Artist:     Trapper Schoepp

Album:     May Day

Label:     Grand Phony Records

Release Date:     5.21.21

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The significance of May Day is not lost on Trapper Schoepp. The Milwaukee singer-songwriter’s birthday falls on the holiday, which celebrates spring’s transition to summer and nature’s awe-inspiring reawakening. References to being born on May first abound, as Schoepp’s latest set of flowing, hushed Americana emerges from the pandemic longing to feel the sun on its face again.

Informed by racial unrest and the bleak uncertainty brought on by COVID-19, the highly literate, ghostly May Day could also be seen as a breathy, often intimate, distress call, living in both the light and the dark. Survival is not guaranteed here, but there is hope. Softly rendered with broken piano and brushed with pedal steel, the tender, moving ballad “Paris Syndrome” finds a disconsolate Schoepp singing, “Disconnected, I am lost.” This coming after the warily upbeat, finely strummed “Yellow Moon” talks of feeling “capsized, paralyzed, caught in a perfect storm,” giving off a downy, melodic country-folk glow that still shines through Ryan Adams’ best work and overcoming it all after stylish noir floods a despairing, yet resilient “River Called Disaster.”

Addiction to the “bad drug” of an obsessive relationship is the subject of May Day’s rushing, dreamy travelogue of a title track. The surging “Little Drops of Medicine” bitterly howls with anger and desperation, while the deeply reflective “Solo Quarantine” slowly sweeps up heartbreak’s debris. Then, along comes “I Am a Rider,” a swaying, head-nodding march of rootsy pop that suggests an alliance to the cause of civil rights, its powerful, defiant chorus rising to the occasion in May Day’s instrumentally full, grand rebirth.

—Peter Lindblad