Grumpy is the project led by Heaven Schmitt, who was originally based in Nashville and studied songwriting at Belmont University. Schmitt recalls dramatically quitting music right as they were graduating, and they took up a job at a marketing agency, which relieved so much of the pressure of pursuing a music career that they did, in fact, pick up a guitar again. The songs Schmitt wrote during that time – sillier, weirder, and naturally more true to themself – ended up on Grumpy’s debut album, 2020’s charming and cheekily titled Loser. With Schmitt having since moved to New York, Grumpy has become associated with the Brooklyn scene that includes This Is Lorelei, Frost Children, Blaketheman1000, and May Rio, and signed to New York City institution Bayonet Records. Their current backing band – Austin Hans Seegers on drums, Lane Rodges on keys, Anya Good on bass, and Diego Crimson on guitar – includes a few exes, which was also true when they recorded their new EP, Wolfed. “I keep on writing you syrupy songs so that I don’t forget how it felt when you loved me,” Schmitt admits on ‘Flower’, offsetting its twee sensibilities with piercing honesty. For Grumpy, the line between ugliness and love, discomfort and catharsis, humour and vulnerability, isn’t just permeable but vital – a glue stitching the songs’ disparate elements into a raw, mesmerizing whole.

We caught up with Grumpy for the latest edition of our Artist Spotlight series to talk about the project’s origins, the intimate process behind Wolfed, their upcoming tour, and more.

What are some of your earliest memories of being drawn to music?

I remember the first time I realized that someone was writing the song. I remember being really young and thinking, like, “Wow, somebody sat down to write this.” I really thought about lyrics for the first time. I was pretty young, and it was the song ‘Crooked Teeth’ by Death Cab for Cutie. I remember sitting in my parents’ house in their little den and being like, “These lyrics are really smart; they say something to me.” And I just hadn’t been listening to lyrics as a kid, I knew the words to songs, but I never thought about what they meant. And then I was like, “Is that somebody’s job? Who’s writing words for songs?” That kind of blew my mind. I had never considered that there’s a person feeling these things behind the song. I was really stunned by the imagery in that song.

I remember talking to my dad about music a lot. He would make me and my twin sister mix CDs that were really good. My dad has great music taste, and he played Death Cab, the Shins, The New Pornographers, Neil Young, Postal Service, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Beck – Beck has been a deep, lifelong influence for me, and it’s really coming out in what I’m writing now, although it may be years down the line before it’s released. I remember making little music videos with my family’s camcorder to Beck songs when my sister and I were little. Whenever I think about being a kid and listening to music, my brain goes straight to being in my dad’s two-door yellow Jeep Wrangler with the top down, hair blowing everywhere, listening to music in the Jeep with my dad, mom, and sister, headed to the community pool. I was like, “That’s the life. That’s music right there.”

What do you remember about the first songs you wrote? Did you think about how they represented you as a person feeling these things?  

When I first started writing lyrics, I was not really thinking about – the first time I ever wrote a song, I was auditioning for some play. I was probably 14. The audition was like, “You have three minutes to do whatever you want,” and I wanted a singing role in this play. I barely knew how to play guitar at the time; I only knew a couple of chords, and I couldn’t find a song I really liked to sing, so I thought, “Well, I’ll just make one up.” So I just made up a song, and it was about some crush, or like the disillusionment of a crush I had at the time. It was very dramatic, and I went downstairs and told my parents, “This is what I want to do for this audition.” They were like, “What song is that?” And I was like, “Oh, I just made it up.” They were like, “You wrote that song?” I didn’t go into it thinking, “I want to be a songwriter.” I just knew that I loved singing and wanted to do it more. After that, people responded, saying, “You wrote a song?” People loved it – the song, I’m sure, was terrible, but I was young enough that it was probably cute. And they were like, “Yeah, do that again, keep working on that!”

