Jason Schmidt is quickly becoming a name to know, effortlessly balancing a thriving Broadway career, a growing music catalog, and an undeniable stage presence that bridges both worlds. Known for his role as Sodapop Curtis in the Tony Award winning The Outsiders: A New Musical and his standout performance as Buddy Aldridge in Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies on Paramount+, Schmidt brings a rare mix of charisma, talent, and down-to-earth charm to every project he touches.
At a sold-out performance at New York City’s Mercury Lounge, Schmidt recently took the stage alongside friends from The Outsiders: A New Musical, Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies, and former college peers showcasing his passion for collaboration and genuine love for performing. His energy was electric, drawing audiences in and creating a unique bond with fans who eagerly sang along to both his released and unreleased tracks.
Balancing the demands of Broadway with his evolving music career, the Chicago native approaches his work with an authenticity that resonates deeply with his fans. In an interview with ECHO, he reflected on his creative process, the emotional depth behind his songwriting, and the lasting influence of the cities, friendships, and characters that have shaped his journey.
You’re on a mini-tour right now. Your next stop is Boston, and you just played a sold-out show at Mercury Lounge. What has it been like performing unreleased and new music live?
We just did Mercury Lounge. That was a great show. I had such a good time. I brought a bunch of guests on stage: a few from The Outsiders: A New Musical, a few from Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies, and some from college. That’s kind of like my dream music-wise. I think it’s such a cool collaborative art form to do a show where I get to sing and hear friends sing who I’m inspired by and who I think are so talented. That was the coolest part. We packed it so much they couldn’t even close the back doors to the venue, which was sick.
We’re going to Boston in January at City Winery, which I’m very excited about. It sold out super quickly. The crowds have just been so great, and I’ve released a little bit of music over the past few years, and people are singing along to that, but one of the coolest parts has been playing a lot of these unreleased songs for the first time in October, live at least, and at a concert for people. I played it for friends and stuff. People are singing along to these unreleased songs already based on clips that other people are posting of the shows on TikTok and stuff, which is so incredibly cool, too. I did a duet with a girl who’s opening for me, whom I know from college, and we had written it and changed it like a night before our LA show. And then, when we played it at the next Mercury Lounge show two weeks later, people were already singing along to those lyrics with us. Which was crazy because we haven’t released it. It’s been two weeks. They found a video somewhere and fell in love with the song, which is so cool.
Fans seem to want “My Stoner Girlfriend” and “Close By.” When can we expect a release date?
They are coming very soon. They’re coming in January, February, and March.
You’re starring in The Outsiders: A New Musical on Broadway and recently released a new single called “Growing Up.” How do you balance working in theater and producing your own music?
It’s a tough balance. I’m still learning how to do that, especially how to do that and have an outside life. The cool part about it for me, and I’ve said this ever since, is songwriting and acting were like huge things in my life; what I love about it is I go through phases of both at some point; I’m in a songwriting phase, and another point I’m in an acting phase where I get a little obsessive over one or the other and I’m either working on it, writing a lot or picking up a bunch of scenes monologue and working on the acting thing. What that does for me is it keeps me interested in both of them.
The hard part about Broadway is the schedule where you’re always doing it. Within that, there are ups and downs like how good it feels to do it, how natural it feels to do it, your kind of interest level in it, like the artistic fulfillment of it. Like there are some weeks where it’s like, “Yes, this is everything I’ve ever dreamed it might be” and there is some weeks where it’s like tiring and we just did a five-show weekend, and on Friday, we did a put in for some of the new people. So it’s kind of like six shows in three days. I had a great time at the show last night. It was a good show, but it was like, “Okay. I can feel that I’ve done this six times in three days.” It’s harder to make this new and natural. But then you come back like we have two days, Christmas Eve and Christmas off. Then, I’ll come back that next day, and almost always when I have two days off, it feels like this is so fresh and new again, strangely enough. What the music does for me during this time is it keeps me artistically fulfilled on the weeks when the show feels harder. It is still physically tiring, but Daryl Tofa, and Josh Boone did the concert at Mercury Lounge with me last week. We all came in the next day, and we’re like, “Ah, it just feels so good to do something outside of what we normally do” and feel some artistic fulfillment.
