Heavenly Highways: A Conversation with Worried Songs
I’m excited to bring another Q&A style interview to the blog, as I realize it’s been a long time since I’ve posted one here. This time around, I had the pleasure of chatting with Chaz, who runs the label Worried Songs based out of New Brighton in the UK. Worried Songs, who has recently released albums by artists such as Corey Madden, Northwoods Sleep Baseball Radio, Ananya Ganesh, and Edsel Axle, puts their focus on music coming out of the American underground, spanning folk, experimental, and jazz styles. In our conversation, Chaz and I discuss running a small label in 2024, concepts of American imagery and identity, discovering new music in the age of algorithms, and the sights and sounds of baseball. Even as construction ground away in the apartment above me and power drills drowned out my senses, the words shared between us were miraculously preserved on recording and are shared with you here now. – Hannah Blanchette
Hannah Blanchette: I guess where I want to start off is a little bit of label history. How did Worried Songs start as a label? How did we get from point A to where we are now?
Worried Songs: I think it started as a stupid idea in the pandemic. (laughs) Then instant regret and realizing what I was doing. I always played in punk and hardcore bands growing up in my late teens, early twenties, and released music for friends’ bands, bands we toured with from across the world. So I always had that bug, and particularly with this DIY aesthetic, and making things look cool and the record sound good. I always played around with this idea of doing it a little bit more professionally, but trying to still have that feel of DIY coming through. So yeah, started in 2020 and it’s sort of steadily, I don’t know about grown, but… (laughs) the financial black hole has sort of increased over three years since then. But it’s been really good fun. Work is very, very busy, can hit easily seventy hours-a-week. I’ve got a two-year-old at home as well. It’s this crazy, silly hobby that I take very seriously, and is a bit of a creative outlet. I like to think it’s grown a little bit in pressing bigger numbers of records, more people are hearing them, they’re getting further around the world. At least I hope they are.
HB: Oh definitely. I found you when, I get the Pitchfork daily digests and I think the Edsel Axle record was on there. And that’s how I had found the label. And I know The New Yorker did that article on the [Northwoods Sleep Baseball].
WS: We’ve been really lucky with those sort of things. The Edsel Axle record has done really, really well. The best a record has probably done on the label. It’s almost broken even, which tells you… (laughs)
HB: That’s when you know!
WS: Gotta do a few more of those. I think that’s kind of the point of the label. All of the modern day metrics of what makes music successful, I could give a shit about. I want records to look nice, sound really good, there be trust between the artist and the label, and then get as far out into the world as they possibly can. So that’s my only barometer of success I have really. The music industry is going in some really strange places, and I think it relies on small labels, blogs, record stores, people talking about the music they like and not caring quite as much about numbers of streams or any of the modern metrics for what makes music good or successful. Which is kind of scary.
HB: It’s interesting you brought that up because I wanted to know your thoughts about record label identity in the age of streaming. I feel like it’s more significant than ever that record labels have strong identities, and how do you see Worried Songs fitting into that?
WS: Simply no idea to be honest! My idea with this label was to get a flavor of the American underground, of the sort of music I really obsess over and I’ve collected as a record nerd, and bring it to a UK market. But 70% of the records just go straight to the States. Which is great, but maybe not quite what was intended! So going back to that question, I don’t know those weird metrics of everything having to be based around numbers, and stuff coming out really quickly. It kind of bums me out how quick records seem to be old. And if there’s not initial hype around a release, it’s almost like it’s gone. I definitely don’t think it should be that way. I hope Worried Songs is a label that tries to put a lot of love into records so they don’t just disappear in this modern attention span. We try and do well on social media but I have no idea how the algorithms work, I don’t have a website, I’ve got an Instagram page and a Bandcamp. I’m probably the architect of my own downfall really.
HB: When you talk about how quickly things come and go, I mean we see this with movies too. Movies are in the theaters for such a short period of time and then they go right to streaming. I think we’re seeing that across the board. When I am looking into what I want to write about, I resist the urge sometimes to only talk about something that’s just come out. Or if something came out six months ago, not to think, “Oh, that’s passed now, I can’t talk about that now, it’s too late.” It’s not. That’s definitely a byproduct of the era that we’re in, in terms of how we put out and consume media, and talk about it.