I definitely loved the feeling – I’ve always loved attention, so I was like, “This is a good way for that!” [laughs] But I just loved singing, and it was such a vehicle to get the best out of my voice. I was writing a lot pretty soon after that, and then I was like, “Okay, I want to be a musician and a songwriter.” It was kind of just me understanding that’s where the songs come from, that someone was writing them.

You went on to study songwriting at university. How did being in that environment affect your approach to songwriting or becoming a musician?

As a high schooler, I started thinking, “I want to do this.” And then I was like, “Well, then I have to go to college, because that’s what you do.” I don’t regret it, I had a blast. But if I could do it again – if there’s anyone out there who’s going to college for music and wants to be an artist, I’d say production or audio engineering: learn how to produce at home on your laptop. I’m still learning that now, how to make this rich inner world translate into a recording. The more I learn that, the more it sounds like me and how I wanted it to sound.

The songwriting major itself I think was a little more geared toward people who wanted to be professional songwriters, writing for other artists. There were people who wanted to be artists, too, but I think the program leaned more toward co-writing, like Nashville songwriters. What I really needed was to learn how to produce, and I did learn a lot about recording there. But I was such a highly stressed student, just plagued with anxiety about my future and about how I would become a career artist. I created this highly pressurized environment for myself, thinking I had to write commercially viable songs, songs that will make mone so that I don’t have to do some other job. That really destroyed music for me. I was trying so hard to make commercial music, and I thought what I was making on my own was too weird or ugly for anyone to care. By the end of college, I couldn’t even look at a guitar; I wasn’t writing at all. I was like, “If I don’t make it by the time I graduate, I’m cooked. There’s no way I’ll be an artist.” You know, college is the coasting time.

It absolutely was not. I was getting a degree, and it was a ton of work that didn’t leave a lot of time to, like, become an artist. It wasn’t until I graduated that I was like, “Oh, there’s so much more time here. I can work a job, but then I get paid for my labor, and then the rest of the time is mine? This is crazy!” But anyway, I get to my senior year, and I’m like, “I need to be real. I don’t have what it takes to be an artist.” I remember going to my friends, and I think I even told a professor, “I’m going to find another career path. I’m done trying to make it.” It’s so silly, I just dramatically declared quitting music. I also, at the time, really believed that I had to be in great emotional pain in order to write something worth hearing. That belief, and the pressure of trying to make music that would make a career, really destroyed art for me.

I went and worked at a marketing agency for a year and didn’t pursue music and didn’t really write. In that time, I just felt such a relief that made me feel like this was the right call, like this must mean I don’t have it in me to be an artist. And I relaxed so much that silly, fun songs just flowed out of me. I was like, “Well, alright, I guess I can write songs just for fun, and maybe I’ll show my kids one day, and they’ll be the only ones who hear it.” What ended up being the first Grumpy album just came out of me in like a month. I was writing these silly songs that were so me and didn’t need to be anything, and the people in my life loved these songs more than all of these high-pressure, forced songs I was writing before. I was writing stuff that was just me, and then people liked that. That was also a big turning point of me being like, “Dude, people like me? They like this expression of who I am; they must like me.”

I just had been coming from such a low-confidence place, and this project, for me, has so much to do with my confidence arc and me becoming who I am, loving who I am. The genesis of Grumpy was me realizing that music could be fun, and that if I write it for me, actually, people like it a lot more. I formed a band and recorded this album, and some of my friends from school had started a label called Acrophase, and they were some of the earliest believers in me. I’m really grateful to them. So that was this big boost, but I’m still young, I don’t quite know how to produce and record an album. I’d written the songs, but in the recording of it, I was really shy and doubted myself. I was like, “I’m not loving how this sounds,” but I didn’t speak up because I was like, “Well, what do I know? I don’t know what good is, these are the professionals. They know what will be good.” It just came out sounding a little safer than I wanted it to.

