This formula was enthusiastically accepted by mentors such as Jeff Tweedy, who praised Schauf for his previous album The Party in 2016 for “his ability to create these seemingly real worlds”. In a recent interview, Schauf talked about his past as a punk band musician, how Randy Newman inspired him and the painstaking process of writing The Neon Skyline. As a control freak, Schauf has a natural hearing for all those vintage sounds that give his music “timeless” quality – dry bit, string guitar, bass line, hot brass section played on the old AM radio station. For “The Neon Skyline”, Schauf has built his universe and written 50 songs, which were performed on the same rocky night of the album. I thought, “All right, I’ll sit down and write a song about a guy who got stolen. “And this is the first song I’ve done that deliberately tells a story about someone.” T are probably no reviews or reference articles about Canadian singer-songwriter Andy Schauf that don’t mention some of the great nostalgic pop-rock 70’s: Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson, Paul Simon, Johnny Mitchell. He wrote a lot w the main point should be, and then wrote four songs with that effect and said: “Oh, that’s terrible.” “And then those songs would be left behind, and I would have to write four more.” Whenhe’ started writing songs, Elliott Smith was an early inspiration untilhe’ discovered Randy Newman after reading an interview with Ben Gibbard at Death Cab For Cutie. Ben Gibbard started talking about how songwriters should treat songs like stories, and pointed the finger at Randy Newman. In addition to writing songs, Schauf also released the album by playing all the instruments himself. When I did that, it was like saying to myself, “Boy, you can do a song about anything. You don’t have to write about broken hearts. RX is a label called Uproxx Music that awards the best albums, songs and music stories of the year. While he acknowledges that he considers the 60s and 70s to be the “golden age” of music, this old-school status also corresponds to his musical sensitivity. “I don’t know how to do this,” Schauf said.

Andy Shauf