[Cover photo credit to Jodi Caution]
Baton Rouge, Louisiana-based singer songwriter Eric Schmitt is releasing the LP Wait for the Night on April 11th, 2025. It’s a character-driven album that’s “set in the streets and by the levees of Baton Roug, the gulf highways of south Louisiana, the cedar skies of Central Texas.” Schmitt grew up with Jazz in his family and was inspired by Americana songwriters like Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark to connect music with the literary side of his life teaching English at Louisiana State University.
Today, we’re very pleased to premier his song and video “Louisiana”, taken from his upcoming album, which will be released widely this Friday, February 21st, 2025. It’s rare for Schmitt to write about his home state, in fact this may be his first released track on the subject, but it’s hard to imagine a more fitting tribute than the one he’s created with “Louisiana.” Two features of the song that really shine are its simplicity and its specificity, and those are not two things which are easily combined in a single song. For expressing intense emotion, Schmitt makes sure to keep his lyrics spare and direct, using the kinds of words that the people of Louisiana would actually say to one another about their home state, rather than becoming more ornate. For making the song grounded and making sure the audience doesn’t find the song generic, Schmitt has worked carefully to pick physical descriptions and locations that suggest authentic local flavor without overloading the track. The music follows a similar suit of preserving clean, piano-driven lines, while allowing gentle ornamentation to suggest distance, space, time, and even devotion. Particularly impressive are the ways in which the track soars to become anthemic, but doesn’t soar too high to lose its grounding.
As for the accompanying video, that too has a carefully considered approach. Lovely, detailed footage of Lousiana is interspersed with live play footage of Schmitt at the piano, and something about the fixed location of the piano creates a departure and return feeling between the different scenes. The connection with water evident in the song also comes out strongly in the video, as well the little details of locations and impressions that carry the song. While many musicians create live-play videos for their songs, it seems particularly suited to this song for audiences to see Schmitt up close and personal. As a Louisiana native singing about what he knows best, the snapshot of the state wouldn’t feel complete without the songwriter in a central role. As everything about the song and video suggests, Louisiana is informal and unpretentious, and both the song and video fit that ethos, while delivering the emotive appeal of everywhere that we call home.
Eric Schmitt writes about “Louisiana”:
“I grew up in southwest Louisiana near the Calcasieu River in Lake Charles. We were south of the saltwater barrier, and I spent a fair amount of my childhood fishing off a wharf for redfish, black drum, speckled trout, and a lot of crabs that were pretty good at stealing my shrimp. I watched ships make their way up and down the ship channel to the port of Lake Charles and back out to the Gulf of Mexico. There’s something about that connection with water and, in particular with water that connects with other water and eventually the whole world—that made an impression on me.
After going off to college in Texas and then moving back to Lake Charles for a time, I was living on one side of a duplex. On the other side was a group of true-blue Louisiana fellas. One of them fished almost every day, and they drank beer and fried fish and boiled crawfish, and now and then when they were drunk, they’d get sentimental about it and use that whole “God’s country” kind of language and wax poetic about their love of fishing and their connection with the whole south Louisiana region. Part of that, too, was a little dose of resentment against our big, brash neighbor to the west.
Eventually, I moved off to Baton Rouge, started my teaching job, and got into song writing. For years I never wrote anything about where I was from. It just wasn’t itching to get out. But in my music travels I met all these Texas songwriters who’d written lots of songs about Texas. I felt a little guilty, to be honest, like I owed my state something. I tried once or twice to come up with something, but it just never happened. Until one day something clicked.
I don’t remember what I was thinking (I rarely do). As I recall I was just noodling some I to IV chord kind of things when I mouthed the opening words, “Well, I come from Louisiana.” I think maybe the tempo and the tone and the kind of melodic phrase (if you’d call it melodic at all) meshed with those words. And then it was like one of those Louisiana boys was sitting on his porch about twelve beers in and talking to himself.
Anyway, the narrator romanticizes that whole territory from the Sabine River all the way to Mamou, which is northwest of Lafayette. Mamou hosts one of the more popular country Mardi Gras celebrations, and it has a bar called Fred’s. It’s maybe a stretch to call it a biker bar, as the narrator of the sonng describes it, but everytime I’ve gone I’ve seen a number of bikes, and I’ve met some folks in a few biker groups that like to stop at Fred’s when they do their weekend rides. Anyway, Fred’s used to be owned and run by a woman called Tante Sue. She kept a bottle of Hot Damn in a holster on her hip, and she’d walk around the bar giving people shots. And she’d do this every Saturday from 8-12, but not 8-12 at night like a regular bar. Fred’s was open only in the morning. So there’s all these little things the voice in the song calls up—the water, the fishing, the rice fields along the highways down south, and a character in a bar over in Mamou. It’s a bit of a beer-tinged, sentimental gush, I suppose, but it felt like it came from the heart—the heart of some die-hard Louisiana fella, or maybe my own.
I usually perform this song with an open-tuned acoustic guitar, but my first little demo of this song was on the piano. I like both versions, and Clay and I actually started this one out as an acoustic guitar-based song. But something wasn’t clicking on that track with me, so I just reimagined it in the old piano style. This is the one track element we recorded off-site. Clay brought a small laptop type rig out to my place, and we recorded me on my little upright. I thought about scouting out a nice grand piano somewhere, but it was just easier to cut it at my house. And so we did. And as a result, this is the only song where we didn’t record the vocals and my instrumentation together. That’s because I wanted my vocals done at Clay’s place. So I worked on playing the piece as I would if I were singing, and we pulled it off okay. We added vocals later at Clay’s studio.
And then, there was a lot of back and forth on how to arrange this song. Dave Hinson came one day to put cello on “My Red Door,” so while he was there, we recorded him with his upright bass on “Louisiana.” I had written out a crude, probably incorrectly notated, chord chart, complete with little marks indicating where I wanted the bass in terms of chord inversions and all of that. So Dave recorded the bass, and it felt right. From there, I debated bringing in someone on accordion, or maybe even like a weird plucky instrument to balance the smoothness of the piano and upright. But I didn’t want to overcomplicate things, and Clay was concerned that an outside musician might not be attuned to all the little harmonic nuances in the song—the inverted chords and little added dissonate notes. Clay has an incredible ear for that kind of stuff. So I tried to think of ways he and I could pull it off. That’s when I thought about this old lap steel I had. And Clay has an organ that he bought and fixed up himself. So that’s what we did. Clay put down an organ pad, and I played my lap on the instrumental break and through the end of the song. Once Jodi James added her stunningly beautiful backup vocals, we figured anything else would do more harm than good.
The new album was recorded on an eight-track tape machine at Clay Parker’s studio in Gonzales, Louisiana. Schmitt and Parker have played music together for years, and this friendship can be heard in the production, as well as among the small circle of close friends who contributed to the album. For Schmitt, the album is a “distillation of various musical influences and life experiences.”
Schmitt has released three previous albums under his own auspices: Pina Coladas and a Polynesian Girl (2014), Unraveling (2017) and Bees and the Eaves (2021). He’s also performed with a group of Baton Rouge songwriters known as The Levee Road Revue, a group that includes Clay Parker, Denton Hatcher, and Ryan Harris.
