Noah Schnacky wins the hearts of the London crowd and talks to me about finding love!

Noah Schnacky was a new name to me before Country 2 Country, he had a couple of good tracks out but I knew little about him. However his performance and attitude really impressed me more than anyone's at C2C, his performance was so well thought out, his crowd engagement and his monologues were meticulously planned and executed. Back to the very basics he has a strong but sweet voice and great love songs. Before his show in London I caught up with him, first thing in the morning whilst the poor lad was still eating his breakfast! But he was full of energy and enthusiasm even then and it was a pleasure to chat to him and find out more about his career.

So when I was doing my pre-festival coverage I was writing a few lines on every artist and it was actually hard to find out a lot about you, so it’s good to chat and find out more!

That makes me sound like such a bad boy, I’m the mysterious dark horse haha! I’m sure now you’re looking at me there’s a totally mysterious, dark horse vibe going on with my blueberries and strawberries for breakfast!

Haha, yes! So can you tell me about the first moment you knew you wanted to be a musician?

That’s a crazy story, my Dad wanted to be a country singer when he was young and my Granddad did music before him so it was in my blood from being young. When I was really young I fell in love with Country music by accident because my Dad used to play it in my room, he’d play it to wake me up, he’d grab a guitar off the wall. Over the years of him putting a foot on my bed and picking up the guitar and singing like an old Kenny Chesney song it went from being an alarm clock to me putting my head under the pillow but kind of listening to the lyrics and listening to those lyrics I fell in love with storytelling and grew an appreciation for it. As I grew older I fell in love with finding hits and deciphering what a hit looks and sounds like, why is a Drake or a Post Malone song popular right now? Or why Thomas Rhett or Old Dominion are doing so well in our market nowadays so I fell in love with the aspect of music I don’t think there was ever a turning point, I’ve just always known.

It could have gone the other way I suppose if Country music was your alarm clock you could have grown to hate it?

That’s true but theres something different about Country that no other music has, what I love about music at it’s core is that you can change people, and country does that best through it’s stroytelling, I just wanted to be a part of that, I love love and I love telling stories and if you listen to my first two songs that kind of sums it up.

When it comes to your own songwriting then where do you draw inspiration from is it personal experience?

Well it’s kind of funny, because we’ve been on the road since I was little doing this kind of stuff I haven’t had many chances to have a real relationship so I think like the fantasy of having a relationship is where I draw a lot of my inspiration from. If you listen to Hello Beautiful it’s based around the idea of a guy finding love by accident in a coffee shop, he just runs into someone and has a conversation that lasts a little too long and ends up sneaking out with her against his better judgement and then it turns into this epic story which ends in a way where he’s still waiting for her and I guess that’s me if I’m breaking it down and getting to the core. I’ve always wanted to find that love and I’ve never known where it was coming from but I’ve always been excited to see where it could, it could be on a plane in the next seat - I think Brett Eldredge has a song like that - or it could be a few states away but the idea has always been exciting to me. The idea of waiting at the end there I guess is me saying I’m willing to wait, I want to find the right person, I don’t want to settle.

Do you have favourite people you like to collaborate with or anyone you’d like to duet with?

Don’t get me going right now there’s some artists I’d love to collaborate with in the genre, I’ve been a huge fan of Thomas Rhett, I grew up listening to him and Brett Eldredge and Florida Georgia Line, those are my people. I made a playlist called in the neighbourhood on Spotify, the breakdown of the playlist is, take a walk through the neighbourhood of the songs that live in Noah Schnacky’s reality. It’s all the people that inspired me, John Mayor, Brett, Dan and Shay, they’re on fire right now and they’re great friends of mine, shout out to those guys if they end up hearing this they are some of the nicest people in town, they’ve always been so encouraging to me.

A few silly questions now, what’s the strangest thing you’ve ever written a song about?

Well I made this one song called Salty, it was a while ago, it was a pun song, I don’t know if you say that over here but in America it’s like used to call someone bitter or jealous, the whole chorus was like “Woah girl, why you got to be so salty, you’re throwing more shade than a palm tree, acting like you know me, hanging on her hip like a tan line…” the whole thing was a pun but technically the song was just about salt haha.

So when you’re on stage are you completely focused or do you let your mind wander we call it your mid-gig thoughts?

That’s a great question, most of the time the nerves happen before you go on stage and then you get on stage and everything calms and you become one with the crowd, reading how to better serve them but there are other times when you miss a string or if your string breaks on stage well you’ve got some mid-gig thoughts right there. Most the time though the thoughts come before you walk out on stage, you are what you are, you’ve got what you’ve got and they either love you or they don’t and there’s something beautiful about the simplicity of that.

You mentioned you’d been doing a little sightseeing in London and that you went to see a show, what did you go and see?

Aladdin, it was so cool, but the coolest thing we’ve done here, even cooler than the show although it was amazing, your theatres are insane! But this is what it’s all about, we hopped on the tube, and I’ve never done anything like this but we somehow managed to get to the train station to catch a train for like an hour to reading then we hopped on a bus for 18 stops to this random house in the middle of nowhere where we knew one of my fans lived and we did lots of ninja research behind the scenes to find out where they lived and we got to the house, we didn’t know if they were home or not but by the grace of god she was there and she opened the door and it was the coolest thing ever. We connect with the fans all the time over social media but to put a face to the name that’s different and to see the joy on her face and talk about how my music has impacted her and to get to talk to her like we’ve known each other forever that’s special because she’s been a part of the story for so long!

Myself and a lot of the readers are aspiring songwriters, what advice do you have for them?

It’s savage advice but you’ve got to get in the game to be good at it, if you don’t think you’re a good songwriter, write more songs because it’s a muscle, everything is. It’s like Social media, if you’re not good at it then post more because what will happen is you’ll post three or four pictures and you’ll look and think well this one’s a little different this one got seven likes so let me try more of that. It’s the same with songwriting, guitar playing, performing, whatever you’re doing, you’ve got to get going!

So what’s next for you?

So we’re playing C2C… get this we released two songs just over a year ago, in the first year, thanks to the fans…I was hoping to get a decent amount of streams so I didn’t get embarrassed showing someone my Spotify. So we were all independent when we released these songs but we ended up getting over 50 million streams which was mind blowing to us that people could like our music so much to be in the ranks with a Keith Urban or Kane Brown song. Now I’m sitting across the table from you in London which is a place I’ve never been to before playing C2C the biggest Country music festival here then we go straight from here to CMC Rocks in Australia so we’ve gone from Florida time, five hours behind you and then we fly ten hours in front of you in Australia, back to Florida and then we fly to Italy. It’s going to be quite the journey but that’s what our next month looks like.