WS: As a teenager, when you’ve got all this time to yourself, I feel like I would obsess over a record and be reading about it in the press for six, seven months afterwards. There’d be singles coming out after the record, now it seems to be this trend of having two or three tracks to get interest, and then you hope when the record actually comes out it does well. There’s loads of really good blogs around, but it’s getting fewer by the year where real music writing’s taking place, which I think is a really beautiful art form that feels like it’s being squeezed and squeezed and squeezed all the time.
HB: Looking at your catalog, just based on visuals, it seems like maybe ten-ish, twelve releases in the past four years? That is a testament to really taking your time with a release, nurturing it and making sure it gets the attention it deserves.
WS: Yeah, and it’s really, really hard, isn’t it? You put all that love in, and it still feels like every time there’s this weird element of luck to it as well. Maybe there isn’t, but it does feel like records I’ve released that I thought would do super well, or might be more commercial-sounding, don’t go as quickly as some of the weirder ones. For instance, the Edsel Axle record, really far out sounding record, the Tongue Depressor record, being a double LP, that did really, really well. But it’s probably the more far out music I’ve released. Maybe that’s a testament to people still seeking out those niches, and maybe that’s where people are still really, really supporting independent music. I go back and forth on this, and everybody on the label I’ve had this conversation with at some point of like, “Please trust me even though I really, really don’t know how this works anymore.” I think for me, it’s making sure it goes to writers who I think are great, and still sending out physical media for review. Because that’s such a huge part of it for me, that people have these things in their hands and take time to look at the artwork and sit and listen to the whole thing. I basically go on these roundabouts, and in the end I think I probably spend more time thinking about quitting the label than I actually do running it. (laughs) This thing runs from midnight till 2am when my little kid’s asleep and I’ve managed to get all my schoolwork done. I absolutely adore doing this but it’s a tricky thing to run a label in 2024. Particularly one that is less established, although hopefully is becoming more and more established.
HB: I personally think so. I think we’re very much in a period of transition as an industry. That back and forth that you have about the approach to running a label in this time is kind of a reflection of that. Something else you brought up when we were first talking about the beginning of the label was that you played a lot in punk and hardcore bands when you were younger. How did your interest in the types of music we find on Worried Songs develop?
WS: The general progression was like, being ten-years-old just as nu metal hit, and at that very, very formative age, that was definitely kind of damaging. But it went from nu metal to finding Black Sabbath and Slayer, which then went into punk and hardcore. But I think even in those times, I’d pick out jazz records and things like that, that I knew had some of those more extreme sounds on them. I think slowly got into it that way. When I was probably in my early twenties, I worked for a record shop for a couple years and worlds opened up for me there, for the music I was listening to but also record culture and record collecting culture. That’s probably as I was getting into weirder and weirder stuff, and folk music, and jazz music, and more and more experimental music.
Although I’ve got a pretty early memory of being in a music class in school, probably in year 10, which for me would be fourteen, fifteen. The lesson was on contemporary classical, I think every week you looked at a different era of classical music. I remember the teacher playing Different Trains by Steve Reich. I don’t think I enjoyed the music at the time, but I remember seeing everybody freak out and be like, “This is the worst music ever.” And I was like, “This guy’s onto something.” ‘Cause he’s got this reaction out of these people. I think the teacher also mentioned John Cage, 4’33” as well, and I was like, “This I can kinda get into.” This idea of music on the fringe of stuff, and making sounds that don’t sound like what you hear on the radio, and where do I find more of this…. There is always that part of me that with whatever genre I get into, my brain works in a way that I have to find out all these weird, crossed lines that go between different musics and different genres. Same with books for me as well, I can’t just buy one book by an author, I then have to go down a rabbit hole and buy every, single thing. It’s that unfortunate brain I think record nerds, or maybe just nerds have.
