Indie-folk group Eddie From Ohio to perform a Lincoln Theatre
Eddie From Ohio isn’t.
“I’m so sorry,” said Robbie Schaefer, guitarist and vocalist for the indie-folk band, which will be performing on Sept. 17 at the Lincoln Theatre.
“We’ve actually had people get upset that we’re using the name without proper authorization. We’re awaiting the bill with the penalty,” he said by phone from his home in Alexandria, Virginia.
The band actually hails from Virginia, where three of its four members, including Schaefer, 55, attended James Madison University. They got together in 1991 with an old friend of Schaefer’s, Julie Murphy Wells, and started performing cover songs at local bars on weekends.
“When we started the band, it wasn’t even with an intention of writing our own songs and doing it as a career. It was
just sort of a weekend lark,” Schaefer said.
“By the time we had done two or three shows, we figured we had to come up with a name. Our drummer, Eddie Hartness, was nicknamed Eddie from Ohio in college by a former girlfriend. He’s not from Ohio, though maybe his mom was. The rest of the story is murky. But we decided, that’s a quirky and maybe memorable name, and we can change it later. But we never changed it. I think we committed to a T-shirt, and there’s no going back after that.”
30 years and counting
Now the band is celebrating its 30th anniversary, with the same four founding members.
“It’s astonishing that: A), any of us are old enough to have a 30th anniversary and; B), we kept the band together that long. And it’s astonishing that we still like each other.”
Why has the band survived so long? “From very early on, we put our friendship before our ambition. While we had plenty of ambition, especially for the many years that we were touring and recording full time, and on the road 150 or 200 days a year, that never superseded the fact that we were human beings with lives at home, and increasingly over the years, spouses and children.”
By now, the band is down to performing about a dozen shows a year, with all its members involved in other projects.
Among the other projects Schaefer has been involved in is the writing of a musical called “Light Years,” based upon his relationship with his father.
“I didn’t set out to write a musical,” he said. “It was about six years ago. My father had had Alzheimer’s, and had passed away. For about six months after he died, I was kind of in a creative noman’s-land, where I didn’t feel like creating anything. I had written some songs, but I had zero interest in making an album. I remember very distinctly sitting at my dining room, and it was like the clouds parted, and I went, Oh, I’m writing a musical about me and my father.”
He spent the next 21⁄2 years working on the project, and in 2018, the musical was produced at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia, where it had a five week run.
Now it’s about to take another form. “I spent much of the pandemic converting it into a screenplay, and now it’s being made into an independent film. That hadn’t occurred to me, really. But when the guy who directed it at Signature Theatre approached me about it, and a production company came on board, all of a sudden, it seemed like it wasn’t so crazy after all.”
Eddie remains a focus
But no matter what other projects its members are involved in, Eddie From Ohio remains a presence in their lives.
“The bulk of the show is our 30 years of albums and songs. A lot of the audience wants to hear stuff that they know and have loved for years. However, I’m still writing songs, and Mike Clem, the bass player for the band, is still actively writing songs, so we pepper the show with new things that we’ve written. And we love putting together a cover song here and there, if we can find an interpretation that feels fresh.”
For those unfamiliar with the band, Schaefer notes that it’s “acoustic-based music, singer-songwriter focused in that the songs are really full of storytelling.”
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