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Mattie Schell is a fixture in the St. Louis music scene.
You smell like fresh laundry,” Mattie Schell tells me. We are waiting for drinks amid the varicolored tiles and eclectic bric-a-brac of Venice Cafe, a short walk from the house the talented singer-songwriter shares with her fiancé, musician and audio engineer Nathan Gilberg. Schell describes her home’s proximity to Venice Cafe as “dangerous” due to the tempting convenience of such easy access to her favorite watering hole.
It’s a convenience she apparently enjoys often. The bartender knows her drink without Schell having to order it, and no fewer than a dozen people stop to talk to her during our sidewalk-table interview. (“We’re doing an interview right now,” she tells one friend. “But when we’re done I’m gonna come over and hug ya!”) She’s a popular and convivial fixture of the place, almost always smiling, the kind of gal who likes to have one foot on the dance floor and one elbow on the bar. Plus, she performs at Venice twice a month as one of St. Louis’ most popular new solo artists.
The key phrase is “new solo,” as Schell is most familiar to St. Louis and beyond as one-half of acoustic-based folkicana duo River Kittens alongside singer/guitarist Allie Vogler. Over the last decade, River Kittens recorded two EPs, released a flurry of singles and kicked up dust around the country mixing olde-tyme musical idioms with wry modern songwriting and seamless vocal harmonies.
Vogler had already formed River Kittens as a duo with singer Martha Mehring when Schell first met her in 2014 at the Crow’s Nest in Maplewood. After an impromptu set together that night, Schell officially joined River Kittens, turning the group into a trio.
The lineup took off, as the Kittens played five nights a week around town, released a well-received self-titled EP and opened for Pokey LaFarge’s 2015 New Year’s Eve show at the Pageant. After Mehring left the band in 2018, Schell and Vogler forged ahead as a duo, eventually connecting with guitarist and producer Devon Allman, who signed the girls to his Create Records label and put out the Kittens’ 2021 EP Soaking Wet.
“That record literally took us coast to coast,” Schell says of the band’s cross-country tours opening for the Allman Betts Band and playing venues such as the Ryman in Nashville with the Allman Family Revival. It’s a lifestyle that fit her well. “I love the road,” she says. “For me, it takes a lot longer to want to come home than it does to want to go back on the road.”
River Kittens chalked up a long list of highlights. They recorded at Sun Studios in Memphis, closed the Open Highway Music Festival by jamming with Old Crow Medicine Show on a cover of the Beastie Boys’ “Fight For Your Right,” played the Mighty Pines’ inaugural Pines Fest last year and collaborated with G. Love on a version of Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City,” released as a River Kittens single. “G. Love gave us a boost,” Schell says, though she notes that the younger Vogler had previously never heard of G. Love. “I was like, ‘I had him on fucking Napster, dude!’ She was like, ‘What’s Napster?'”
Despite the many successes, the Kittens felt like 2023 was time for a change. Schell treads lightly when talking about Vogler, careful to avoid saying anything negative about her former bandmate or the reasons for their split, and she says she considers the door open to future collaborations with Vogler or River Kittens reunions.
“The experience of the River Kittens is one of the most incredible things in my life,” Schell says, emphasizing the unique vocal connection she and Vogler shared. “Allie and I were really good at telegraphing what we’re going to do, really good at singing harmony. We just had that chemistry with each other.”
Still, she notes that the two were quite different in other ways and that after eight years together, Schell was ready to go solo. “I can’t speak for Allie, but at the end of the day, every artist deserves to be able to create without compromise, and I think we were both ready to just do our own thing.”
So suddenly, she became Mattie Schell, solo artist, the girl who grew up as the musical-theater-loving kid from Jerseyville, Illinois, and member of the sprawling Schell clan of bluegrass pickers. Back in those days, Schell cut her teeth in high school praise bands until heading off to college in Nashville and broadening her horizons. “I discovered marijuana,” she says, laughing. Today, she is wearing overalls and a flat-brimmed ball cap adorned with Grateful Dead dancing bears, attire that sums up both her farm-girl roots and her eventual foray into more expansive, jammier music.
A big influence on her was her uncle, Wayne Schell, who turned her on to some of her favorite artists (Dylan, the Band, Gillian Welch), gave Schell her first mandolin and played covers with her on weekend nights in Grafton, Illinois bars back in the early ’10s. “I really started finding my sound and my voice with my Uncle Wayne every Friday night,” she says.
She eventually landed in St. Louis, waiting tables in Maplewood, dating Gilberg, meeting Vogler and carving out the River Kittens years. After the split with Vogler, Schell found herself taking on previously scheduled River Kittens plans by herself, including a tour with singer-songwriter Jackson Stokes and an Off Broadway concert in February paying tribute to the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty and the Band’s Stage Fright, two of Schell’s favorite albums.
That show ended up being billed as Mattie Schell & Friends and featured an impressive all-star crew made up of Al Holiday, Nick Gusman and members of the Mighty Pines, Funky Butt Brass Band, One Way Traffic, Yard Eagle and more. “I knew that if it’s not going to be River Kittens, I needed an awesome lineup,” she says. The night was a big success, and Schell promises similar shows to come. She is also a favorite on Sean Canan’s Voodoo nights, most recently a two-night stint channeling Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie for Voodoo Fleetwood Mac.
But Schell is most excited for her upcoming solo album, which she recently recorded in Nashville with producer JD Simo. “I’ve never done a solo record in my life,” she says with visible excitement. “They are all songs that I’ve written or co-written with my fiancé. We cut the whole thing live in the studio — no headphones, no separate rooms.”
In the spirit of her solo debut, the album’s working title was Baby’s First Record. “I thought it was funny,” she says. “I get so tired of people taking themselves so seriously. Then I recorded one last song, the only one with just me and the guitar, called ‘And So It Goes,’ so we named the album after that song.
And So It Goes has no release date yet, as Schell is fielding some promising label options, but the first single, “Let You Let Me” is out now. “The album is definitely the best thing I’ve ever done,” Schell says. “I’m really proud of it.”
With an advance listen to the album, it’s easy to see why. And So It Goes highlights Schell’s chameleonic ability to channel a range of Americana styles into an assured tour through country crooners, funk-soul groovers, jazzy ballads and folk confessionals, all delivered with Schell’s powerful, pliant vocals.
In the meantime, she’s gearing up for an action-packed summer. She will be singing at Venice Cafe on the first and third Tuesdays of each month; she is scheduled to play three separate sets at the Open Highway Music Festival on June 16; she will hold a solo showcase at Joe’s Cafe on June 22; and she is on the lineup for the Summer Sundown Festival in Effingham, Illinois, in August.
“I’ve started finding my own sound as much as I ever had in my life,” she says. “And I’m chomping at the bit to get it out there.”
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