HB: I think, yeah. I very much do the same thing. And talking about working in a record store, I’d say that’s the same point for me as well. Part of it is you’re working there and you feel like you need to know a little bit about everything that’s in there. So you start to explore things you might have not considered exploring before. It really opens things up. And making all the connections between the different things, that’s definitely something that any sort of nerd of something will very much relate to. (laughs) Definitely record collectors will resonate with that.
It’s funny, you reminded me of when I was younger, I played in a clarinet ensemble. And my teacher always picked very weird serial pieces, or like, Elliott Carter for us to play. It was also a similar sort of thing for me at the time that I don’t think I necessarily loved it, but I knew that it sounded interesting. I was like, “This is super different from learning the Mozart clarinet concerto in my lessons. This is a totally different brain working here.” It sometimes can take a little time for it to set in, but ultimately if you can recognize the uniqueness of contemporary music at some point in your life, it’ll blossom later.
WS: And then you realize that and Napalm Death are the same thing!
HB: Exactly! There’s a connection there.
WS: I think that’s a weird thread in Worried Songs’ stuff. However different the releases sound, there’s some weird thread. For me, Ralph White and Tongue Depressor are kind of the same thing. It’s this weird, traditional music taken to these strange places they’ve never been taken before. And there’s some weird line between the two of those definitely.
HB: I definitely think there is. I’ve spoken recently with the guitarist Daniel Bachman, and I feel like his music is an example of that. It’s really rooted in folk tradition, but it really takes it to far out, droning places. There’s totally a thread there. I see a similar sort of thing with your label, of this stuff that is seemingly on the surface very disparate but actually is super connected historically. How do you go about curating the releases on the label?
WS: It’s a real mix. Some it’s people I’ve gotten in touch with and said I’ve been interested in releasing something. The first three releases were all things that had come out in the States, or had come out on cassettes, and I thought it would be cool to do a UK pressing of them. And like I said, they all ended up back in America. (laughs) But that’s by-the-by. From there, it sort of spiraled. I did a record for Jerry DeCicca, who then in turn recorded the Ralph White record and produced the Bob Martin I did. So those came from having that relationship there. For others, I get loads of records sent to me. Bob Keal, who does Small Sur, he completely blindly sent me the record and from within the first two minutes of that record, I completely fell in love with it. He sent me the Cara Beth [Satalino] record that I’m releasing in a couple months time. There doesn’t seem to be one set way of what I choose to release. Rosali [Middleman], I’d heard that awesome guitar tape she did and was like, “Would you like to do an LP of this sort of stuff?” Some are shots in the dark, some are shots in the dark to me, some are ones I’ve put out there, and a couple are friendships I’ve built through doing the label, and in regards to future releases that I’m doing as well, from people I would’ve never crossed paths with had I not done the label, which is probably what just about keeps it going. There’s a nice aesthetic to the releases I’ve done and they’re around nice paintings making it kind of look weird. All the releases have been really, really easy. I try to run things properly whilst it being this financial black hole of a hobby.
HB: You brought up the paintings, I noticed there’s a little bit of a unified aesthetic for a lot of the releases. How does that come about? I hadn’t noted if the artwork is done by the same individual frequently…
WS: Not all of them are done by the same person, there’s two or three people I use quite regularly. Jonny Brokenbrow is a guy from England who I use a lot. He does these really cool abstract paintings. He also does these really cool portraits of bands and musicians as well, as well as doing interesting zines. He does a lot of them, which is a huge help, and I feel like he’s part of the label despite the fact I’ve actually never met him in person, which is very strange. But yeah, he’s been great for it. It’s been like, having those conversations with the musicians, that there is a kind of aesthetic around things. Some musicians have completely trusted me with the artwork, others have come in with stuff already that I love. Weirdly how a record would look, I take it so seriously, it almost would be a dealbreaker for me. If someone sent me an artwork and I was like, “I really don’t like this…” But thankfully I’ve never been in that situation. (laughs)
HB: Artwork very much means a lot to me, even when I’m buying a record. It’s definitely something that could go both ways of a record that could sound super good, but I’m like, “Hmmm, but that cover.” Or it’s the reverse, where “that cover looks so neat, I have no idea what this sounds like.” It can go in either direction.
