About

“It felt like the universe was telling me to make this record,” says Jack Schneider, and it’s hard to argue given the string of unlikely coincidences and chance encounters that led to its creation. From surprise anniversaries to unexpected reunions, Streets of September is indeed a work of serendipity, but more than that, it’s a deeply personal reflection on growth, change, and mortality from a master craftsman with an almost religious reverence for words and music. The songs are warm and timeless, harkening back to ’70s troubadours like James Taylor and Jim Croce, and the performances are raw and spacious to match, captured live to tape with producer/engineer Matt Andrews (T Bone Burnett, Old Crow Medicine Show) and an all-star band of Nashville’s finest. Add it all up and you’ve got a touching tribute to the people and places that shaped Schneider’s journey over the last ten tumultuous years, a meant-to-be mixture of profoundly honest original material and revelatory interpretations that stands a testament to the enduring power of storytelling in the face of loss and transcendence.

“Songs are alive,” Schneider explains. “They keep people’s memories alive long after they’re gone, too. The past never dies if you find a way carry it with you.”

It’s a lesson Schneider learned early on when he fell in love with his first favorite record: An Evening with John Denver. Though the legendary songwriter had already passed by the time a young Schneider first got his hands on the LP, guitarist Steve Weisberg (who played in Denver’s band and performed on the record) would become an early friend and mentor, encouraging Schneider to pursue his love of music and never lose sight of what mattered most.

“I felt like an outsider growing up,” Schneider reflects. “Music was my therapy and my sacred place to connect with something bigger and deeper than myself, but I didn’t really understand at the time that it was something I could make a living doing.”

That all changed in 2015, when Schneider earned a scholarship to attend a summer songwriting intensive at the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan.

“Those weeks altered the course of my entire life,” he explains. “Being around like-minded souls who shared the same passions, realizing there were other people like me out there who I could connect with through music, it opened up whole new worlds of possibility for me.”

After graduating high school, Schneider enrolled at the Clive Davis Institute at NYU and began picking up regular work as a session guitarist. During breaks from school, he’d travel to Nashville, where he landed a summer job at Gruhn guitars and met Vince Gill, who quickly took him under his wing. Eager to hone his craft further, Schneider moved to Nashville full-time after college, only to find himself almost immediately in the hospital.

“I developed this mysterious illness that started making my entire body shut down,” Schneider says. “No doctor seemed to be able to figure out exactly why it was happening, but I had a fever that wouldn’t break and my liver was starting to fail. I honestly wasn’t sure I’d survive.”

After multiple weks in the hospital, Schneider finally began recovering, though he would remain weak and exhausted for much of the next year.

“It’s taken a while for me to process that experience,” says Schneider, whose grandmother passed away shortly after. “I think my biggest takeaway from it all was just how fragile life is, how we can’t afford to take anything for granted. It reinforced how much I love music and that it was my purpose in life, whether I ever got a chance to make a living doing it or not.”

A year later, Gill called to invite Schneider to join his band on the road.

“Touring with Vince these past few years has been the greatest experience of my life,” he explains. “Our friendship has been the most wonderful gift I could imagine, but even more than that, he inspired me to start telling my own stories as a songwriter and share what was in my heart with the world.”

In 2022, Schneider recorded his critically acclaimed debut, Best Be On My Way, which featured Gill along with David Rawlings and Stuart Duncan among others. Two years later, when a friend cancelled a recording session Schneider was scheduled to produce, he figured it was a sign to use the studio time to record another LP.

“Right before I went into the studio, I flew to Michigan to play guitar at a festival, and I realized it was ten years to the day since I arrived at Interlochen,” Schneider recalls. “It was this profound full circle moment that made me start thinking about the journey I’d been on since that first trip to Michigan, about the lessons I’d learned from my illness and the gratitude I had for being alive.”

That perspective and gratitude is clear from the start on Streets of September, which opens with the breezy title track. Lush and gentle, it’s an ode to renewal and fresh starts, to casting off sorrow and following your heart. Like much of the album, it’s also firmly rooted in the faith of better things to come if we’re willing to lay our burdens down, to let go of our pain and carry only love and appreciation into the future. The bittersweet “How In The World” (written with Gill) makes peace with loss, while the aching “Crying In the Rain” (written by Carole King) washes itself clean of sadness and regret, and the tender “Footprints In The Sand” contemplates grief and the healing power of time.

“I first encountered grief when I was seventeen and lost both my grandfather and that first mentor of mine, Steve Weisberg,” Schneider recalls. “I wrote a tribute to Steve on the tenth anniversary of his passing, which led to a note from a friend of his who’d inherited his guitar. They brought it to the studio while I was recording overdubs on the album, and I was able to play the exact guitar Steve had played on An Evening with John Denver on what turned out to be 50 years to do the day since it was recorded. It was almost too good to be true.”

Similar stories and characters from Schneider’s past turn up throughout the record. A buoyant cover of Barbara Keith’s “Stone’s Throw Away” grew out of a trip to New York, where Schneider was first introduced to the song while performing a Country Music Hall of Fame benefit with Gill and Emmylou Harris; the delicate “Renée” features a gorgeous, weaving fiddle line from Andrea Zonn, who a 12-year-old Schneider first saw perform with James Taylor (and who coincidentally recorded her first album at the same studio 30 years earlier); and the mesmerizing “Bright Eyes” (written by Dick Siegel) reconnected Schneider with one of his most influential instructors at Interlochen.

“When I played that festival in Michigan, I wanted to visit Dick let him know how much his song ‘Bright Eyes’ had meant to me,” Schneider says, “so I moved my flight, borrowed a car, and drove out to his house. He didn’t remember the tune at first, but when I showed it to him, his entire spirit opened up in front of me. He wanted to play it over and over. It occurred to me that this wonderful song was in danger of disappearing if it wasn’t recorded, so I asked for his blessing to cut it and share his incredible talent and heart with the world.”

In the end, that’s what Streets of September is all about: keeping stories alive, preserving the ties that bind us, honoring the past while cherishing the present. The universe wasn’t just telling Jack Schneider to make a record; it was telling him to live a life worth remembering, one song at a time.