‘I Was Just Slowly Killing Myself’: Trapper Schoepp Opens Up on Addiction, Recovery & His ‘Exorcism’ of an Album

“It’s hard, and it’s supposed to be hard. If it was easy, I wouldn’t have needed to take these steps in the first place — in terms of sobriety and the album,” Trapper Schoepp tells Billboard of his new album, Osborne, out Friday (Sept. 19) on Blue Élan Records. The Wisconsin-raised singer-songwriter is usually sorted into the ‘Americana’ category and describes himself as a “folk artist” when talking to Billboard, but Osborne is a rock record in both spirit and sound, from its cover art (a flaming electric guitar enters his mouth) to its take-no-prisoners lyrics to the catharsis of his raw yet sweet voice. Even when Osborne dips into country or wraps with a hint of reggae, its songs rip – if only in the sense of ripping off a Band-Aid.

“I wanted to sing about the opioid epidemic as someone who has experienced it firsthand,” he says over a Zoom, sitting in front of a painting he made while at Hazelton Betty Ford clinic in 2024. “I’ve seen the horrors of it firsthand as well.”

While some artists (Jelly Roll, Tyler Childers) are becoming more vocal about the opioid epidemic in America, there aren’t too many musicians writing about opioid addiction, especially considering how widespread the problem is (from Jan. 2021 to June 2024, 43% of overdose deaths in the U.S. involved opioids) and how many artists do talk openly about issues with alcohol or other drugs. With Osborne, Schoepp is hoping to be part of that change. “I think we often speak of sobriety as the act of giving something up. I’m working on reframing quitting as gaining something, whether that’s sanity, health, family,” he shares.

Produced by Mike Viola and Tyler Chester, the album offers a galvanizing portrait of pain, hard-fought recovery and hope over the course of 11 arresting, hard-charging and oftentimes beautifully melodic songs. Recovery may be a constant state, a perpetual work-in-progress, but on Osborne, Schoepp the musician feels fully arrived.

“I’m trying to get in that mindset of thinking about recovery as something that emphasizes liberation,” he explains. “I may have some hard, hard days, but at least I know I’m a better dude.”

If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse or addiction, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Helpline at 800-662-HELP (4357) is available 24/7.

The Osborne album is in large part about your addiction and recovery. Did any of the songs pre-date your time in rehab, or did you write the songs after?

I had already written a full country album that I was going to record. I exited Hazelton in May and I had this commitment to record an album in June. It was not in my plans that I was going to go to rehab. This was a drastic measure by way of drastic circumstances. I was in a state of psychosis, mania – I had gone mad. I was like Mulder in an episode of The X-Files where I felt I was on to this greater truth and everyone was out to get me. It was really like this episode of X-Files in my mind.

When I went to rehab, the first night I brought a lot of paper and a pen. I left my cell phone, and I didn’t intend on writing songs. But the first night I got into treatment, I landed in the Osborne unit. And it was so funny, because on the way to Hazelton — on the Amtrak, there — I had texted a picture of Ozzy Osbourne to my friend. It was a quote that he had, it said, “Hazelton, that was a tough one. They don’t f–k around.” And I just laughed. I sent a screenshot to my friend and then lo and behold, I was in the Osborne unit. Which is a letter off from Ozzy’s surname, but the patients there associated it with heavy metal. It just had this heavy metal vibe. With it being tied in a way to Ozzy Osbourne, I used him as this strange spiritual guide and muse to write these songs in my recovery.

So you were writing in the clinic.

A big part of recovery and rehab is writing about your experience. So I wanted to get two birds stoned at once, and just go for it and write stream-of-consciousness. The first night I got there, I wandered around in the woods and I wrote this song “The Osbournes.” When I got out, I sent Mike (Viola) a new song that I’d written. He was like, “What is this? This is totally different, and it’s really good.” (After I was out) we ended up at a church basement in Glendale, California, and it was a surprise to me that it was in a church basement. With Ozzy and the church and all this sort of Satanic exorcism stuff in my head, we joke that the album was like my exorcism. I had to get it all out in one swoop, sort of in atonement for my sins. If you do a lot of drugs, you have to pay the toll. The album is like an open wound that I’m letting everybody see.

“Loaded” is an excellent album opener, and I love the lyric about being handed a loaded gun. Is that a reference to prescriptions?

Yeah, opioid prescriptions. When I was 20 years old, I had spinal decompression surgery, and the best way that they treated all of that at that time was the Sackler brothers’ method: on a scale of one to 10, how do you feel? And you’d go up and you’d say (a number), and they popularized this idea of chronic pain, pain that cannot be cured. You must treat it forever with painkillers. I think painkillers can be of great use to people in hospital settings, but when they’re in everyone’s house, every grandma’s cabinet and kids are going in there and wondering what this is all about, it becomes a problem. Those prescriptions were just like little loaded guns, and I was just slowly killing myself slowly. You rob yourself of growth, especially at a young age, in your twenties.

When about was this happening?

