Zach Schmidt has the 400 Unit for new album ‘Raise a Banner’
You may have heard of Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, one of the premier alt-country/Americana bands. Now, get ready for Zach Schmidt and the 400 Unit. For “Raise a Banner,” his second album and follow-up to 2016’s “The Day We Lost the War,” the Nashville-based singer-songwriter from Baldwin Borough has the mighty Isbell band on loan.
The hookup happened, naturally, in a Nashville bar back in February 2018. Schmidt had a bunch of songs written and was ready to make a record, but his producer friend was busy with other projects and kept pushing it off.
So, on the February night Schmidt and his wife went out for drinks on her birthday, they ran into a mutual friend of Sadler Vaden, the hot guitar-slinger who joined the 400 Unit in 2013, having left Drivin’ N Cryin’. He told Schmidt that Vaden was producing like-minded artists and wondered if he wanted to put him in touch. Knowing Vaden from The 5 Spot, Schmidt said “sure.”
“So, like 8 a.m. the next morning Sadler calls me from Australia,” Schmidt says, “because they were on tour at that time. He said, ‘Send me some songs, and I’ll take a listen, and we can maybe figure this out.’ ”
Within two weeks, they were heading into Nashville’s Creative Workshop to record with members of the 400 Unit — bassist Jimbo Hart, drummer Chad Gamble, keyboardist Derry Deborja — along with backup singer Jackie Berkley and pedal steel guitarist Adam Kurtz.
“I think because they were all in Australia together when the idea of this record started coming together, Sadler said, ‘Hey, when I get back, I want to start working on this. Would you be into it?’ And they were, which was cool.”
They went in with 10 songs, whittled down from the 18 demos he had originally sent to Vaden.
“The first day, we started playing stuff for them in the control room, then we went in and just hit record and started going,” Schmidt says. “It helps so much that they’ve been a band together for so long. They knew how to play off each other, and Sadler knew their styles, so he knew what to ask them. So, it all worked out pretty perfectly.”
Making an album that was too close to a Jason Isbell record wasn’t a concern for Schmidt.
“Although we’re in the same genre, I think my style is different enough from what Jason does, so it just lends itself to a different sound.”
After the session, while Schmidt was on tour, Isbell himself came in to add guitar to “Foregone Conclusion,” the rollicking honky-tonk number that serves as the opening track. It began as a folk song — about how Woody Guthrie would view the current political climate — before the 400 Unit took it to a different sonic level.
Elsewhere, “Raise a Banner” ranges from sturdy heartland rockers like the single “I Can’t Dance” to Southern gothic ballads like the title track, to “Concrete Dreams,” which sounds like Ryan Adams fronting Dire Straits.
What chance does a high-end alt-country/Americana record like “Raise a Banner” have in the modern Nashville scene?
“It’s hard,” Schmidt says, “because for some reason there just isn’t the influx of money in what we do as opposed to what I call the Southern pop, pop-country movement. I can’t speak to why that is. Maybe they sell beer better than we sell beer or whatever. Why does Kenny Chesney come to Pittsburgh every year and do the huge stadium tour where someone like Isbell is still playing theaters? I don’t really know the answer to that. I think part of it is the people you have behind you.
“But my hope,” he adds, “is that people will find this record and dig this record based on the songs. I think it’s a pretty damned good record, and all I can ask is that people give it a chance.”