Last week at Mercury Lounge, you played an unreleased Christmas song that you wrote based on being in Chicago. As someone who has lived in three different places during their career, how do you balance the influence of where you live when you’re trying to create your own music?
I think it’s the coolest thing, maybe not the coolest thing, but it’s a cool thing to add the culture and the feeling of the city into the music I’m writing. I don’t know if it’s something that I consciously do all the time. Still, I think it just kind of naturally happens. I’ve lived in five or six different cities over the past few years, and I feel like the songs that I’ve written in each city kind of have their feel, and it has a lot to do with what I was going through at the time, which then has some stretch to the city itself.
Your career spans acting, singing, and songwriting. Which of these did you fall in love with first, and how did they come into your life?
The first love, not what I wanted to do, but just love, was music. Growing up, my grandma was a piano teacher. So, it was almost a requirement for us to take piano lessons, which I did not like at the time. I loved it when I could play a song well, but practicing it, I didn’t really love it. My dad and mom were huge music fans, especially 70’s and 80’s rock and roll. So we got shown music all the time. My sisters and I have a playlist of all the songs we grew up with. Initially, I loved listening to music. I loved being a listener of music.
In terms of what I wanted to do, the first thing that got me was the acting part. I did this community theater in Chicago, and I fell in love with the performance, the live performance. I did little improv classes, which was the most fun thing in the world. From there, I started songwriting somewhere in high school, based on the fact that I would sit at my parents’ computer for hours with my guitar on ultimate guitar tabs. I’d be playing through all these songs, and eventually, I started playing around with the melodies or the formatting, adding little things. That kind of got me to be like, “Well, if I can do that, I wonder if I can write my own thing.” I don’t think those were very good. I think only my oldest sister is the only one to have ever heard of any of them. There’s like three. I don’t even remember the third one, but I remember what two of them were. There was no feeling quite like that. It’s cool to feel like you’ve created something that’s yours and is like your baby in a way. Even when it was bad, it felt super fulfilling to me, which is telling to where I’m at now.
When you talk about where you’re at now and how you used to write songs, now that you’re in your twenties, how do you approach songwriting today?
It truly comes from everywhere, which is cool because that evolved. I would only be able to write anything when I felt like I needed something off my chest whether it was romantic failures or like “Little Blue World,” one of the songs that’s been super popular at the shows. I wrote about like a very stressful time in college where it felt like this little world where I was everything, and I needed something to remind me that there’s so much, so much more to life, and my scope feels very narrow, and that’s part of the reason I feel so anxious and stressed right now. And then, over the past few years, as I’ve continued to write and hone my craft, I suppose it comes from everywhere. It can come from a single word that I think is cooler, like a phrase I have this song, “Odyssey” that I haven’t played at shows yet, but it’s a favorite of mine. That came from a best friend while we were joking around and freestyling. And he said this phrase, “I’m lucid.” I thought that was a super interesting little phrase. That’s not even what the song was about, but that started it for me. And then the rest of it came out after that, which is super cool. Sometimes, a lot of times still, it’s about personal circumstances. Lately, as I’ve been writing more on the spot with producers, it’s been like telling stories and seeing where the song wants to go. You have this idea, but what is what the song wants to be itself, not just what I want it to be, which has been super fun. It comes from all over the place, which is my favorite part.
Do you have a dream producer or a dream collaborator to work with?
Yes. Yes. Oh, yes. My dream producer slash-songwriting partner would be FINNEAS, Billie Eilish’s brother. I love his music, especially his personal music. I also love his style. It would fit my style very well. I think we can make some very cool music.
Do you have a favorite FINNEAS track?
“Let’s Fall in Love for the Night” is my older favorite, but he released a new album. I have to pull up “Lotus Eater” because it is really good. I have all my playlists organized by the season. It was fall. “For Cryin’ Out Loud!” is also a favorite, as are “Family Feud” and “Lotus Eater. “ My other favorite is “Break My Heart Again.”
You brought out special guests at the Mercury Lounge show, but I’m curious if you’ll be bringing special guests to the upcoming shows.
