Camille Schmidt’s ‘Songs to Crash Out To in NYC’ playlist
Ahhh, the crash out. It’s a distinctive feeling. It’s not quite a breakdown; it’s more fun than that. There’s still a kind of excited fizz where things have blown up or are about, and you’re waiting for the final hit. But, for now, maybe you go for a walk, maybe you rot in bed, maybe you get very drunk, or, in the words of New York resident Camille Schmidt, you go have a “hot matcha and a heart attack”.
That’s the solution she lands on in ‘Stanley’, a standout track from her debut record, Nude #9, which you should listen to. Funny, vulnerable, revelatory, poetic and deeply poignant—it checks all the boxes. She perfectly captures the experiences of heartache, loneliness, anxiety, life-long wonderments and beyond. But she also perfectly captures the experience of a crash out, in particular, the big city kind, as you walk around both overwhelmed and comforted by your anonymity amongst it.
Sure, I get to crash out in London, but Schmidt gets to crash out in New York—’The Big Apple’, the ultimate city, and a location that, throughout history, has provided some of the best music to soundtrack a tense emotional moment. It, sometimes, suits her well, as she said of her adoptive home, “I’ve lived in Brooklyn for the past six years. I love it here, but it also drives me insane—though I’m also a little crazy, so who knows what causes what? I guess I just don’t feel like I belong in a city, but here I am.”
But while Schmidt might have mixed feelings about NYC, she’s sure of her love for the scene in which she’s found a place. NYC is the gift that keeps giving, as Schmidt is one of the many new artists who deliver new music for this distinctive mood. Immersed in the Brooklyn music scene in particular, the singer is a fan of, and a friend to, or even shares a home with, the best of them. “So much of who I am as an artist is from having moved into this house of seven musicians in the Flatbush area,” she explains. “I moved there right after college. That’s actually how I met Allegra [Krieger] and Eliza [Edens] and John and Lily [Talmers], who are all on this playlist.”
“It’s called Songs to Crash Out To in NYC because this is some of the music I crash out to that’s written by NYC-based artists,” she says, introducing her playlist. “Some of it makes me cry, and some of it is just really relatable and comforting, and some of it makes me want to run really, really fast—though toward what I don’t know.” Both Schmidt and Far Out Magazine wish you well while also happily soundtracking whatever you’re going through.
Camille Schmidt’s crash-out liner notes:
Allegra Krieger
No one understands a crash out quite like a friend does, and Schmidt has the benefit of some of her best friends also being musicians, so her soundtrack feels personal. “Allegra and I lived together for a few years in the city. She’s one of the best lyricists I know. Her music is beautiful and troubling in the best way,” she says, picking out ‘Never Arriving’ and ‘Low’ as two of several Krieger tracks on her mixtape.
There has to be a silver lining somewhere, and the inclusion of a close friend, with all those good memories attached, provides that. She recalls, “This guy actually came up to me right before a show I played a few months ago and was like ‘you know Allegra!’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I love that girl’, and he was like, ‘She is the best songwriter of our generation’, and I was like, ‘Literally.’ Allegra and I have a sort of insane side project called Pootie Pootie that I hope the world one day gets to see.”
NYC Connections
Krieger isn’t the only friend making the cut for this crash-out playlist or making the whole thing personal. Several of the selections come from peers and pals Schmidt has made as the New York scene remains as buzzy and fresh as ever.
“I originally covered one of Hank [Heaven]’s songs at a Halloween party a few years back at that big musician house I was living in. Now we’re friends,” she said of her Hank Heaven inclusions, and that’s the way things go. “Same with Claire Ozmun,” she adds. “We were playing a show together at The Sultan Room, and I heard COB [the Claire Ozmun Band] for the first time, and I was just like, holy fuck. Claire’s voice and lyrics—the whole band is so dialled in. I’m obsessed with her stuff.”
The connections keep coming; “I also met Caitlin [Starr] through a show we both played on a rooftop in Williamsburg,” she says, discovering Starr’s music when the city brought them together too. But who else could be better to soundtrack an emotional moment than 1) someone you know or 2) someone in the same situation as you—trying to make music work, trying to make New York work, trying to make everything work? Eliza Edens is another selection that captures the poignancy of that. As Schmidt points out, the inclusion of ‘it’s your birthday & you’re gorgeous’ “slices my heart every time I listen to it.”
NYC Classics
You cannot live in New York without indulging in the history, and if you are, surely you’re doing it wrong. It would be a waste to wander around the city, deep in your feelings, and not lean into the legacy of emotional tracks the decades past have left behind. In particular, Schmidt turns to the Meet Me in the Bathroom generation.
Two songs stand out as necessary companions in a strange emotional place. The first is The Strokes’ ‘Heart in a Cage’ as Schmidt says, “I listened to ‘Heart in a Cage’ a lot while I was working on a novel back in 2018. The lyrics “I’m stuck in a city, but I belong in a field” are kind of how I feel about living in NYC often. But there was this character I was writing about in the novel named Mary, and I sort of mapped her life onto the narrative of that song.”
For an emotional big hitter, the second has to be Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ ‘Maps’ as even the lore of the music video gets to her; “I’ll never forget seeing the ‘Maps’ music video for the first time. I read somewhere that Karen O is genuinely crying in the video because she was waiting for her boyfriend Angus to show up, and he was so late. She didn’t even think he was going to come, and this was a song she’d written for him. She was just about to leave for tour, and it was all very meta—what the song was about and what was happening during the video shoot. Watch that video if you haven’t. It’s so awful to imagine what she must have been feeling, and then at the same time so relieving to hear and see and feel something REAL.”
Sad songs, buzzy songs, songs to make you feel manic, songs to calm you down—Camille Schmidt has covered every corner of the necessary crash-out soundtrack. While being in NYC would obviously be ideal, god knows a crash out is not location dependant.
