Features

Label from the North Country: Arts & Crafts

Los Campesinos!

Kevin Drew’s business sense started in his immediate familial spectrum. “My dad was in the book business for 30 years,” he says, 10 years after Broken Social Scene’s auspicious breakthrough. “He was a distributor in Canada and he gave a lot of speeches when he drove us to school.” He laughs, then pauses: “It was kind of like business-101/life-101.”

That said, he’ll readily admit that the label was founded—and continues—on two seemingly disparate principals. One side wants to put out records that focus on the artists making art for their own sake while the other wants to see those artists hit the highest commercial peaks possible. From the beginning, there was a definitive decision to not operate like a boutique Canadian label—and, instead, focus on breaking through in the United States. “I’d heard that there’s something like 30 or 40 million people within a 10-hour drive of Toronto,” explains Remedios of the strategy to win over the entire Northeast—not the words you’d expect from a man who thinks in small, lets-do-this-locally terms.

That discrepancy between art and commerce means celebrating when an artist like Feist or Chilly Gonzales lands a lucrative iPhone or iPad commercial (remember “1…2…3…4?”) and being equally happy when an artist like the avant-musician Charles Spearin delivers The Happiness Project, a charmingly artistic oddity based entirely on the timbres of the human voice. “That was what I loved about it [from the beginning],” Drew says, “that we could have those two sides to it.”

Their smaller artists seem to agree. When they signed to the label a few years ago, U.K. indie rockers Los Campesinos! was one of the few non-Broken Social Scene-related bands on Arts & Crafts and was its first international acquisition. “We don’t like having people or record labels poking us in any direction or suggesting what we should do, and Arts & Crafts had been really happy for us to just call the shots,” says frontman Gareth Campesinos, while taking a break from helping his girlfriend with her taxes at home in London. Still, Arts & Crafts offered some impressive perks. “When we first visited them, their office was so flash,” he exclaims. “There was a Nintendo Wii in the office!”

For Drew, though, it’s another type of balance that’s been the biggest challenge: how to prioritize decisions that are best for the label, while also managing—and fronting—that same label’s biggest band. It takes its toll not just on him, but on his bandmates as well. “We’ve had a lot of trials and tribulations over the years,” admits Canning, when asked about how Drew balances his band-guy and label-guy personae. “It’s a lot of crossed wires, a lot of who’s wearing what hat and are you really wearing that hat or are you wearing this hat?” Still, he says things mostly work themselves out. “With business, there’s always going to be these shortcomings in some way—because the music business is such a funny one.”

For Drew, the moment of reckoning came a couple of years ago when theoretical next-big-things Stars were planning their album release and Drew scheduled his solo album’s drop just a week later. “The gray areas started getting more gray, and I was trying to figure out what to do,” he says. “It was a real bonehead move on my part because I wasn’t really acting as a label head at that point, I was acting as an artist. I remember that was a real awakening experience for me. It wasn’t as if it were in bad taste, it just wasn’t appropriate thinking.” Not long after, Stars—some of Drew’s longest-running friends—left the label. “I kind of turned to Jeffrey [Remedios] and said, ‘Well, this is the end of an era’,” says Drew wistfully.

Helping Drew fix the situation, was his book-loving father, who had previously come on board to help him run the business. “I said, ‘Pops, I’m gonna need some serious help here, because I’m wearing two hats and I’m responsible for a lot of things here.’” Not surprisingly, his dad was a bit taken aback. “‘I never thought it could be as ridiculous as the book business,’ he said, ‘but the music business is just as crazy!’”

Ironically, Drew’s hesitant to talk about what family role he plays when it comes to the inner workings of the label. Press him a bit, though, and he’ll let you in on his secret. “There’s a joke that I’m the Uncle Buck of the office,” he says. “I’m never there, and when I am, I just sit down and chat with people here and there.”

Sometimes—at least in Toronto—family turns out to be all it takes.