Artist Feature: Social Cig

words By and photos by Aideen Gabbai

Social Cig’s Parker Schultz (Aideen Gabbai)

Everything about Social Cig is chill. The band’s sound is colloquial, earnest and nostalgic, sounding like music that would be featured in a classic ‘90s movie during a cool montage. Their music emphasizes fluidity and change, a personal philosophy of Parker Schultz, the founder and sole member of the band.

When I met Schultz over Zoom, he greeted me with a relaxed vibe and introduced me to his new dog, who is tentatively named Crabcake. He summed himself up with a simple statement: “I like to watch movies and skateboard and eat good food. That’s who I am.”

Social Cig is the personal project of Schultz, which he started while he was a junior at UW-Milwaukee in 2019. He has been doing music since he was young, but didn’t start to consider it a career option until Social Cig. They released their first album Yellow Weekends in March of 2020, and so didn’t really get to perform much right after that. There weren’t any big ambitions for the first album, ”I honestly didn’t see a future with it all at that time, so the whole album is like I just have these songs, I have some friends who like to listen to my music, said Schultz.

One summer four or five years ago, he read a book called “Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff.” Schultz has shaped his life philosophy around the title of the book. “I’m very much a person that I forgive really easily, I don’t know, whatever happens, I just keep going and keep looking ahead, and try to stay fluid with everything that happens in life,” said Schultz. His mindset filters through his music, with many songs reckoning with these themes of change and trying to keep up with the churn of time.

Before the band, he explored a couple of different creative ventures, like t-shirt designing and photography, but nothing stuck until Social Cig. But now, those other hobbies bleed into the band. “It encompasses the t-shirt brand as like merch and then [with the] photography, I love editing videos and it all funnels the things that I love into Social Cig, it's like putting all my eggs in one basket with this project,” said Schultz.

The band’s live lineup is a collaborative process, with band members coming in and out all the time, based on their availability. Schultz views it as a way to keep the band fresh and ever-changing, a fun configuration with lots of input and malleability. He toured most recently on the East Coast with two members of another Milwaukee-based band, BUG MOMENT, Aidan Hoppens on drums and Elias Dorsey on bass. “I love doing the full band stuff, it’s a lot more fun of a show, but also the solo stuff is more intimate and more of a conversation.”

Initially, Social Cig didn’t play much, only a few house shows, and then the pandemic shut everything down. However, when Social Cig started playing local shows after the quarantine, they were met with a huge turnout from the community and played venues all across Milwaukee.

They just recently returned from their East Coast tour, a venture Schultz has been working on for a while, with him booking the whole tour himself. “ It was just the coolest experience, like every day just waking up and driving to each city,” said Schultz “I just feel like the momentum of the tour just carried us along the entire way, lots of adrenaline.”

In his song “My Last Cigarette”, there is a refrain that repeats, “‘Til' we talk again.” The circularity of the refrain and the words, a promise that even if people drift they can come back together. It embodies the feeling that the band’s music evokes. Social Cig’s music pairs the chill with the existential, accepting that the universe is always changing, but that the way people can deal with it is by accepting it as it comes and having good in the meantime.