Stuff Happens is Stuffy Shmitt’s first record in eight years because, well, he went crazy. Or maybe he just manifested his longtime craziness. Proof: He was bounced from bars in New York’s West Village for years, so he left to live in Nashville. If anyone needs more convincing, please listen to the whole album—the songs, as evidence of severely crazy, would stand up in court.

This unconventional artist (no, that’s not redundant) comes by his off-center musicality honestly. Growing up in Milwaukee, his mother drank, played drums and wrote songs in her sleep; his father played guitar and had a thing for fast cars. Shmitt said, “We read a lot of books, listened to a lot of music and protested social injustices. Our home was loud and nasty and violent. We didn’t spend a lot of time hugging or talking about feelings.”

Stuff Happens is all about disasters, big and small. The songs run the full spectrum of manic depression to bizzaro blues rockers to naked, unapologetic American rock & roll and desolate Americana ballads. The songs are built with words you might find scrawled on a crumpled napkin in some sawdust jukebox bar with chicken wire on the window and a pig foot in the jar.

Stuffy Shmitt has ventured to New York, then L.A. then back to New York, playing—in all senses of the word—with the coolest cats in town: Johnny Rotten, Willy De Ville, David Johansen of the New York Dolls, The Band’s Levon Helm, Violent Femmes’ Gordon Gano, and Jayotis Washington and The Persuasions. Finally, Shmitt started playing solo acoustic gigs instead.

Shmitt told Elmore a bit about this song: “Although you might not notice on first listen, ‘It’s Ok’ is an extremely sarcastic song. It’s about a girl I love very much. A girl that has borderline personality disorder. The song was written as if I’m talking directly to her on a cold day in Nashville. After hearing the song, a friend of mine said, ‘The chorus where you say ‘it’s ok,’ when it clearly isn’t ok, is the saddest chorus ever.’

“We recorded this new version for More Stuff Happens, the deluxe edition of my most recent album, Stuff Happens. I think this version is more cinematic, more wide open than the original. The horns and keys add a freewheeling flavor. I don’t think it’s necessarily better than the original, but it might be more fun. There’s a feeling of escape and abandon in the new one. I think everybody did a hell of a job bringing things to a different level this time. They call it rock and roll, ya know. Oh yeah.”

So here’s the madness:

“It’s my killer band,” Shmitt said. “Chris Tench on guitar, Dave Colella on drums and Parker Hawkins on bass. We decided to make the song fresh for the new release, so we kicked the living crap out of it. We added Jan Petter Ringvold on keys, Dick Aven on sax and Roy Agee on trombone. Colella came down to add more percussion and we blew the roof off Brett Ryan Stewart’s Wirebird Studios in Madison, Tenn. It was loud, man.”

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