Rachel Schumacher Bet on the Backup Plan

Rachel Schumacher did not grow up with a perfectly mapped-out path to becoming a country artist. For a long time, the plan was veterinary school.

Originally from St. Louis, Missouri, Schumacher attended the University of Missouri and expected to continue into veterinary medicine after graduation. Then she applied to vet schools and was rejected across the board. Instead of taking another year to regroup and reapply, she started looking harder at the other part of her life that had always been there.

Music.

“Singing was kind of my backup plan,” she says. “Right after graduation, I moved here in 2022, and I’ve been doing it ever since.”

It is the kind of story that sounds simple in hindsight. One door closes, another opens. But at the time, Schumacher was choosing between the practical path she had prepared for and something far less predictable. Her parents encouraged her to think realistically about whether she should give vet school another shot. Schumacher understood where they were coming from, but she could not shake the feeling that walking away from music without trying would bother her more than failing at it ever could.

“I just kind of had a gut feeling that I needed to just go for it,” she says. “I was going to regret it if I didn’t. And I needed to just go all in.”

The interesting part is that Schumacher did not always know she had something worth going all in on.

One of the first moments that made her reconsider how seriously she should take singing happened during college, when she performed during her sorority’s preference day. She was not treating it like some major career test. She was singing largely because there were not many other singers in the group.

Then she noticed the reaction.

Girls were crying. People were moved. Schumacher realized that what felt ordinary to her was landing very differently with everyone else.

“I didn’t even realize I was that good of a singer,” she remembers. “I was like, wow, maybe I’m actually kind of good.”

That confidence grew during an early trip to Nashville, when she played a writers round called New in Town at Winners. The encouragement she received from the people in that room helped make Nashville feel less like an abstract dream and more like something she could actually pursue.

By the time she graduated, the idea had become difficult to ignore.

Finding the Version of Country That Sounds Like Her

Schumacher describes her music as ’90s country mixed with modern pop-country, but even she admits that definition only gets you so far.

The deeper reference points are more specific. She hears pieces of ’90s female country in what she does, along with the storytelling of early Taylor Swift, particularly the Fearless era, and touches of artists like Kelsea Ballerini and Kacey Musgraves. At the same time, Schumacher does not love the idea of trapping herself inside one comparison. She listens to too many different kinds of music and writes too many different kinds of songs for that.

One album, however, brings her directly back to the beginning.

Schumacher remembers becoming obsessed with Hunter Hayes’ debut album in high school, especially the era around “Storm Warning.” She played the record repeatedly and remembers thinking that someday she wanted her own music to feel like that.

Another important moment came in 2022, when she opened for Priscilla Block while she was still in college. Schumacher had not moved to Nashville yet and was still figuring out what kind of artist she wanted to become. Watching Block perform and hearing about the path she had taken gave Schumacher a real-world example of what an emerging country career could look like.

“She was still up and coming, but was having a big moment,” Schumacher says. “Hearing her life experiences really shaped me and encouraged me to get to where I am now.”

Ironically, Schumacher says she began finding her own voice after moving to Nashville and playing more cover shows.

Night after night of singing songs everyone already knew taught her that imitation was not enough. If she sang something exactly like the record, there was very little reason for anyone in the room to remember her. The challenge became respecting the song while still leaving enough of herself inside it to make someone look up.

“You have to kind of add your own little twist to it without changing it too much so that people pay attention,” she says.

That same philosophy carries into her original music. Schumacher’s songs are often pulled closely enough from her real life that friends can immediately identify who inspired them. She wants that specificity because, for her, songwriting is a way of letting listeners into the story rather than hiding behind something generic.

“I hope listeners understand me honestly and hear my life stories,” she says. “And I hope that it applies to them.”

The song she thinks best introduces that side of her is “You Don’t Need Him.” The track has surpassed 200,000 Spotify streams, but the accomplishment Schumacher seems equally proud of is that she wrote it completely by herself.

“It’s all me,” she says. “Nothing from anyone else. Just me.”

Learning to Write Outside Her Own Life

Her next chapter is starting to push that songwriting process in a different direction.

One of the songs currently in progress is called “Dopamine,” written with Eris and produced by Tim Miller. The two writers had never worked together before. They sat down on Schumacher’s couch, Eris mentioned she had always wanted to write a song called “Dopamine,” and the session grew from there.

What makes the song interesting for Schumacher is that it is one of the first times she has stepped noticeably outside her own biography.

The opening lyric references a cigarette even though neither writer smokes. Schumacher laughs about how unfamiliar that feels for someone accustomed to writing songs where people close to her can immediately identify the backstory.

“I’ve never smoked a cig in my entire life,” she says. “So it’s really kind of made up, honestly, which is new for me.”

For an artist whose writing has often depended on turning her own experiences directly into songs, learning how to build a believable world that did not literally happen to her represents a small but important evolution.