WS: And I think that’s another thing with running a label in this year, or this time, you want things to look really nice in a record shop. People have less money to spend, I think everyone is finding things tough financially, and previously something you could do really, really easily like buying records now is an average range of 20-35 dollars, it’s this really expensive thing to do. I want to make sure the product people are getting is worth the money.
HB: Definitely. You want to have the whole package. Something else that piqued my interest is that on your Bandcamp and on your Instagram, your bio says “Heavenly Highway Hymns” as a descriptor.
WS: Yeah, that’s a funny one! That one came through Joseph Allred, when we were doing the artwork for their record Rambles and Rags of Shiloh. They sent me loads of inspiration from the recording of the record from this area of Shiloh in Tennessee. I just spotted that [phrase] on a hymn book that was in the back of one of the pictures, and I was like, “I’m stealing that, that’s the tagline.” I really, really like it. We put that on some T-shirts and it feels like it covers everything of the label. It’s rooted in all these different sorts of American music and that phrase sort of sums it perfectly I think.
HB: I love that it was in the background of the image. That it was something that spoke to you that wasn’t even the focal point.
WS: I think that their guitar was leaned against a piano and it was on there, and I was like, “That’s the one. That’s mine.”
HB: It’s funny because when I saw that, something told me I felt like that is from somewhere and so I looked it up.
WS: I know it’s like a popular book of song, I don’t know.
HB: I don’t think I’ve ever come across it myself, but apparently it’s a super popular hymnal.
WS: Oh cool! Hopefully I don’t get sued by someone. (laughs)
HB: So far doing great!
WS: They can have the twelve pounds I made off of those T-shirts.
HB: On the topic of how you focus on the American underground with the label, can you elaborate a little more about the impetus behind deciding to, at least up until now, release solely American artists? What do you think is conveyed about the American underground through what you’re putting out on this label?
WS: I have this conversation a lot of the time about how I’ve always been obsessed with American stuff. We had a next door neighbor growing up who had an American mom and a British dad and they separated when he was nine or ten, and we were next door neighbors, played in the street all day long. All of sudden, he’d only come back once or twice a year to see his dad, but he’d come with all this crazy stuff, video games, CDs, this stuff we’d only ever heard of or dreamt of. So I think that might be the root of it there. Also, one of my mom’s friends married an American so she moved out. It must’ve been when the Rockies started, which I think is the late nineties, maybe ’97, but every year we’d get a Colorado Rockies baseball jersey from the age of about seven or eight. I think those weird things stuck in. Plus the movie Mighty Ducks was on constant rotation in our house. Those things combined gave me a real love of American culture, and then that became counterculture through eighties and nineties American hardcore. Those sorts of things really got into me. My undergrad was in history and I did a lot about the American West. The history writing in a country that is so young in theory I found kind of fascinating in these weird juxtapositions of American history. I’m still obsessed with reading about America.
There’s richness and a variety of music that has come out of America. I’ve always thought America does counterculture through music very, very well. That’s always something I’ve been very interested in, that you can have these traditional musics that are sometimes linked to a stranger side of politics, but people can take it in fresh directions and put their own spin on it and their own politics on it. That’s always kept me coming back to it. It’s just meant I can take cool holidays in the States as well (laughs).
I got to take a cool trip with Cam Knowler, he’s a flatpicker from Arizona, last year. He came and toured the UK and I drove him around for a couple of weeks with Eli Winter. And then we did a big road trip across the States and he played a few shows from Nashville to LA, west Texas, and Arizona, and New Mexico. If I ever doubt why I do the label, it’s being able to do cool trips like that.
HB: Have you been anywhere else in the States?
WS: I’ve been to a lot of states. Me and my wife, when we just finished university — and when I tell Americans this I think they find it really crazy — the Amtrak had this offer on for tourists that for $500 you could get three months of passes on the trains. I think it equated to twenty-five journeys, so we did New York to New York in a big circle. It went all the way across the Pacific Northwest down the West Coast through to Texas and the Deep South, and then back up the East Coast. It worked out that it was twenty dollars a journey, and every journey was twenty hours on the train. Having now bought Amtrak tickets from one city to another and spent like $200 on it, I’m aware of how crazy that deal was.
