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 Bob Schneider has long been a favorite in Austin, earning local Musician of the Year honors several times and owning the all-time best-seller (Lonelyland) at the city’s renowned Waterloo Records, making Schneider tantamount to being MVP of an all-star team.
Born in mid-’60s Michigan, Schneider’s family moved briefly to Munich, Germany, when Bob was a child. Back in the States (El Paso), he learned piano, guitar and painting, and studied art at UTEP; music’s gravity was much too strong, though, pulling Schneider away from school and into the Austin funk-rock band Joe Rockhead. By 1993, he’d joined the Ugly Americans, an alt-pop/jam band that toured with 1994’s H.O.R.D.E. Festival and with the Dave Matthews Band. He co-founded the Scabs in 1997, which was effectively the Ugly Americans adopting a funky dance approach, and halfway into their four-year run as local phenoms, Schneider began moonlighting as a singer/songwriter.
Schneider, who dated actress/producer Sandra Bullock at the turn of the century, settled into life as a solo artist in the ’00s with a trio of label-released CDs (Lonelyland, I’m Good Now and The Californian) and a slew of self-released side projects. His songs can manifest as melodic soft rock, bluegrass, R&B, country, Latin, jazz, funk, electronica or folk; “the only certainty about his music is that he will travel wherever he wants to with it,” is how Paste put it.
In 2009, Schneider readied Lovely Creatures, which includes the single “40 Dogs (Like Romeo And Juliet),” one song with Patty Griffin and a number called “Trash” that came out of a long-distance songwriting game he plays with Jason Mraz. Calling Schneider “a brilliant, prolific songwriter,” Mraz told Rolling Stone that Schneider “picks a word or phrase — like ‘trash’ or something — and you have a week to write a song about that subject.”
Provenance: Ypsilanti, Michigan
Latest release: Lovely Creatures (2009)
© 2009 Nigel Music Media LLC. Used by permission.
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