In 2019. It was supposed to be a really good year for me. I published a song with Bob Dylan, my childhood hero, which is amazing. Just amazing. And I was running all over the world and on the BBC and in Rolling Stone and in a spiral of Vicodin and Tramadol, which seemed to keep me level and out of pain. But the irony of pain medication is that it desensitizes you to pain, so you become so much more affected by any sort of pain because of the way you’ve trained your brain with these medications. I was taking them all throughout that and I was real thin, I wasn’t eating. It was supposed to be a celebration, and all these people were congratulating me on what a great success this was– publishing a song with Bob Dylan – and it was probably the most miserable I had ever been in my entire life.

The album was finished well before he died, but it’s an odd coincidence that Ozzy passed a few months before your album was released. Have you mulled that over?

I haven’t thought so much about that specifically, but Ozzy Osbourne was a voice of all of the f–ked-up children of the universe. He was a voice of the vulnerable. He was a voice for all those who didn’t have one. He struggled so much in his life with addiction, and I think for a folk artist (like me) to use him as this spirit guide in this whole process of recovery is definitely a new one. Not to go too coincidental or weird, but when I got home from Hazelton, my best friend sent me a first pressing of Black Sabbath’s Vol. 4, and he had no clue I was in the Osborne unit.

You said you sent lyrics to Mike, one of the album’s producers, early in the process. How did you get connected to him?

He was just a mutual friend of someone who worked at a record label I was with. He was like Tommy [Iommi] from Black Sabbath. He really brought this SoCal punk rock edge to the album and played so much of the guitar. He brought synths that he used with The War on Drugs and we had all these really old vintage drum machines, because we wanted to kind of sound like Suicide, the New York band. We wanted to have that flavor with some of the songs where you would sit around an old drum machine and dial it in and then all play live to it with a tape machine going. We recorded to a lot to tape live, to capture the intensity and the spirit of the lyrics.

Suicide — the band — is one of my favorites. That reminds me to ask about the final song on the album, “Suicide Summer.” It’s beautiful, it almost made me cry.

It’s tough. When I wrote it, I made a promise to myself. I was like, “If you’re gonna do this, you have to tell everything. You can’t leave anything out.” That song is inspired by when I came off of opioids and the suicidal ideation would not leave my head. It would not leave my head, and it was just plaguing me. It came out of the worst summer of my life when I was having suicidal ideation that would not lift. I think a lot of people who are in drug recovery have that. And I think a lot of people who are not even in recovery have that suicidal ideation thing. Destigmatizing that as well as issues surrounding addiction is what made me want to go in this direction, because the shame and the stigma and the isolation is what keeps people from asking for help. I do not have it figured out, but I still feel comfortable sharing my truth.

Musically, it’s not too dour.

I recorded a version of it that was very melancholy, and we were gonna go that direction, and then I thought about Toots and the Maytals, who have so many beautiful tracks about dark subjects. I wanted that lift to it, because I wanted it to show that I had made it through that, I’d overcome that part of my journey. It was the last song we recorded. I was sprawled out on a couch and they had put a microphone above me, I was perfectly chill. Mike, Tyler Chester and Bob Dylan’s grandson, Lowell Dylan, who I have a strong connection with. I just laid there and sang this traumatic song.

There’s also a song on the album called “Satan is Real (Satan is a Sackler).” Was there anyone at your label who was like, “hey, can we not mention them by name” or anything like that?

No, everyone is pretty down with it and cool. It’s a play on the Louvin Brothers’ album Satan Is Real. At the end of the song, I mentioned them by name. I mean, they’re total f–kers. They are just responsible for so much pain in America. So much pain. And there was the big lawsuit, the $8 billion settlement [ed. note: the Supreme Court rejected the settlement in 2024, which would have given the settlement money to treatment programs and victims but also shielded the Sackler family from future lawsuits], but no amount of money can account for the pain that they have (caused) for their own personal profit. I’m so glad that they have been shamed in the way that they have. And I’m glad that I can add my two cents.

You talk about going into the album knowing you would be honest and open about everything. Putting it out into the world, you’re having to talk about it again in interviews and of course you’re getting reactions from listeners. How is all that going?

You don’t just get to heal from recovery. There’s no light switch where you say, “I’m good now.” That’s a part of the atonement, paying the toll and coming clean. I think it would have been harder for me at that point to not do this than it would have been to do it. When you have that weight and you have something in you, you want to get it out — that exorcism. Part of healing is being vulnerable and being honest. I’ll tell you that from the little I’ve played these songs live, I have gotten more emails from people who have been in recovery, saying, “Hey, man, I have 35 years. Love the record. Keep going.” The other thing, speaking to long-term recovery, is everyone in recovery wants to get clean, but it’s hard to do the dishes, you know? There’s hard, mundane work outside of putting down the bottle and putting down the pipe. Nobody wants to do the dishes. You have to reprogram your mind and act your way into right thinking. And I’m no expert — I need to emphasize that I’m no expert on any of this — but what I do know is that a drunken horse thief who gets sober is still a horse thief.