For Trevor Peterson of Fire Talk Records, being the head of a successful indie label came as a product of his environment.
After pouring all of himself into touring with his post-rock band Woodsman for years on the DIY circuit, Peterson started the label. It began as a path to release his own music and a way to document the projects his friends were working on. Now over a decade since the label’s first modest releases, Fire Talk has been putting out records from some of indie-rock’s most exciting acts like Dehd, Pure X, Weeping Icon, Deeper and Patio.
We caught up with Peterson to talk about the early days of the label, staying true to the DIY spirit and what the future looks like for Fire Talk.
I know that before you started the label, you were playing in the band Woodsman. Was getting your own music out the main inspiration for starting Fire Talk?
There were no designs really other than maybe a morsel of an idea that it would be cool to have a label one day. But the short of it is that I had the band Woodsman, we were playing local shows when we were first starting out and then we booked our first tour in 2009 via MySpace-style stringing a bunch of DIY venues together. Back in those days, there was a whole community of DIY venues that existed on MySpace in particular. They all had profile pages and you could kind of get a sense of where the places to play in each town were.
It was similar to New York, we had five great DIY venues. Every little town in America had a little DIY venue which was awesome. You could string together these little tours without having any knowledge of the mechanics or any sort of business knowledge of what it meant to sell tickets or any of that stuff.
The label essentially was born [when] we had recorded five or six songs and put them on a CDR. We were going on this tour. We had this merch and we hand painted all of the CD covers. It was like ‘Okay, it would be cool to have a label name attached to this merch’. That was kind of the jumpoff point. It was a way to make the merch a little more legit, that’s functionally what it was [laughs].
If you want to go way back, I have always had an interest in business and entrepreneurship. At a core level, and more importantly, I’ve always been really into record labels, even growing up. Mail ordering from Drag City, or whatever. It was already in my mind that a community of artists could come together around the idea of a record label. It wasn’t like, I’m going to start this community right now. But it was like, we have our first release! You’ve gotta start somewhere.
You mentioned Drag City. Were there any other record labels you looked up to as a model?
Drag City was a big one for me. Also, I was really into Jagjaguwar back in those days. If you want to go way back to my teenage years, I was always a collector of CDs back when I was a kid. I listened to a lot of rap music, so I bought every No Limit CD when I was 13. It was always a fascination of mine to buy everything that “one label” put out.
When I got a little older, it was certainly Drag City and other labels like Jagjaguwar. At that time, it was their early days, Jagjaguwar was releasing a lot of psych, which I was into at the time. It was all of that in the early-2000s. By the time I had started the label, there were a bunch of really cool little labels cropping up. Night People was one I was really into. When they were starting out, I was starting out. I was into all of the releases Night People was putting out. Not Not Fun was another one that I was really into. All of that kind of stuff. I’m still collecting stuff from all of these labels! I guess my ear has always been in that DIY, underground world. That’s what I gravitate towards the most.
How did the label grow in the beginning?
It quickly evolved. Another friend’s band asked if they could use the label logo for another CDR so they just used the logo. They had already manufactured the CDs. By the third release, I was like “Okay, well… that doesn’t make any sense. This isn’t just going to be a logo I lend out. I want to try and do this for real!” So, the third thing was a 7” and that was the first thing I ever put any real capital into the label. Then it was three or four 7”s and then I did a batch of three 12”s. Early on, I knew I wanted it to be a vinyl label.
Could you paint a picture of what the operation of Fire Talk records is like today compared to what it was like back then?
Back then, I didn’t have any sort of grasp on any of that stuff. Streaming wasn’t a thing yet which is a huge difference. I didn’t even have those first releases on iTunes, which was probably a mistake. I released the first Tennis 7”. They’ve got a decent sized fan base at this point. This is a good example. I didn’t think enough to put those songs on iTunes or have any kind of contract or anything. It was just 300 7”s and that was it. Then they took off! Little things like that. If I was planning for the future, I would have done that release way differently. But it wasn’t about that at the time. They were my friends and they played house shows in my living room. It was more like “let’s get this music out into the world” not “let’s craft a business around it.” That would come later.
My band Woodsman signed pretty quickly after that first CDR to Mexican Summer for a record and then another label for a couple of records. We were touring a lot. So that label at that time was simply a side project. It was a hobby thing that I was doing to help friends out. I was putting as much energy as I could into it. But most of my energy was going into making music.
I remember distinctly the first time I signed a distribution deal. It was in 2014, it was a digital only distribution deal with The Orchard. I met with a friend’s band’s manager who basically bridged that connection. The manager said — and it was a really good piece of advice — “I’m gonna do this for you, but you have to pick one or the other. Are you going to be a record label person or are you going to be an artist?”
