Article in 2026 on Fiver/Simone here: Fiver – Fiver Trois presents Cleaning House – You've Changed Records
Simone interviews Paul Henderson at this link: Interview with Paul, 2025 — Sappyfest
More Simone here "you've changed records" vocals with Simone Schmidt:
Fiver & The Atlantic School Of Spontaneous Composition - Train Leaves Here This Morning - YouTube
More here: Fiver – You've Changed Records
Bandcamp: Music | Fiver
Facebook: Fiver | Facebook
Instagram: Fiver (@fiverfines) • Instagram photos and videos
Link: Simone Schmidt
Youtube: Fiver Fines - YouTube
and here in 2022 announcement with Struts Gallery:
Welcome New Programming Coordinator | Simone Schmidt
Simone, born in 1984, chatted with me one afternoon at the Struts Gallery BBQ Friday Fundraiser.. she explained about her "condition".. which is something I honestly had never heard of "misophonia":
"The intense aversion to the sound of people eating with their mouths open is known as misophonia, a condition characterized by strong emotional reactions to specific sounds.
Understanding Misophonia
Misophonia, often referred to as selective sound sensitivity syndrome, is a condition where certain sounds trigger extreme emotional responses, such as anger, disgust, or anxiety. Common triggers include:
- Eating sounds: Chewing, slurping, and smacking lips.
- Nasal and throat sounds: Sniffling, coughing, or throat clearing.
- Repetitive environmental sounds: Tapping, clicking, or rustling noise"
Latest from Simone Schmidt "Fiver" here: ▶︎ Fiver Trois presents Cleaning House | Fiver
"In 2020 I consulted with a psychic who gave me a ritual for purging my apartment of stuck energy. I’d become backed up, moving from one place to the next, inheriting my dead friends' keepsakes, curb shopping, accumulating far too many cursed things from other people's pasts. I was told to put everything that previously belonged to someone else in one room, to trace a chalk circle around it all, and say the spell. I piled the contents of my life high to the ceiling and did what was prescribed. Then I put back what I wanted to keep. Whatever I didn’t want I was free to let go.
Writing this record was a similar process, albeit 5 years later, and this time the house was my head. The pandemic had left me with 3 untoured records of repertoire that still very much speaks to me (and actually speaks quite well to this moment). In 2022, along with many other friends and paradigms, I’d lost metaphor. I could not see it coming back. And because I am wary of the toll diaristic songwriting takes on the singer I had all but given up on song.
Music remained: Almost every weekend since 2023 I’ve commuted two hours across the made up border that divides Mi’kma’ki into New Brunswick and Nova Scotia to play music with drummer Nathan Doucet and bassist Jeremy Costello. Our influences are disparate: Jeremy is ever marked by Jon Anderson and the music of Yes, Nate was blasting Chris Dave and Doechii, and I was mostly listening to Jeff Parker, Mulatu Astatke and Ahmad Jamal. Together, we meandered to wordless musical dialogue, meeting eachother with an attentive responsiveness I’ve only ever experienced through music. We called ourselves the Trois.
Suddenly in 2025, I began the process of Cleaning House, and found the many moods of the past 14 years had littered my mind with some nagging melodies and unfinished phrases, some molten feelings that had hardened and deserved to be enshrined, and some wilting tunes that awaited reinvigoration by new players. Along with the return of metaphor and songwriting came the ongoing delusion that I am innovating on the progressive edge of Country Music, and so naturally, when it came to recording, I sought a pedal steel player. I cold called Dani Crowther of Townie fame to be the fourth to our Trois. Who knew the young one had so many kinds of chops? You’ll also hear fiddle player John Showman of the Lonesome Ace Stringband play on the songs RJD and Elemental Progression.
I produced Cleaning House using the formula I’ve come to follow: rehearse for a long time, record to tape for a short time and mix it with urgency. Thank you to Gavin Gardiner for engineering and mixing the record, to Howard Billerman at hotel2tango for maintaining such a fine studio, and to Phil Demetro for mastering the record.
There is an idea circulating that the job of the artist is to respond to the moment. This moment: I watch it roll like a slow storm cloud of poison gas, as Christian Nationalists continue their centuries long crusade, border imperialism administered by technocratic psychopaths tears my loved one's families to shreds, and renewed land grabs by oligarchs are dressed up as economic security. The dead bodies of people are broadcast on a horrorshow stream funded by corporate tyranny and our inattention, now the nukes again, my friends incarcerated for saying no to militarism, my friends dropping dead from a poison drug supply, a two tongued settler state speaking the words of reconciliation while banker daddy continues his ecocide. Down the road they’re nation building with another american owned gas plant in the Chignecto Isthmus, and back in my old city, people surrounded by millionaires and vacant buildings are freezing to death one season and boiling to death the next. All these things are the extension of logics that I have been writing about explicitly and implicitly for 18 years. The crusade may shred time, but the old verses don’t expire. In this economy there is no point in rewriting the same song. I save my slogans for the signs, and here I offer you my humble poetry to set you beside yourself.