HB: I’ve looked into their sleeper train trips, and I really want to go out West, and they’re not cheap. It’s something I’d have to save for. That’s amazing.
WS: Whether they still run that I don’t know, but every time I’ve gone since, it’s been back on Greyhounds basically (laughs).
HB: You see a lot on a Greyhound.
WS: I’ve been lucky enough to do different trips with different bands over the years, and just traveling with friends as well. It always seems to be a place I go back to. Record shops have a very big part to play with that as well, every trip ends up with a very, very heavy bag going home.
HB: It’s so true, I always try to do CDs when I’m traveling.
WS: And you can listen to them as you go if you’ve got a CD player in the car.
HB: What would you say is the place you’ve been to in the US that you think has most resonated with the concept that you’ve had [of the US] your whole life?
WS: That’s a really good question. That’s the nice thing about the label, is that what I’ve done now, plus future releases, there’s not many states I don’t now have a close friend in or nearby. So that’s a really good question, I don’t know if I can even answer that to be honest. I’ve always had a love of the history of the American West, and how messed up that history is but also fascinating, and just some incredible storytelling involved in that. Those western states have always had a bit of magic to me. That trip I took last year, I’d been through New Mexico and had a couple of nights there, but we traveled from bottom to top and I definitely fell in love with that sort of area, in far west Texas and Colorado. It’s really nice that with the records I’ve released, I think of the state and surrounding areas, and I don’t think that’s just because the person is from that place, it’s that they make me think of those sorts of music.
HB: Circling back to your releases, when we started talking about this, the baseball really jumped out at me, as this icon of American culture, and now taking that and turning it into this field recording that’s not actually a field recording, and turning that into [Northwoods Sleep Baseball], into something to be listened to and absorbed as a soundscape.
WS: The level that guy goes to on those recordings is really wild. I’ve always been fascinated by the game of baseball, the spectacle, the stadiums and where you find them and where you see them in more rural areas. I’ve always found that the rhythms of the games and the sounds within the games are really intriguing. I just love sitting out on a warm evening drinking a beer, watching baseball. It’s funny, I’d not really thought about that, but that sort of typifies the label quite a lot, in that it’s a weird wormhole into American sounds and American culture.
HB: And it’s something that I think is kind of changing too. At least once a year, my family would go — we didn’t have any of the major league teams near us — we’d go to a minor league game every summer, and I feel like it used to be so active, they would always have the same organ sounds. There were always certain things that happen every year. I go to Reds games now, and I definitely think the soundscape is changing a little bit. I do think it’s a little less rooted in those traditional baseball sounds. They’ve gradually been waning over the course of time, so I think a record like that is so fascinating as it captures a certain essence of what baseball sounds like. But again, it’s not a literal recording of a baseball game.
WS: But it could be! That’s the really scary thing about it. I’ve fallen asleep to those every night for like, the last four years.
HB: There is something very soothing about it. Like you said, there’s a particular order to how things go, there is this structure, I think almost more so than other sports. You only get this many strikes, and then it’s a walk…
WS: The slowness of it I like as well.
HB: Yes! I do forget sometimes until I go to a baseball game how slow they are, sometimes I’m just there for the atmosphere. Especially if you’re sitting in the nosebleeds, you can’t see anything, so you’re just there for the sounds and the smells.
WS: I actually got married in New York, and we went to the Yankees one night, and the following night I went to see the Brooklyn Cyclones at Coney Island, which is minor league I believe. It was like nosebleeds to front row, sit where you like, and get talking to everybody that you sit next to. You could see the two different sides of the game. You see that over here in football or soccer, the difference between non-league and premier league football. Those traditions maybe in premier league are long lost, maybe due to capitalism. But you still can go to non-league football and still get a taste of the magic of it not being about money.
HB: Have you noticed any shifts or changes in your label over the past few years?
