Pittsburgh Keeps Its Hold on an East Nashville Singer-Songwriter

Zach Schmidt’s a Pittsburgh native who relocated to East Nashville, closer to, but still a river crossing and an artistic universe away from the country music industry. His first full-length album is the product of five years of songwriting, an Indiegogo fundraising campaign and the musical contributions of friends who tracked, mixed and mastered the album in two days of live sessions. It’s a mark of the talent in Schmidt’s tight-knit musical community that two days was plenty of time to get ten solid masters on tape. It probably helps that the songwriter had been polishing his songs over the years in front of or with these very musicians, as their affection for the material is heard in the shuffling drums, bending steel and twanging guitars.

Schmidt’s mood echoes the weary side of Guitar Town-era Steve Earle, and while his protagonists are often tired and defeated, they still manage to muster a look forward. The nowhere town of the title track is a jail in which hope has faded, and from which escape seems unlikely. In Schmidt’s world, a lifetime of hard work may be redeemed in the hereafter or taken away in the blink of the eye, but either way, your burdens are what carry you forward. His songs are populated with orphans and widows, the departing, and on James Maple’s “Buried in Burgundy,” the departed. Schmidt sings with the twang of his adopted Nashville, but the rust of his native Pittsburgh has clearly left its mark. [©2016 Hyperbolium]

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