybody knew put razor blades in apples. Why would she spend time doing that? She was watching General Hospital. She wasn’t trying to hurt anybody. Maybe you went dressed as a mailbox, because back then being clever or weird was better than being sexy. There were no sexy mail boxes. That was maybe just me. I don’t know. Whatever the prompt GenX Halloween brings to mind, we all want to hear it! So you know the drill. You can leave me a voice mail right from your computer! You just go to https://www.speakpipe.com/MidlifeMixtape and you can start recording there with one click. I LOVE when people do this, because then I can incorporate the actual voice of our listeners in the episode. There’s a 90 second limit on these recordings, and you can re-record it as many times as you want. If you’ve got a longer story, just record that into your phone as a voice memo and email it to me. The email is dj@midlifemixtape.com and again, I love hearing these stories in your actual voice. You can send me an email with your story typed out to dj@midlifemixtape.com and I’ll share it in the episode, or you can always send me a Facebook message, a tweet or an Instagram comment. I’m @midlifemixtape So, I need those by October 12th, please, and I’ve already gotten some great ones in, including one that actually took place recently, but it was such a perfect Get Off My Lawn, Gen Z moment that it fits right into the theme. So, Gen X Halloween: what have you got? Second thing I wanted to just say briefly is that this is the time of the year when lots of people start thinking about gratitude, in the run up to Thanksgiving, and I’ve been doing a bunch of virtual and live events about my book, The Thank-You Project. But I still have room for a few more, and I love doing this. Do you have an organization, a club, a class, maybe your work colleagues, just a group that could benefit by knowing more about the power of gratitude letters? Hit me up at dj@midlifemixtape.com and we’ll get the ball rolling. I just did one with an organization called The Choose Love Movement. This is a group founded by the mom of one of the Sandy Hook victims, and it was such an honor to connect with Choose Love and its monthly book club. I love doing it. So, if you have a group and you want to talk about gratitude and thank you letters, I’m your man. Your woman. So, here’s the deal. About 10 years ago I joined a gang. It was a gang of lady humor writers and our main weaponry is the cutting remark, but a bunch of them are based in Austin and told me back then, “You have GOT to check out this musician, Bob Schneider. He’s an amazing performer based in Austin.” So, I did and I’ve been a fan of Bob ever since. Is his music funk, R&B, Latin, Americana? Yes! That and more. It’s everything, and it’s all done with such a great sense of humor, and I’ve had the chance to see Bob play live a whole slew of times in the Bay Area over the past decade. But of course, with the pandemic, concert going ground to a halt. Luckily, I am connected to this concert promoter in San Francisco named KC Turner. You can find KC at KCTurnerPresents.com and at KC Turner Presents on social. And you should, because he is always bringing great acts to the Bay Area. Anyway, I got an email from KC earlier this year saying that he was doing a backyard concert series with different artists and these were really small, like 30 people, everybody had to be fully vaccinated. And one day the email came that one of the artists he was bringing to town was Bob Schneider. I JUMPED at the chance to hear Bob in such an intimate setting, and so did my friends, and long story short: Bob Schneider played a backyard show for a bunch of us here in Oakland at the end of July, and if you go over to my Instagram @midlifemixtape, you can see some of the pics from that day. It was magical, and I finally met Bob in person for the first time, and I’m so glad he agreed to come visit us on the Midlife Mixtape Podcast. Let me tell you a little about him. Bob is as mentioned based in Austin, Texas. He is a singer-songwriter and former front man of The Ugly Americans and The Scabs. He has become one of the most celebrated musicians in the live music capital. Drawing from a range of diverse musicals styles, Schneider’s talent has defied genres. Combining elements of funk, country, rock, and folk with the more traditional singer/songwriter aesthetic, Schneider draws inspiration from the ’70s but with a modern twist. He has won more than 59 Austin Music Awards including Best Album, Best Songwriter, Best Musician, and Best Male Vocals making him the most decorated artist in Austin music history. If you have ever been to Austin, you know what kind of a music city that is. So, that’s quite an accomplishment. But Schneider’s fan base reaches far beyond the city limits of Austin. He started gaining national recognition when he released 2001’s Lonelyland, his major-label debut for Universal Records, and since then he’s released more than a dozen albums, written over 1,000 songs, he is a published author, he is an avid painter and collage artist, and he’s not planning on slowing down anytime soon. Bob’s newest record is called In A Roomful Of Blood with A Sleeping Tiger. It came out in August 2021, and we’re going to hear some tracks from it today. I love it! So, let’s go with the flow with Bob Schneider. [MUSIC] Welcome to the Midlife Mixtape Podcast, Bob Schneider. I’m so happy to have you here today. Bob 06:22 You sound so professional. Nancy 06:24 Thank you. I think it’s the sound of the dog licking himself in the background that really sells it because he waits until he knows I’ve hit record and then he’s like, “You know what I need to do? Clean up house.” Bob 06:35 Wow. That’s a good visual that I’ve got now. Nancy 06:38 Yeah, well, that’s Arlo. Welcome to the show. It’s me and Arlo Kho. Bob, I’ve got a question for you. What was your first concert, and what were the circumstances? Bob 06:49 Well, the first concert that I paid to go see was Earth, Wind & Fire, and I think the year was 1981, if I’m correct, and they were touring, like they had all their hits. It was the most amazing concert I think I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Now, I was raised by a musician, my dad. Nancy 07:11 He’s an opera singer, right? Bob 07:12 He’s an opera singer, but he would also moonlight in a cover band, and he worked his way through college playing in cover bands, and I know I was at many of those shows before I was even born, and then when I was 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. So I watched him play a lot of shows. But the first official one that I take responsibility for was Earth, Wind & Fire. Nancy 07:36 And where was it? Bob 07:37 It was in Germany. Nancy 07:39 Okay. Bob 07:40 It was in Bremen, Germany. Nancy 07:42 So, I did not realize you were raised in Germany. I saw that in a bio when I was doing my research this week. I also lived in Germany and Bob: I saw Earth, Wind & Fire play while I lived in Germany. Bob 07:52 What year was it? Nancy 07:53 It was not ’81. It would have been at ‘88 or ‘89, and what I remember about it, Bob, is that I went with my American friend Kristen, and we stood up and danced. And the Germans, I don’t know if this was your experience in Bremen – nobody was dancing, they are an orderly people, they sat still. And somebody fired a beer can at my head because I was obstructing their view. Bob 08:14 They are very orderly. But t
