Noah Reid's double life: how the Schitt's Creek star balances acting and music

This time last year, Noah Reid was organizing his annual birthday baseball game. 

The Schitt's Creek star and musician, whose birthday perfectly aligns with the release of his upcoming sophomore album, Gemini (May 29), has celebrated for the past few years by heading out to the diamond with his friends. But this year that is not an option, for obvious reasons.

"Oh God, I would love to be out there throwing a ball!" Reid exclaimed two weeks ago, realizing that the big day was fast approaching.

Reid is staying busy promoting his music though, as he's spending most days chatting with interviewers over the phone from his Toronto home in between bingeing the Michael Jordan documentary The Last Dance and "figuring out how to make things grow" in his garden. He adds: "On some level, it's nice to be moving ahead with an album release because it means there's something to do every day." 

Gemini comes on the heels of Schitt's Creek's five-year run, which wrapped up with an emotional series finale on April 7. Reid joined the show in its third season as the love interest of Dan Levy's character, David. Over the course of the Emmy-nominated series, Reid was at the centre of not only the show's standout romance but also some of its most memorable moments, many of them musical. 

"I think Dan had a pretty strong sense of how it could possibly fit into the show," Reid said, of Levy's instincts to hand his character, Patrick, a guitar. In one of the show's biggest breakout episodes in its fourth season, Patrick serenades David with an acoustic cover of Tina Turner's "(Simply) the Best," a scene that the New York Times crowned "one of the most romantic, adorable moments on TV" that year.

While Patrick was more a hobbyist when it came to music, Reid took things a little more seriously. 

An American–Canadian dual citizen who spent his formative years in Toronto, Reid always had an interest in playing music. His mom would transcribe the melodies he would make up and hum out loud, he studied the Suzuki piano method at the Royal Conservatory, and he always sang in choirs. 

For Reid, music and his other love, acting, went hand in hand. "I started writing songs as character explorations," he explained, of his early experiments with songwriting. "I wrote things down from the perspective of different characters and thought, 'Oh, this is a great way to spend some time,' but what if the character was me? What if I'm the character and these songs are just about what I'm going through and so, as I started my professional acting career, the songwriting came as a natural byproduct of a kind of difficult industry with a lot of different challenges, and songwriting was a way for me to put some of those things I was experiencing into a container." 

In 2013, when he was acting in a production of Red at Halifax's Neptune Theatre, Reid was at a crossroads. Like many actors looking for their big break, Reid was contemplating a move to Los Angeles (even though his prior trips there admittedly didn't yield many good experiences). But it was his mother who suggested he focus on his music instead.

"She was like, 'I feel like you've got to record some of these songs you've been writing; if you don't, they're going to expire,'" he remembered. "So over the course of that Christmas, I decided to stick around and make the album."

2016's Songs From a Broken Chair was recorded over two days in Toronto with the help of singer-songwriter Matthew Barber. Reid first met Barber while attending house shows in Stratford, Ont. "When we connected and I spoke to him about how I would go about recording, he said, 'Well, I'd be happy to produce it for you if you want,'" Reid recalled. "Not only did he produce it, he also played drums, we rehearsed in his basement, he facilitated the recording spot, he mixed every song and he spoke to me ad nauseam about all of my lapses in understanding of recording and insecurities about songwriting." 

But instead of hitting the road and promoting his music, Reid left it "on the table for anyone who wanted to find it." To him, the project was "the thing I might be proudest of," but it was also simply an "archival recording" to catalogue his musical ideas. Acting remained his primary goal — until people found the album. 

It was around the time of that Tina Turner moment on Schitt's Creek when fans of the show unearthed the two-year-old Songs From a Broken Chair. With all the positive attention he was getting from the show and from feedback for his music, Reid decided it was time to return to the studio. 

Once again, Reid teamed up with Barber for Gemini but instead of two days, this time they took two weeks to piece everything together. The result is a collection of folk-rock songs that explores the highs and lows of Reid's life, told through Springsteen-inspired anthems ("Honesty," "American Roads") and quiet acoustic moments ("Hate This Town," "Jacob's Dream") that expose a personal vulnerability that fans of him onscreen rarely get a glimpse of. 

The "good and bad days" captured on the album are just one of many dualities represented on the album, thus inspiring the title. Reid himself is, of course, a Gemini, but he never took much stock in astrology until recently. 

"I feel like there are two things always happening for me," he muses, connecting his dual identities as an actor and singer, as well as an American and Canadian. "It's a nice nod to the many splits in my life." (The album cover itself is a reference to the Canadian Gemini Award. "Canadians will get it," he adds with a laugh.)

Even as he sits idle at home for the foreseeable future, until COVID-19 restrictions ease, Reid is back at that crossroads, contemplating his next steps. Between acting and music, is there one he wants to pursue more? "That's a definite question for me," he said, unsure of the answer. "I hope to be able to do both things. It just feels like a balance that I'm going to have to navigate throughout my life."

Either way, one of the first things he's excited to do once we return to some semblance of normalcy is going on tour. When live events started shutting down due to the pandemic, Reid was in the middle of his first proper North American tour. Following a show in Chicago, Reid and his crew drove back to Toronto for the night before heading to Boston. "We never left for Boston," Reid revealed. 

"I'm sure that we will be going back on the road," he said, confidently. "It will likely be a while before that kind of thing is allowed and you just don't know how people are going to respond to the notion of being in crowded spaces." 

This is when the optimistic side of his Gemini personality jumps out: "Maybe people will be crazy about it. I think that will be the case."