I’ve got some friends from college coming up; both Nuala Cleary and Andy LeBuhn (Kid Wolf) are people I met in college. My favorite people that I met in college. What’s special about it is that they’re two people who helped start my love for songwriting. Andy especially was somebody who, when we got to college freshman year, was releasing his first rap album and if you know who he is and what he looks like, the energy of that is confusing. And you’re like, why? We were all like, “Okay, buddy, you’re releasing your first rap album,” but then he released it the first week, which was so cool. I went to him because I had written at that point but didn’t know how to release things. I didn’t know how to find people to get things recorded. So, I went over that whole process with him, and he pushed me to become a writer. Nuala came from showing me the music she had written. I think our styles are super compatible, and the type of music she was writing was the type I wanted to write, and I didn’t know how to pull that off lyrically. Having them play with me at these shows during the start of my music journey is super cool and rewarding for me because they’re two of my biggest initial inspirations.
Your team consists of multiple friends and family you’ve had for a long time. What is it like to bring them with you and have them as a support system while you have such a busy schedule?
That is the biggest dream past what I want to do in my career, is doing it with people that I love, and especially it’s even more rewarding. I meet plenty of people on projects, and I’m like, I love you. I think Josh and Daryl are a great example of that. But then there’s the people I met, you know, in the process of going to college and learning about this thing. Before that, even who I am so inspired by and believe in, and sometimes they’re people that the world has already been like, you’re great. Sometimes, it’s people that the world hasn’t seen yet. I’m very excited about the opportunity to help introduce the world to some of these people or just amplify some of these people because I feel like one of my talents is an eye for special creators. And so that part is the most fulfilling thing to me. It’s important that I’m surrounded by all these people who truly know me and are not afraid to call me out when I’m wrong and stuff like that. I think that is so important, and that’s really like all I have in the space is people who know me and keep me in line and in check (not that I need to be kept in check frequently), but you know what I’m saying.
With the new music coming out for you, it must be somewhat influenced by the characters you’ve played over the past years of your career and in college. How have the characters that you’ve gotten to play influenced the music that you’re making today?
I don’t know; I’ve never really thought about that. During Grease, I wrote a lot of sadder music, and there was a point in Buddy’s arc where he was going through it with who he was. So I bet that kind of has some connection there. Just staying in that head space—not that you try to stay in that head space, but it comes with you a little bit as you’re filming back-to-back days of Buddy being depressed and not knowing who he is. I honestly think that playing Sodapop brought out a little bit of “swagger” in the music that I create, and playing Sodapop has been a huge delight for me. When I played him in La Jolla, the out-of-town, it brought out a lot of stuff that I think was already inside me. I just needed confidence for something like that, but I resonated with the character a lot. It helped bring out that kind of cool, calm, collected, free nature that I think was in me, but I can also be an anxious person. I think playing Soda helped me skew more towards that side. That comes out in the music that I was writing then and that I am writing now.
If you had a dream role to play, what would it be?
I’m way too old now, but the first thing that popped into my head was that I really wanted to be Percy Jackson. That was such a dream of mine. I loved the books. I didn’t like the movie very much, but strictly because I knew the books and it was very different from the books. I like the TV show on Disney+ now, but I wanted to be Percy Jackson bad.
Since it’s East Coast Hollywood, which also stands for ECHO, if you could “echo” anything out to fans or future listeners, what would it be?
I’m very grateful – is the first thing I would want to say about the response we’ve already gotten. I think the fans that we have felt so engaged, loyal, and fierce, which is such a cool feeling. And what I want to echo is that in the future, I hope we continue this beautiful relationship that we have. I hope to do y’all justice. The music I create, the amount that I engage in, and the entertainment that I provide, hopefully, is more than just entertainment. But I just want to echo that I’m very grateful for the response so far, and I’m very excited for the years to come as this journey grows and the fan base grows. We’re going to go to some cool places, and I won’t forget the people that were here at the beginning of it.
With new music set to release in early 2025 and upcoming shows on the horizon, Schmidt is not just a performer to watch—he’s an artist carving out a space uniquely his own in both theater and music. Follow along with Schmidt on both Instagram and TikTok at @jason.s.schmidt
Featured Photo Credit: Nicholas Luan Bui
This interview has been edited for clarity.