During one of many teenage after-school trips to the Tower Records near Lincoln Center, I made a pact with myself: “all I want from the rest of my life is to put out an album that people can buy at a record store like this. If that happens, I will be happy.”
Five years later, I found myself at Jackpot Records in Portland, staring down a wall of my band Get Him Eat Him’s debut CD Geography Cones. It was pretty awesome.
… this NEVER, ever would have happened without Absolutely Kosher Records. Cory Brown took a chance on my band when we had nothing to our name except for a handful of demos I recorded in my dorm room. He gave us a budget to record our debut album straight to analog tape at Tiny Telephone in San Francisco. He paid to have that album mastered and manufactured. (He even let us use the thick, waxy-smelling paper for the CD insert, which was a really big deal.) When that album failed to recoup the money Corey had invested in it… Cory gave us a budget to record our second album.
But Cory’s contributions went far beyond material support. I never, ever forgot that my band’s music would bear the same mark as truly fucking incredible albums like the Wrens’ The Meadowlands and The Mountain Goats’ The Coroner’s Gambit. That the label responsible for releasing those albums saw fit to release my music meant more to me than I could really express. It made me aspire to make truly great music. And it made us feel like a Real Band.
Look, I understand that the music business is changing. I understand that bands can bring music direct to market, that physical distribution is no longer as important as it used to be, that grassroots groundswell can be more powerful than a label-funded publicist. But independent record labels are still important. Independent record labels are still really important. The gap between how artists create and how audiences consume is only getting wider; bands spend years pouring themselves into a record, only to have it consumed as a negligible blip in a torrent (pun very much intended) of free, on-demand entertainment. Independent record labels still support artists, not content producers.
Last week, Cory announced that Absolutely Kosher would be going catalog-only. Cory stayed true to his taste and his vision until it was no longer tenable, and I can’t imagine I’m the only musician who has him to thank for a whole lot of things. So, thank you Cory. And thank you Maren, Richard, Ryan, Sikwaya, Naomi, Joe, Rosemary, and everybody else who I had the pleasure of meeting and working with through Absolutely Kosher.
So hey, head over to Absolutely Kosher’s website and buy some music. The label put out some incredible records that never really got their due, including but by no means limited to Okay’s High Road and Low Road, The Jim Yoshii Pile-Up’s Picks Us Apart, and Sparrow’s The Early Years.
