August, the latest album from Karen Schoemer, began with the prompt to write a poem a day for a month. Sounds like a straightforward premise, right? In reality, it was a multi-year process of writing and cutting and pasting before recording the poems, which are backed by music that pals like Mike Watt, Oli Heffernan, Amy Rigby, Wednesday Knudsen and others composed. 

“I had the idea to make an album in August of 2022,” Schoemer recalls on a recent video call. That’s when she emailed her collaborators with the idea as well. “Oli Heffernan sent music within an hour. He was like, here are seven pieces of music that I’m not doing anything with.” A few others composed pieces with only the knowledge that the piece needed to be about two minutes long and it was for a project called August.