WS: I’m slowly learning more and more how to do it well. The big thing for me is having better relations or writers I trust to write about the music, or knowing who will really enjoy a release. Getting a bit of a better idea of how the record business works, because previously my ethics in my early twenties were as DIY as it came. The distributor was you and you trade with a label in Japan, and then a label in Australia, and then a label in the US. I kind of still love that and I still do a lot of trading with other labels, which is cool because it means you can get small releases into the UK. I think some of the stupid questions I’ve had to ask people over the last couple of years, like “Is it that simple?” or “Is it this tricky?” There’s been a lot of people who have helped me out along the way, so hopefully I’m asking less stupid questions now, three or four years in. But it maybe bewilders me a little bit more, or makes me want to go back to it feeling DIY and a small operation. Doing releases like [Northwoods Sleep Baseball] where you’re hand stamping every box and you’re folding up twenty different inserts to go inside. I don’t think that will ever leave me, that side of things.
HB: There is something to that, that handcrafted care, like we were talking about earlier with the physical product. Running a label, I would assume, is something that you really have to do it to learn it. You don’t really know how it works unless you’re in it and doing it.
WS: I think that’s it. You learn how it’s done and you learn how you do it, and those two things can be slightly different. There’s decisions I make that keep it in the realm of what I’m comfortable with, and keep out the ickier side of recording industries and how you get coverage in a modern age. It goes back to those metrics that I don’t care about, as long as the records come out looking nice, and sounding nice, and people are buying them and they’re in record shops, I’m pretty happy. It’s just how long you can continue that with a label in 2024, I don’t know (laughs).
HB: There’s also to some degree, only so much of that you can control. Once the record’s out, it’s a little bit of a leap of faith. You can do PR and doing this and that, but at the end of the day, it comes down to how people respond to it, whether that be the public or critics. And that’s something that’s just a big ole leap of faith.
WS: I don’t know what the next move is. I’m gonna need TikTok, I don’t know. That would be so cool if I could get Ralph White trending on TikTok somehow, I just don’t know how to do it.
HB: I don’t think anyone can really predict what algorithms are gonna do these days. I feel like the most obscure things have gotten trending on TikTok.
WS: My favorite band in my early twenties was Duster, and it was like you were asking eleven other nerds on a message board, trying to track down all their lost demos and recordings that didn’t end up on records. I knew they were getting bigger, but it was only when I went on Spotify that I saw how huge they are. That’s crazy to me that music can always have this second life. That’s where I think streaming and social media can be really cool. Like a band that didn’t get the attention they deserve first time around are finally getting it. It’s a love-hate relationship with those things, where you can have amazing accidents for a band like that, where they become almost like — from what younger people I know tell me — I wouldn’t say a household name, but there are fifteen, sixteen-year-old kids who are listing them as one of their favorite bands. That’s pretty amazing that those weird algorithms can allow that to happen. I just wish it happened more like that.
HB: That is one of the things that is nice about streaming is that it’s very easy to explore a lot of different music. There is a flip side of it can be overwhelming, you’re inundated. But that’s where I think labels really come in, because they can be like, “Here, this is high quality, this is great music, you should listen to this,” in a world where there is so much out there. But there is that possibility that it’s super easy to explore a lot of different things. Someone who hears a Duster track, they’ve never heard them before and they wouldn’t have expected to hear them otherwise, they could easily go and listen to the whole discography in one sitting.
WS: And that’s great, but then also there’s that love of going into a record shop and finally having found a record. Even those early days of mp3 sharing when you had a terrible rip of something and then you finally find a record copy you’ve been tracking down for years. I worry that people miss out on that. But then it’s also amazing that you can find a new favorite band and have listened to their entire discography within two or three hours.
HB: There is such a satisfaction in putting in that work to find something, so it’s a love-hate relationship. There are some great benefits, but there’s also stuff that gets lost.
