by Austin Campbell, Death By Film!
Joseph Fisher-Schramm
Rob’s Billiards & Sports Bar in Euless is an odd place to see an artist like Joseph Fisher-Schramm.
Opening for two heavy metal bands in front of a small group of patrons seated away from the clattering of pool balls, Fisher-Schramm loads in his gear along with tonight’s group of bandmates.
This will be a louder show to be more fitting to the bill, but Fisher-Schramm is just as comfortable performing a quieter show with an upright bass alone on stage.
A musician, a music teacher, a poet, a publisher, and record label owner, Fisher-Schramm has dedicated his life to music and the arts as a way to promote the artists he wants to see rising up.
“It’s something you could write on a business card,” Fisher-Schramm says about the list of titles he could go by, “but as I’m getting older, I’m realizing that, that’s really impractical.”
Fisher-Schramm had to find himself before taking the plunge into a solo project. Once the bass player for Dallas’ now defunct alt-R&B act Duo Contra, Fisher Schramm decided to take on the role of the composers he studied in UTA’s music program.
“After a certain point in working with bands, I realized that I don’t really like the illusion of democracy that a lot of them have,” he says. “I never want to make the same song twice as you probably heard.”
Indeed, Fisher-Schramm’s new album, Starving by Design, Vol. 1, is a mixed bag, but not in the sense that the artist at the helm of the recording is directionless. There is a clear line that can be drawn through the album’s subject matter.
“I like to think of the music or the lyrics in, if not like a theatrical sense, a pointed sense,” he says. “I don’t want to write lyrics that I don’t stand by whether or not they’re supposed to be silly or not.”
Not that any of the lyrics recorded for the album are silly. Built primarily around the concept of a relationship falling apart with the lingering desire to find connections whether physically or just conversationally, Starving by Design, Vol. 1, dives deep into the negative space created by the failure to connect — something that the artist wanted to show in the presentation of lyrics in the folds of the album insert.
“One of my least favorite things in an album is when you open it up and either there aren’t lyrics or the lyrics are just put in a block with a slant in between lines,” Fisher-Schramm says. “That’s not how you hear it. The way that I write is supposed to line up in a similar way to poetry. The way that we speak has beats and emphases and pauses.”
As much creative control as Fisher-Schramm has over his music and writing, he takes it all as a lesson in how to promote others on his label and publishing house, A Study in Expression, which has released, among its musical releases, a spoken word poetry album, a comedy album, a play, a video game, and Fisher-Schramm’s own book of poetic character sketches, Everyone Has Something Trite to Say.
