JAMS alum resurrects Bob Dylan’s “ He may have been raised in Minnesota, but Bob Dylan had a fondness for Wisconsin. More than 50 years ago, he wrote out lyrics for a song, “On Wisconsin,” as a love letter to the state. Decades later, singer/songwriter and UWM alumnus Trapper Schoepp put Dylan’s words to music and in July, released a music video of the new/old song featuring famous Wisconsinites. Schoepp, a 2013 graduate who majored in journalism, advertising, and media studies, sat down to tell the College of Letters & Science all about his and Dylan’s labor of love. How did you come to write the music to Bob Dylan’s lyrics? One day I woke up and I’m scrolling through Facebook and see the news article that would forever change my life. It was a Rolling Stone article saying that a long-lost Dylan song about my beloved home state of Wisconsin was unearthed and put up for auction for $30,000. The photograph showed two pages of hastily scribbled lyrics. The pages were torn, sepia-toned, and the ink was fading, barely clinging onto the page after over half a century.
I had a sinking feeling in my gut that told me I needed to finish what was started. I made a pot of coffee, sat down at the piano and tried to get inside of a song that Dylan started 57 years ago. The song is written from the perspective of a lonesome drifter like in an old Woody Guthrie song, where the singer is imagining a happy homeland filled with Wisconsin’s finest exports: milk, cheese, and beer. I immediately connected with it. I ended up adding a chorus inspired by my state’s fight song, “On Wisconsin,” and recording it with my band that weekend – going entirely off that photograph of faded lyrics. Months later, I received an email from my manager simply stating, “Dylan has it now.” Through a series of Hail Mary passes, he’d begun talking with Dylan’s team about the possibility of me and the Nobel Prize winner publishing the song together for the first time. But hours turned into days, days turned into weeks, weeks into months. I figured my hero didn’t fancy our take. But then I get a ding on my phone and voila! I get an email saying Dylan had signed off on it. For a Wisconsinite raised on Dylan’s music to now share a songwriting credit with him in a song about Wisconsin seemed stranger than fiction. Journalism, advertising, and media studies alum Trapper Schoepp put Bob Dylan’s “On, Wisconsin” lyrics to music. Photo by Kayla Jean.
4 • IN FOCUS • August, 2019