WS: Me and my friend were talking about how she really liked those free CDs that came with magazines the other day, and how most of the ones we got weren’t great, but we both remember one that was based on Kurt Cobain’s list of his fifty favorite records, and it was like twenty tracks on there. It might’ve been Q or a really big UK music magazine, and you obsessed over everything on that, it had everything from The Shaggs to Minor Threat to Leadbelly. And rather than just being able to go find all those, we had a handwritten note for the next time we’d get the train to Birmingham and go to the really good record shops, and hope we found those names in there. There was something kind of beautiful about that even though it might take seven months until you find that thing.
HB: But it’s a very active engagement, with that process, that is less so if a magazine simply made a playlist. It’s a little different. It involves less on your part in the exploration process. I’m conflicted all the time about how I feel about it. You mentioned that you’re planning to do some UK-based releases coming up. What was behind the decision to do that?
WS: There’s a late-eighties band called Chorchazade who released one LP and a twelve-inch. They really did very badly, like they famously made fourteen pence as a band in their three years. I’m slowly compiling all of their music together, plus an LP that never came out. It’s one of the first things I would’ve wanted to release. This was a record that came into the record shop I worked in and just knew from the cover instantly it was gonna be cool, but not knowing what it sounds like. It’s so weird because it’s from the south of England in the late eighties, maybe, ’86, ’88 or ’89? And it precedes the sound of US indie rock completely. There’s a track on it that sounds like Slint, there’s stuff on it that sounds really Pavement-y. It’s one of those records I can’t believe hasn’t been reissued. I’ve got a few things lined up for this year, but that’s probably going to be the big project of 2025. I think the irony of this release being the first UK one is that it sounds like it could be a ‘90s US indie or post-punk release, so while it’s UK, it’s maybe because some of the sounds have that sort of vibe to it, that I was so drawn to. When I first heard it, I was like, “This has got to be from somewhere in the Midwest, some weird small town in the American Midwest.”
HB: I wonder what causes that vibe, what are those similarities there? I can imagine there a similar sorts of places in the UK where that kind of sound comes out. It’s just interesting how that parallel happens.
WS: I completely agree with you that there’s definitely UK bands that sound very much like the cities they’re from. Like Napalm Death and Black Sabbath sound like Birmingham and the surrounding midlands, whereas I think they were either based in Bristol or Brighton, down in the south. I think they come from Cornwall, which is far south. Whether in the eighties, that was super isolated? I haven’t had a chance to speak to them about what they were listening to at the time, must’ve just been pretty far out post-punk, kind of minimal stuff. We’ll see if it comes out, we haven’t been able to track down the masters yet, but I’ve got a friend who’s really into audio restoration so I think it’s going to be a bit of a project for him to get it sounding as good as it were from the original masters, which I think are sadly long gone.
HB: I think that’ll be a great addition to the label. Anything you would like to say about your upcoming releases, the Cara Beth Satalino and Corey Madden?
WS: The Cara Beth record is one of those ones that is just beautiful, folk-rock. It’s just perfect, every little inch of it. I think that one will do really, really well. Cara Beth I think is from upstate New York and now in Philly. She plays in a band called Outer Spaces, which I think has always been a vessel for her singer-songwriting stuff. When she sent me this record, it was under the name Outer Spaces, but we decided it was a bit of a departure from the sound of those Outer Spaces records, so I think it’s the first full-length LP she’s done under her own name, which seems really fitting. Corey Madden was one that I just got sent blind, and I loved the band Color Green, so it was pretty quick and easy with that one. I’m actually announcing a UK pressing of Therapy by Brendan Eder Ensemble, which is a really beautiful ambient record. There’s probably two or three other things cooking this year that are almost to the point of completion. I’ve got that band Old Saw doing their third record on the label which should be really cool, because I’ve distributed their first two over here and they’ve done really well, so fingers crossed that one does well as well. But who knows? (laughs) Like you said earlier, every release feels a bit like a shot in the dark. There’s a lot of people who are very kind about the label, there’s a lot of amazing record shops who consistently pick up the releases, and there’s lots of amazing writers who consistently write about the records. Without them, I think I would’ve been done after the first three or four releases. A thank you to anybody who takes an interest in this music. Like the conversation we were having earlier, that is where good music will survive.
NOTE: This interview has been edited for clarity.
May 3, 2024 | Blog