The story
Stefan Schneider plays guitar in Awake & Dreaming, the alternative rock band from Waterloo, Ontario, and is one of its two songwriters. He and singer Sasha Kristoff met during the pandemic and started writing songs together, then played them outdoors when everything else was closed. There was no plan yet for what the band would become. The music came first.
Rewire is his song, with some writing by Sasha. Its lead line is played on a bass, not a guitar, and there are two basses on the track. The Cold Shoulder chant came to him in the shower, and a whole room sang it back at El Mocambo. On Old Ghosts he played the ghost piano and the bass under Sasha’s song. On Underwater he refined the lyric and added the bells and the opening breath. He arranged Antidote around Sasha’s lyric and kept its dissonant ending.
Rewire is the thesis statement all in one. The chorus is the dopamine mantra we’re told, “Inspire me. Desire me. Admire me. Rewire me,” repeated until it curdles into “I’m bored.” The bridge flips the whole thing into a confession.
Stefan Schneider, on Rewire
For Lights Down Low he spent a day at New Apostolic Church in Kitchener playing its 8,000-pipe organ. It comes in at 3:22. The album’s closer was written for a foot-pumped reed organ belonging to Gary Schmidt, the organist at that church, who also tunes the band’s pianos.
Every song on Inevitable is an equal co-write with Sasha. About three quarters of the way through the record the two of them put the songs in order, then wrote what the story still needed: a fast song, a human song and an ending. On the record he plays guitars, bass, piano, synths, organ and bells, and sings. The album was produced by Awake & Dreaming, made partly at the band’s own place in Waterloo, a house turned into a studio, mixed by Jay Dufour at The Williamson Studios in North Hollywood and mastered by João Carvalho in Toronto. It came out October 16, 2026.
Before the band, he spent twenty years as a nationally competitive figure skater, and the annual ice shows that came with it taught him every side of a production: performing, choreography, lighting and backstage tech, and finally directing full shows. In 2008 he placed 13th in junior ice dance at the Canadian Figure Skating Championships.
He also manages the band, and with Sasha he books and runs its tours. Off stage he holds a PhD in computer science and works with Canadian tech start-ups. He lives in Waterloo.