MUSIC MAKER
Bob Schneider happy he’s doing what he wants to do
It’s about 6:30 a.m. in Beaumont, Texas, and Bob Schneider is waiting to write.
Not wanting to write, the singersongwriter turns to his emails and begins to answer them.
“(I’m) doing whatever I can do to stave off the inevitable task of coming up with some ‘great’ new song,” he said in an email.
Schneider tries to find the balance between his personal and professional life and tries to take each day as it comes.
“I’ll write music and make art and hang out with my kids,” he said. “And write poetry and perform in front of people and get older and make mistakes and learn stuff.”
For nearly two decades, Schneider has put out music regularly.
In 2015, he released a trio of EPs called “King Kong Suite” series.
Then a few weeks ago, he released “I Will Find You No Matter What: The Songs of Luc & Bob Schneider.” Luc is one of his children.
“I wasn’t planning on making an album with my son; it just sort of happened,” he said. “We started doing some recordings together when he was pretty young, around 4 or 5, I guess. At that time, it was more like trying to get him to say something into the mic and sort of sampling that and making a song around it. But then as he got older, he started doing some of the writing, and the singing came into play, which is my favorite part of the whole project, just how beautiful and innocent he sounds on the recordings.”
Over the course of his career, Schneider says, his writing has stayed the same.
“First and foremost, it’s kind of scary, because you don’t know if you’ll ever write anything good again ever,” he said. “You’re basically starting from scratch every time you sit down to write a song. Even if you’ve written ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water,’ which is a remarkable song, you’re back at square one when you sit down to write the next time.”
Schneider always knew that he would work in the arts since he was a little boy.
“I just assumed I would make art, even though I played music my whole life, but it was only in college that I was lured into the music business by the lifestyle,” he said. “I’ll make music and art for as long as I’m living. I have met some people that want to do something for a while, hopefully get successful at it and then retire to do what they really want to do, but I’ve always done what I wanted to do.”