"Shut Your Mouth Round Me" is the debut album by "Poopdeflex" aka Scott Snyder. Hailing from Fort Wayne, Indiana, Poopdeflex has played the Hillgrass Bluebilly Stage at SXSW 2009 & Deep Blues Festival 2009 with good friends Left Lane Cruiser. Poopdeflex has shared the stage with acts such as: Bob Log III, The Legendary Shack Shakers, Black Diamond Heavies, Joe Buck Yourself, Possessed By Paul James, Uncle Scratch's Gospel Revival, The Two Man Gentlemen Band, Reverend Deadeye's No Man Gospel Band, The Pack A.D., American Relay, Shake it like a Caveman, The Scissormen.
"Go ahead and judge local musician Poopdeflex by his name. Because when the 22-year-old, better known as Scott Snyder, is on stage - clanking out a set of highly rhythmic rural blues - he's not thinking about your opinion. As a one-man band, Snyder is able to throw his whole body into creating a version of juke-joint country blues that is raw, rackety, self-taught and peppered with the unvarnished punk vocals of a clear-eyed cynic. And, yes, he came up with the name in middle school.
Onstage, Snyder is all feet, knees and elbows. With his right foot on the bass drum and his left on the snare, his hands are free to yank on a five-string resonator guitar. (Well, a four-string resonator guitar. He removed one string to avoid confusion.) And the sound, amplified by the metal cones inside the wooden soundboard of the guitar, is electrified and raw. But Snyder is the first to admit he doesn't exactly know what he's doing.
“I don't know how to play the guitar,” he says. “But I'm kind of an addict. I hear the music, and I feel like I need to play. I never meant to be a musician. I never meant to play music.”
Snyder started out as a saxophone player, performing with local bands such as Pleasing Melanie. But after hearing a recording by blues man R.L. Burnside (also a one-man band), Snyder began devoting more time to his solo drum and guitar efforts.
“I didn't even know how to tune the guitar,” he says. “I tuned mine while listening to Mississippi Fred McDowell. I guess I did it right. I haven't changed since.”
Snyder's tongue-in-cheek animosity for society is apparent in his songs, many of which have titles such as “I Hate You So” and “I Hate Emo.” And his punk ethos extends to the local music scene, too. Snyder is infamous for starting capricious feuds with other local bands (whether they know it or not). The old-time country outfit the North River Agents, for example.
“We joke about starting a Battle of the Bands,” Snyder says. “But a real battle. With swords.”"
~ Emma Downs, The Journal Gazette
"i never ment to play the guitar. in fact i made it a point not to. all you artsy fartsy chord strummin musicans coveren stones rolled in the direction of pussy make me kringe every time i tell someone i play guitar. but that all changed the i heard two men, R.L. Burnside and Fred McDowell. those motherfuckers can play and they don;t even know scales. as soon as i heard them, i knew i had to try and play that shit. so i sat down in my basement, borrowed an old acoustic, put on some mcdowell and went to try to playin like him. eventually i stumbled on a tuning that sounded good, the only catch was that the way i tuned the goddamn high string kept breakin. after about 5 sets of strings and enough money to buy drugs, i said fuck it, that strings too high and pussy, and what the fuck is a 5 fingered man playin with 6 strings. so off she came. from there i began to play every day, havin no clue what i was doing, i was just tryin to make it sound good, not think about chords or changes or theories, but find my ignorance as to just play what i felt, skip the middle man of thought. once i gained some buttons i knew sounded good, i got together with some buddies and formed a dark delta country blues band called Red Barrels. that was some fun shit. but down the road we had some disagreements about the direction, and called it quits. besides that i always felt weird standin up to play. skip ahead a few months and i sittin at the practice space writin songs when i look down and i see both my feet tapin in rhythum. well i thought about it and dug around the spare parts and finally put together a bass drum for my right foot and a snare for my left. now it was terrible at first, but it felt good, addiction good. i couldn't stop, every spare second i had i would bang shit out. once i had the music the only problem was i couldn't sing. and still to this day i don't know how i learned, but i did. in the end there are three basic reasons why i am a one man band: 1) people suck 2) it gives me a reason to sit down and 3) people suck."
~ Poopdeflex
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