On Returning

Hello. I am so happy to be here with you right now. There are a lot of exciting details coming and pre-orders live right now on the site and on Bandcamp for first Friday, but right now, let’s catch up.

It has been a very long, very difficult 12-year slog of debt and humility to arrive here. It is a horrible feeling to build a business to promote great music by talented artists and then wind up owing those artists money that you cannot pay. Many artists were quietly understanding (or just quiet), some even supportive, but there was anger, pain, disappointment, and a couple of letters on legal stationery. I lost friends or learned who my friends were. My romantic relationships suffered, from my divorce in 2008 through the next three major relationships over the 11 years that followed. I stopped going to shows. I dealt with years of depression and shame, absorbing the responsibility of my failure, sometimes going further into debt just by not keeping up with royalty payments. I spent several years trying to reinvent myself (hence the “Brownbutter” handle), working in pro wrestling on a contextual social network and an animated series there, but I couldn’t invest while I still owed this awful debt. I took gig work to keep making payments and meet settlements, delivering groceries, alcohol, and medicine throughout the pandemic. Old friends emerged to help me get there faster through loans. People became nicer and reminded me of my value. In 2020, I felt the music call me back and I began DJing for John Peel-tribute station Dandelion Radio and later, on Mixcloud. As my debt shrunk, I began to gain some perspective, to forgive myself, to understand that I didn’t cause the $7.5B music industry correction that crept up on us in 2006 and eroded the label’s health from 2007 until our last release in 2011, Himalayan Bear’s aptly titled and hauntingly beautiful Hard Times. When we should have been celebrating Absolutely Kosher’s bar mitzvah, we were instead sitting shiva. It’s not that I didn’t make mistakes, some that will always upset me, but in such times, most choices are mistakes. As recently as a year ago, I never thought I would come back. I have paid off or settled more than $300K in label debt. Who needs more of that, when the last decade of my life, one-third of my adulthood, was spent trying to ensure that my debts would not be my legacy?

And then, just before Thanksgiving last year, in the aftermath of heartbreaking talks around a record it seems we will not be reissuing (or discussing) this year, Charles Bissell asked me to come back and release his next album on Absolutely Kosher. I spent a week thinking about it and then trying to convince him to pursue a more available opportunity and work with one of the many incredibly capable labels who continued to be active since we’ve been gone. His response was that it felt right, that he wanted to work with someone he knows and trusts, who he knows will communicate with him through both collaboration and dispute. After all, the last time we worked together, it went really well.

It’s hard to articulate the mixture of recognition and gratitude I felt that he even asked and the emotion that welled up within me, but when I realized it would be our 25th anniversary as a label, I started to think about what I’d like that to look like. There were other projects I’d wanted to release in 2012 and they had always felt like unfinished business. Plus, while some of our catalog has reverted back to the bands, there was still a tremendous amount of incredible material that had never gotten its due, never been pressed on vinyl, and never been promoted using the many incredible tools music now uses to find its audience. I sat down with a friend I’d met randomly in my apartment building only the year before named Matt Reznick and shared my vision and, just like that, our financing was secured.

I began to reach out to musicians I hadn’t spoken to in years and the serendipity that ensued was astonishing. And the stories themselves, the humanity of this time away, of what life has become with an Absolutely Kosher-sized hole in it for the last decade+, we’re going to tell you those stories in exciting ways. There were other records released by other defunct labels from our original era that were seemingly orphaned, but which also shared these traits and felt like they’d be at home in our catalog, a part of our stories. Not everything worked out (there were half a dozen proposed partnerships I’d still love to see happen down the road), but it’s all worked out for the best. Expect no less than four new albums (including Charles’, under the name Car Colors) along with multiple box sets and reissues over the next 18 months. I can’t wait to share more with you very, very soon, but it won’t all come at once, so please sign up (our old mailing list is gone) and follow us everywhere.

A lot has changed in the world and the music industry in the last decade, but everything changes all the time. The best record labels operate with the confidence of both their convictions around their releases and their capability to promote them, while also understanding when to get out of the way and give the spotlight to the artists and the releases themselves. But that’s also a little bit of a shame, because independent record label founders and the GM’s of larger indies, the people who take on risk and commit to the responsibility of releasing and promoting music, the people who deal with the problems and challenges you never hear about or who are often vilified when you do hear about them, are some of my favorite people on earth (even as I know most of them in a fairly remote way). There is an unquestionable hubris in launching and operating a label and there always has been. But, without taking away from what's special and fascinating about writing and recording an album, there is a totally separate aspect that tends to get lost: there is something truly exciting about releasing an album, when the people who run a label cast their lot with an artist and attempt to bridge their vision with you, the audience. Among the many inevitable changes (not all of which will be seen by the public, but which are important to our ethics, operations, and sustainability), the most profound will be a slightly more public presence for me, going back to the early days of the label when I wrote every email update, with less of an ambitious posture around what I wanted to project as a strong and stable business and more of an authentic snapshot into the human aspect of releasing records. As I sit here and speak directly to you about myself, I don’t need the spotlight, but this new normal places the onus on artists to hold the spotlight and point the camera at themselves and be all things, to train them in all manner of unnatural behaviors and press them to jump through all sorts of silly hoops alone, whispering in their ears how they don’t need a label while shamelessly monetizing their hopes and ambitions and lowering their rate of return, their paycheck, their options. If I can help restore some of the dignity, the breathing room, and shoulder some of the demands, to help keep it real by pointing the camera on myself, naked and emo and acting the fool amidst an absurdly algorithmic monoculture of buried communities, I will.

But more importantly, here at a place of reset and promise and momentum, the road back is about healing. If you are among the bands on the 85+ releases from our first 13 years, whether you left or broke up or just stopped making music, whether you took your records back or not, whether we’ve spoken or not, whether we’ve fought or not, 20 years ago or (truly) in the last year, if you worked at the label or interned for us, shared office space with us, were contracted by us, almost signed to us, if you want to settle an old beef, slight, mistake, static, gaffe, misunderstanding, error in judgment, lack of resolution, or address our time working together with a more seasoned perspective, if I once publicly said you sucked and you told a publicist you wished red ants would crawl into my orifices, or you once mailed me manure, or you just want to say hello and share your own story, I am grateful for you and here for all of it. Please reach out and I will make a sincere effort to connect and meet you where you are.

If you’re new to me or Absolutely Kosher is new to you or you’re only here for the great music or even want to make some with us, enjoy yourself. It will not be boring.

Cory

#AK25 #AbsolutelyKosher #CarColors