Writing this record was a similar process, albeit 5 years later, and this time the house was my head. The pandemic had left me with 3 untoured records of repertoire that still very much speaks to me (and actually speaks quite well to this moment). In 2022, along with many other friends and paradigms, I’d lost metaphor. I could not see it coming back. And because I am wary of the toll diaristic songwriting takes on the singer I had all but given up on song.
Music remained: Almost every weekend since 2023 I’ve commuted two hours across the made up border that divides Mi’kma’ki into New Brunswick and Nova Scotia to play music with drummer Nathan Doucet and bassist Jeremy Costello. Our influences are disparate: Jeremy is ever marked by Jon Anderson and the music of Yes, Nate was blasting Chris Dave and Doechii, and I was mostly listening to Jeff Parker, Mulatu Astatke and Ahmad Jamal. Together, we meandered to wordless musical dialogue, meeting eachother with an attentive responsiveness I’ve only ever experienced through music. We called ourselves the Trois.
Suddenly in 2025, I began the process of Cleaning House, and found the many moods of the past 14 years had littered my mind with some nagging melodies and unfinished phrases, some molten feelings that had hardened and deserved to be enshrined, and some wilting tunes that awaited reinvigoration by new players. Along with the return of metaphor and songwriting came the ongoing delusion that I am innovating on the progressive edge of Country Music, and so naturally, when it came to recording, I sought a pedal steel player. I cold called Dani Crowther of Townie fame to be the fourth to our Trois. Who knew the young one had so many kinds of chops? You’ll also hear fiddle player John Showman of the Lonesome Ace Stringband play on the songs RJD and Elemental Progression.
I produced Cleaning House using the formula I’ve come to follow: rehearse for a long time, record to tape for a short time and mix it with urgency. Thank you to Gavin Gardiner for engineering and mixing the record, to Howard Billerman at hotel2tango for maintaining such a fine studio, and to Phil Demetro for mastering the record.
There is an idea circulating that the job of the artist is to respond to the moment. This moment: I watch it roll like a slow storm cloud of poison gas, as Christian Nationalists continue their centuries long crusade, border imperialism administered by technocratic psychopaths tears my loved one's families to shreds, and renewed land grabs by oligarchs are dressed up as economic security. The dead bodies of people are broadcast on a horrorshow stream funded by corporate tyranny and our inattention, now the nukes again, my friends incarcerated for saying no to militarism, my friends dropping dead from a poison drug supply, a two tongued settler state speaking the words of reconciliation while banker daddy continues his ecocide. Down the road they’re nation building with another american owned gas plant in the Chignecto Isthmus, and back in my old city, people surrounded by millionaires and vacant buildings are freezing to death one season and boiling to death the next. All these things are the extension of logics that I have been writing about explicitly and implicitly for 18 years. The crusade may shred time, but the old verses don’t expire. In this economy there is no point in rewriting the same song. I save my slogans for the signs, and here I offer you my humble poetry to set you beside yourself.
credits
released July 10, 2026"
In the news here: Toronto musician Simone Schmidt’s new album a meditation on mental health - The Globe and Mail
and here: The New Historian | The Walrus
"I know very few musicians who make enough money to survive without having to work other jobs. No one has a retirement plan." - Simone Schmidt
In Wikipedia here: Simone Schmidt - Wikipedia
More here with an interview conducted back in 2018 with Simone Schmidt on Youtube's Kreative Control channel Episode #374 : Ep. #374: Fiver
"Daybreak" here: ▶︎ Daybreak | Fiver
Sackville NB based artist's commentary here:
"I wrote Daybreak 14 years ago and have played it live since, but I’ve never released a recording of it till today. Over the course of all those years singing it, I’ve heard it refract through so many atmospheres of repression. There were even split seconds where I thought it no longer resonated. Unfortunately, there is no time like the present to put out a song for everyone fighting to preserve their lives and dignity despite the patriarchy, particularly as it stalks us in the skin of settler colonial Christian Nationalism.
I recorded this version of Daybreak with Dani Crowther and Jeremy Costello in January as part of a larger session (which also included Nate Doucet) for my upcoming record “Cleaning House”, which will be coming out on July 10, via You’ve Changed Records. Something about Daybreak's sonic balance didn’t lend to the shape of that record. So here it stands, independently.
credits
released April 7, 2026"
Struts Gallery is on X but they don't post there anymore...
they use instead Bluesky:
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