She is still telling stories.

She is simply discovering that not all of them have to be diary entries.

Nashville Became More Than the Place She Moved

Schumacher talks about Nashville less like a city that gave her a career and more like a place that helped her become comfortable with the person she already was.

Looking back at her veterinary path, she does not dismiss it. She genuinely enjoyed parts of that world. But she also realizes how much effort she was putting into becoming someone she thought she was supposed to be.

“I think Nashville’s changed me as a person in a way where it’s allowed me to fully be myself,” she says. “Deep down in my soul, I just knew [veterinary medicine] wasn’t for me.”

Now, she says, she feels happier and more like herself than she did before making the move.

One Nashville institution has been woven through that journey almost from the beginning.

Whiskey Jam.

On her first trip to Nashville, someone messaged Schumacher on Instagram and told her she had to go. She did not know what Whiskey Jam was, but she showed up at Winners, saw the event for the first time and immediately decided she wanted to be on that stage someday.

“I thought it was the coolest thing ever,” she says. “I was like, I have to play that immediately.”

Eventually, she did. Schumacher played Whiskey Jam at Winners before the event moved to Whiskey Row, creating one of those full-circle moments that only really makes sense after you have been in town long enough to recognize it.

The city has also taught her a less romantic lesson: playing the show is only part of the job.

Schumacher regularly works cover gigs for income, but she pushes back against the idea that four hours onstage means the workday is finished.

There are songs to write, social media to create, emails to send, meetings to take and marketing decisions to make. The live show may be the most visible part of the career, but much of the actual building happens after the crowd goes home.

“You can’t just get stuck playing on Broadway,” she says. “There’s so much more behind the scenes that goes on, and you have to put in the hours and put in the work if you want it to work.”

That distinction matters to Schumacher because social media sometimes creates the wrong impression of what she wants.

Her Broadway-related videos tend to perform well online, so she posts them. They attract attention, help grow her audience and can eventually lead people toward her original music.

But she does not want the content to become confused with the destination.

“I think a lot of people misunderstand and think that I’m just a Broadway singer,” she says.

The cover gigs are fun, but the original songs are what she actually wants to build the career around.

“I don’t want to be playing them for the rest of my life.”

From a Backup Plan to No Backup Plan

There is something fitting about the way Schumacher describes where she is now.

The artist who once considered music her backup plan no longer has one.

“The more years I’m in Nashville, I realize how much I truly love it, and I can’t imagine myself doing anything else,” she says. “I’m really putting all my eggs in one basket here. And I have absolutely no backup plan.”

That does not mean she needs worldwide fame to consider the gamble worthwhile.

Schumacher’s definition of success is surprisingly specific.

She wants to play the Grand Ole Opry.

She wants to play the Ryman Auditorium.

And she wants to perform at the Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre in her hometown, a venue connected to some of her earliest memories of seeing country music live.

“If I can do those things in my career, I will die happy,” she says.

The more immediate goal is her first proper project. Schumacher is working toward an EP for 2027, something that will allow her to move beyond a collection of individual singles and present a fuller picture of herself as an artist.

She also wants to keep playing as much as possible, travel farther and eventually perform in all 50 states.

And if she could choose one collaboration to connect the artist she is today with the teenager who first fell in love with country records, it would be Hunter Hayes.

“I think it would just heal my 15-year-old self to be able to do a song with Hunter Hayes,” she says.

For all of those long-term goals, some of the moments Schumacher values most are much smaller.

Recently, a man approached her after a show and handed her a $25 Dunkin gift card. He had been following her videos and knew how much she loved Dunkin.

“It actually made my entire life,” she says.

The gift itself was not really the point. Someone had been paying attention closely enough to know something about the person behind the songs.

Schumacher has learned a similar lesson about the people listening to her music.

She often writes with teenagers and young adults in mind, only to finish a show and have someone decades older approach her about how deeply a breakup song connected with them.

That has made her less interested in deciding exactly who her audience is supposed to be.

“Maybe it is for anyone and everyone,” she says.

Five years ago, the version of Rachel Schumacher sitting in college could not have imagined exactly where that decision to pursue music would lead.

If she could talk to her now, Schumacher says she would mostly give her a pat on the back.

“No matter what happens, I’m very content with what I’ve done,” she says. “And I think she would be very proud of herself.”

There is still plenty ahead. The EP. The Opry. The Ryman. Fifty states. A Hunter Hayes collaboration. More original songs and fewer nights where the cover gig is the thing people know her for.

But maybe Schumacher’s story works precisely because none of it followed the original plan.

Veterinary school did not work out.

Nashville did.

The backup plan became the plan.

And when asked what she wants people to know right now, Schumacher offers advice that sounds like it could just as easily be directed toward the college student she used to be:

“Even if they are feeling a little bit confused or lost in life, they’re on the right path.”

For Rachel Schumacher, being lost turned out to be part of finding it.

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