Adam Schmitt, "River Black"

Note: To fully appreciate this post, read our mix tape crash course entry first

In high school, Adam Schmitt was the Lebron James of the Central Illinois music scene. Everyone knew he was going to be huge from the outset.

At a ridiculously young age, he was locally successful with his Champaign-based band, the Farmboys. Eventually, he joined an even bigger regional powerhouse, the Elvis Brothers. Adam seemed like the missing piece the Elvis Brothers needed to become the national act that they deserved to be. But listeners suck (except for you, dear MWMT reader), and the Elvis Brothers' ascent stalled.

In 1991, the boy-wonder signed a recording contract with Warner Brothers and released the appropriately optimistic World So Bright. It received the kiss of death; critical accolades. Too poppy for rock, and too much guitar out front for top 40, World So Bright never found a mainstream audience in spite of an accessibility and musicality that stood out across nearly every song on the album. The almost-too-easy brilliance of the melodies placed Adam in esteemed company with respected power-pop masters like Bob Mould.

In retrospect, though, the smooth production of the album was already a bit out of place by the early nineties. Besides that, the saccharine and polish wasn’t quite suited to Adam’s voice. In World So Bright, the vocals are really clever and catchy, but occasionally veers to the nasal end of the spectrum.

An exception was when he cranked up the anger and growl on “River Black.”  Almost every reviewer at the time declared the track a notable misstep on an otherwise brilliant album. This is case in point why music reviewers can’t be trusted and the big truths are often missed. Though World So Bright is excellent from end to end (“Can’t Get You On My Mind” is a good general representative track), "River Black" stands out as one of the great Power Pop songs ever recorded. It’s an odd thing to say about a pop song, but people just weren’t ready for it.

The guitars get cranked up to eleven with maximum reverb that conveys sense of anger without losing the pop sensibility. The simple but catchy guitar melody almost drowns out the vocals, but Adam fights back with desperation. You need not understand the lyrics to feel the intended nature of anger and frustration being conveyed.

And that is where I got in trouble.  Never one to over-analyze lyrics (like a certain MWMT colleague), I sang along to "River Black" feeling the emotional desperation of unrequited love. Essentially, I felt the song a kindred spirit of "She Sheila" by the Producers. Years later, I felt it a good addition to the “love” mix tape I made for my future wife, perhaps indicating that there was a certain frustration that the relationship wasn’t progressing as fast as I would have liked.

Time passed and the mix tape went into the glove compartment. Recently, I gave it a re-listen and a few things jumped out at me. The first is that "River Black" has aged well. The accessible but raw emotion in the music would make the Foo Fighters proud and the production comes across as near perfection. 

Secondly (but not necessarily more importantly), I now realize the song is about murder. Guy loves beautiful girl. Girl doesn’t feel the same way. Guy drowns girl in the river. I can’t believe this wasn’t a major hit.The lyrics are all very overt and the meaning really should have been obvious off the bat. Sometimes we only hear the parts we want to hear. Anyhow, can’t take if off the love tape now and it still is the best song on the mix. Just nobody tell my wife the story behind the story, please.

The only evidence of "River Black" on the internet (well until we uploaded it to YouTube) is a few disparaging remarks from reviewers recorded both at the time of the release and in retrospective articles as people have tried to understand the unfulfilled promise of World So Bright.

Listen to River Black by Adam Schmitt

It is to his eternal credit that Adam listened to the advice of the intelligencia and made his second album almost entirely in the vein of River Black (musically, not the murder-lyric part).  And the results were...well, that’s a topic for another day.

Image: Ron Lute, Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)