Shortly before Christmas, Dan Schneider got a call from someone claiming to be Paul Brownell from the UK label Poptones. “Out of the blue there’s a guy on the phone with a thick British accent saying, ‘Dan, we just love your songs and we can’t stop listening to them. We want to sign you and put a record out as soon as possible. Would you be interested?’ To me, it just didn’t seem real. I figured it had to be one of my buddies calling up and playing a really cruel joke.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“He sent in his album, the demos for the album, and it was pretty fucking ace,” says McGee. “Some of the songs remind me of Fred Neil, whose album I reissued on Creation in the 90s. The great thing is that the songs defy genre–they’re just great classic pop songs.” Last month Schneider formally became part of the Poptones roster–alongside the likes of the Hives, the Paddingtons, and Cherrystones–and his album, Let’s Kill the Summer, is scheduled to come out overseas in June. He’s still shopping it stateside.
For almost a decade Schneider has been plugging away without much success in his band Pedal Steel Transmission, recently renamed Hummingbiird. “When you start a band you kinda naively think it’s going to be easy,” he says. “You know, that if you make good music, people will pay attention.” He started the Singleman Affair without any expectations–he was indulging himself, not trying to win over an audience–so he’s not entirely sure why his luck changed. “I have to admit,” he says, “it’s pretty weird how this has all happened.”
Schneider has recorded with a couple side projects, including the Cruelest Aprils, a duo with violist and poet Nissa Holtkamp, and a collaboration with Pyskacek called Sainte Chapelle. But in late 2003 he decided to go solo. “I wanted to try something that was completely my own,” he says. “I wanted to make records like the kind I listened to growing up–stuff like Skip Spence, John Martyn, and Tim Buckley.”
In summer 2005 Galactic Zoo Dossier editor Steve Krakow asked Schneider for a song for the sixth issue’s CD sampler. That led to a Singleman Affair appearance at that fall’s Two Million Tongues festival, copresented by Krakow and Arthur magazine, and to the release of a second Singleman tune–this one on the Two Million Tongues compilation, released by Arthur’s Bastet label. Those were the tracks that hooked the Poptones brass.