That first album was so important to me in just deciding to go for it, but I still ended up being in a really bad place with the songs. It just wasn’t quite me; I wanted it to be fully me. I left that process knowing that I didn’t speak up when I didn’t like it. So I was like, “Well, maybe when it’s out I’ll like it.” And it didn’t change. And then I was thinking, “Well, they’re my songs, I’m always gonna hate them. That’s just what being an artist is like.” Another silly thing that I believed as a young person. The four years between that album and now has been this massive arc of so much self-reckoning. I came out as non-binary, I got divorced, and I’ve written a huge body of material. After that album, I was like, “I’m gonna figure out how to record, and I’m gonna work with people who I think are brilliant and risk-takers.” We made this EP, and I was like, “These are my songs, and I still love them. I love them even more in a produced setting. I’m not gonna always hate them if I make them good.” [laughs]

Both the album and the EP seem to contradict that belief that great music comes from being in great pain, because so many of the songs come from being in love – with the people around you, but also the process of making them.

Obviously, in this EP there’s songs that came from pain, but it’s like, “Maybe I don’t have to suffer.” Being a songwriter, I’ve developed such a love for my pain because it’s a big part of the art. And I think singing about pain is not creating it; it’s soothing it. When we listen to these painful songs or write painful songs, that’s a comfort. I have a much deeper love and understanding for my feelings and my own pain. I’m really grateful that that’s a way that I cope. It’s very cathartic, and it’s something that makes me really happy. When I express what I’m feeling in a way that can be shared between me and the person it’s about, that’s actually a really joyful feeling, too. I think that’s what makes me love this ugly side of life and love so much – the way that me and another person can share that understanding and that acceptance of the ugliness.

To your point, ‘Holding’ feels like both the most painful and cathartic song on the EP.

Often, I’ll write and songs come out because I want to do something sweet for this person, like I want to make this person smile, or I want to flirt with this person. My songs are often created as a gift, and sometimes that’s a really lighthearted thing; sometimes it’s this deep expression of pure love and devotion. In the case of ‘Holding’, it was intended to be this gift. Someone who was my best friend, someone I was kind of seeing just someone who I loved in many different ways, got some really terrible news that was also going to really potentially derail her life plan. She FaceTimed me, and I answered all silly in this costume, I had a ski mask on. She was sitting in her car crying, and I had never, ever seen her cry – it was so rare that I ever really knew what her feelings were like. She has so much wonder about the world, so much excitement and so much curiosity, but I don’t ever really get to know her pain.

She called me crying, and I awkwardly took off this ski mask and was like, “What’s wrong?” She told me what was happening, and we were far away, it was so rare that we communicated about big things with words because I just don’t think that’s what feels natural or comfortable to her. She just quickly wanted to hang up, and there was nothing I could say. I wanted, more than anything, to be able to hold her. That was the way we communicated was with touch so often, in pain and in love. We didn’t often talk – we didn’t really talk about the fact that we were seeing each other, you know? I just wanted to be able to hold her so bad. But I couldn’t be there, and I wrote this song as just, like, “I’m holding you. I’m hearing you. I’m with you.” It ended up being a really difficult thing for her to hear. I thought maybe it would help, and it just made her uncomfortable. She now really loves the song a lot – we’re so many years later.

You recorded the EP in Chicago less than a week after you and your drummer, Austin Hans Seegers, decided to get a divorce.

I swear to God, it was days prior. The whole band was, at the time, Austin Arnold, my ex-husband, Lane Rogers, my ex-girlfriend, and Kaden Vanoorsdel, a Chicago-based artist who was with the band for many years. The four of us and our producer, Austin Hans Seegers, who project-managed the whole thing with us – it was days before everyone was going to basically move into our house for 15 days and work nonstop on making a whole album, which is what we thought it would be at the time.

Do you feel like you had to make that decision before going through with the recording?

