This week’s podcast guest is Tanner Schut, and he is currently out on tour with The Book of Mormon. When we recorded, Tanner was actually on a layoff. The tour was sitting in Toronto dealing with a musicians’ union situation, so the whole band got a few weeks off before picking back up.
Tanner joined Book of Mormon mid run, which is its own story. The drummer before him left to rejoin Blue Man Group, and Tanner got the call after a chain of connections that started with an audition for the Water for Elephants tour that didn’t even work out. He made an impression anyway, and when the Book of Mormon music director went looking for a drummer, his name got passed along.
He grew up in Corvallis, Oregon until he was eleven, then finished growing up in Boise, Idaho. He picked up drums in middle school, almost by accident, and by his teenage years he’d fallen hard for the studio legends: Steve Gadd, Peter Erskine, Vinnie Colaiuta, Roger Hawkins, Jim Keltner, Jim Gordon, Steve Jordan, Steve Smith, Steve Ferrone. You can hear all of that in his playing, honestly. I told him as much before we even started recording.
Tanner went to the University of Idaho, where he bounced between social work, music, and eventually landed on a journalism and broadcasting degree, which he crammed into two and a half years. From there he spent three years working on cruise ships, mostly in house orchestras backing production shows and guest entertainers, before making his way to New York and subletting a spot in Bed-Stuy. That’s also where our paths first crossed. He found this podcast during his last cruise ship contract and started listening to figure out how the New York music scene actually worked.
What we got into
This was a genuinely great conversation, and it went in directions I didn’t expect:
The Water for Elephants audition that didn’t land him the gig, but landed him the one that mattered more
How he talked his way onto his first cruise ship job with an audition tape most people would call excessive: fifty five different styles, chopped together into one continuous take
What a real week on a cruise ship actually looks like, and how close he got to burning out after a nine month contract
The honest version of what it takes to break into the cruise ship world, agencies and all
What he’d do differently moving to New York, after watching his savings disappear faster than he ever expected
The strange, small-world way a family connection led him to another drummer in New York before he’d even unpacked
Tanner stood up for the entire interview because he couldn’t sit still, which somehow felt like the most fitting way to talk to a touring drummer. Nobody in this business sits still for long, and this conversation is proof of that.