No, I did not. We didn’t see it coming. I just kind of got to my own breaking point. Austin, Lane, and I were already living together and a throuple at the time. Mine and Austin’s relationship probably had been over before we really called it, and it honestly was fine, as far as recording goes. This was probably two or three years of us really processing how hard things between us were. No matter what is going on between us – and I think this is true for all my exes – no matter the way our relationships change shape, there’s such a baseline of respect and kindness and love. All of my breakups – there’s nothing totally damning that could stop what feels like an unconditional love for these people. It was pretty fucking intense, but we got through it. These people were all so close to us, so there’s already a level of intimacy and everybody knew what was going on. But it was like, “We got a job to do. We love these songs. We love each other. We have to just put this aside for 10 to 15 days.” And we did.

It was hard, but it was also kind of a welcome distraction for both of us. We had this time to just calm down a little bit and make something amazing together. After that we had to untangle and process it, but the record kind of saved us, in a way, from the deepest suffering, and really gave us something good to put that energy into. Once again, music really took this pain and allowed us to do something beautiful with it.

Putting the breakup aside but also channeling it – I think there’s something to those things both being true, because the intimacy of the songs is so intertwined with the intimacy that you share.

I think it showed us who we are to each other other than partners. It really confirmed that we’re family, and that we’re artistic collaborators, and that we’re friends. It was this thing that I think was actively terrifying to Austin, and for me, it was like, “This will be scary in a week, when this project is over.” But I knew we would be okay, and it gave us something to do together that was positive. Relief was setting in because we got to do our favorite thing that we do together, which is make music. And it was like, “Whoa, we don’t have to fight anymore. We’re broken up.” We’re not chained to each other when we didn’t want to be anymore, so now we can just do the things that we want to do together and not the things we don’t want to do together, which was, like, live together. [laughs] It was totally soothing to do this together.

‘Beach Towel’ is one of my favorites on the EP, both in terms of its vulnerability and the ways you experiment with a more ambient sound. The Bandcamp bio describes it as being about “the imperfect love of friendship,” while another press release says it’s about “benign moments shared with a romantic interest.” Those are obviously different, if not necessarily conflicting, perspectives on the song, and you don’t have to offer a definitive take – but it did make me wonder if the song has changed meaning for you.

For me, ‘Beach Towel’ is about this person who was my closest confidant, Kaden. The reason I wouldn’t correct necessarily that it’s not about a romantic interest is because, in my life, the line between friend and romantic partner, romance love and friendship love, is very blurred. People love to comment on the fact that the band is mostly my exes, and that person was once a lover,  but mostly they’ve just been my friend for 10 years, and there aren’t hard lines of who this person was to me. The song was something I again wrote as a gift to this person, because the 10 years that we’ve known each other, it’s the same miscommunication. I think when you commit to somebody in your life, there’s a certain level of commitment to the fight, the fight that you two are always gonna have.

I don’t know what it is that makes us disconnect – Kaden and I were demoing a song in my house, and we had this painful miscommunication and had to separate in the house. I think sometimes we get to this place where he thinks that I’m judging him, and I wish I could just open up my chest and my head and show him how much I believe in him and how much I feel like his champion. It’s so true for me how much I think he’s brilliant and talented that I think I forget to say it. So I’m like, “Let’s keep going.” I stepped aside and I wrote this song about our friendship. I don’t think I’ve thought so much about why I sit down and write a song until this interview, but it’s so true: pretty much every song comes out of wanting to give a gift, like this is something to give to someone, especially the really heartfelt ones. Because I write songs that are so true to me, that was almost a way of trying to prove to him how much I believe in him – I’m proving it because I would never lie in a song.

What excites you the most about the future of Grumpy?

The thing I’m most excited about is tour. It’s the reason I’m doing any of this. I think what we bring to the table the most is our live performance. The lineup of who’s in the band is just the funniest, most talented people I know. All these years ago, when I started Grumpy, I was like, “I’m going to come back to music, but it has to be fun.” And I’ve picked the perfect people to keep that dream alive. I want to get this music in front of people. We’re going on a full-length tour opening for Real Estate, and that’s going to be our first real tour. That’s the most exciting thing coming, for sure, but I’ve got big plans for songs coming out.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Grumpy’s Wolfed EP is out now via Bayonet.