At the time I was offended. I was like, “What do you mean I’ve got to pick one?” (laughs)
At the core of what he was trying to say was that there is only so much time in the day. He was speaking on it at a different level than I was thinking. All of that is to say, the business knowledge has come over time. I’ve learned about the business from being on the artist side, first and foremost. There was a turning point in 2016 when my band stopped playing. I decided I was going to grow the label into a real business and that would be my job. That was six or seven years into it.
How big is the staff at Fire Talk currently?
I do have people working for me. Ruby [Hoffman] is my sort of partner in this at this point. She wears many hats because it’s still a small operation at this point. Then I have another employee who helps with social media and marketing stuff. There’s three of us right now. With any small business the hope is that it continues to grow and evolve overtime. My hope is that I want that to happen naturally. A lot of the label’s growth and staff expansion goes hand-in-hand with our artists gaining more fans and their platforms growing. Our label expands to meet our artist’s needs.
Is there a throughline or a mission statement to the artists you’d like to find a home on Fire Talk? Has it changed over time?
The process has evolved, but not really. I started this label in the blog days. But I was an artist on tour and it was very small. We were signing bands mostly by the bands being in my immediate sphere. Whether it’s playing a show with them or finding out about them on the internet or going down the block to Shea Stadium to see them play and signing them from that. Very community oriented. Now we’re taking a larger approach.
But we’ve always worked with artists from all over the place. My whole goal from the beginning was to have a diverse range of viewpoints. Especially geographically, I want to work with bands from all over the place.
In terms of the throughline, I always answer this question with an esoteric answer but it’s the only way that I can describe it: I want to work with bands with a certain spirit. The spirit is hard to quantify, but I feel like it’s in every artist that we work with. It’s just a feeling that I get, more than anything, from the people behind the music. So, that’s a really big one for me. The actual humans, the people creating the music, I have to be able to connect with them on a certain level. If we’re going to enter into this business partnership I want there to be a certain level of trust before any of the business stuff.
I can only imagine after being a touring musician for so long that you can easily spot bullshit when you see it.
Yeah! My band got into a number of really stupid situations with not very good people and it made me really astute to the bullshit. There’s a lot of people fakin’ the funk out there. Especially in indie music! The barrier of entry in indie music is a lot lower than a lot of different professions. A lot of times, all you need is some capital and there’s plenty of people with money out there with ulterior motives. There’s plenty of really, really great people in indie music and those are the ones who usually succeed. But, yeah, I learned a lot from being on the artist side and that’s where everything starts with Fire Talk.
How hands on are you when working with a new artist on a project?
I give every artist as much space as they need. It depends on the artist or the project. Because I understand the recording process on the artist level down to the minutiae of the right microphone making the kick drum sound a certain way, I can have those conversations with our artists and be that involved. But a lot of our artists don’t need my viewpoint until they’ve tracked. I feel like most of the artists on Fire Talk want to bounce mixing ideas off of Ruby and me and tracklist ideas, that kind of thing. There are certain artists who deliver records to us and that’s what the record is and there isn’t any input. That’s totally cool with me. Either way!
I think oftentimes you get to the best finished album with a few different viewpoints in the mix. But not always. Sometimes an artist just knows what it is and delivers it and it’s the best thing it could possibly be.
One thing that I have started to understand as a reality is that I won’t be able to see bands play material from albums that came out in 2020 on their actual album cycles when the songs are most meaningful or close to them. What have been some of the biggest challenges this year without touring being an option to promote releases?
It’s a big barrier to fan engagement, if that makes sense? Like you said, the bands that you are the biggest fan of you want to go see those songs live on the album cycle. I think more than anything, it’s the hardest on the artist because they can’t get out there and connect with the people who really want to hear their work. That’s a big challenge. Staying astute to the challenges our artists are facing right now and easing that as much as we can. At the end of the day, what we as a label can do is just be as good as we possibly can at our jobs which is using the tools available to get the music to as many ears as we can.
Right now, the only way is the internet. Trying to maximize our visibility on the internet for our artists has been our number one priority through all of this. As you can imagine, it’s crowded out there. That’s a challenge when there’s only one way to get music to people.
Another challenge has been A&R and signing new artists. We’re doing it differently in that before all of this happened I was a big proponent of making sure we saw the band play multiple shows before committing to work with them and making a personal relationship in person. Now, that’s cut out. But I’m not pumping the breaks. We’re going to keep signing new artists and putting out records in the face of this thing. But I’ve never even seen a couple of the bands we’ve recently signed live. I don’t know what that experience is like. It’s not my favorite feeling!
So how do you find out about some of these newer artists that you are signing?
The finding has always started online. Whether it’s a blog post or a show listing. I’ve always started the A&R experience online, for the most part. Sometimes you’ll randomly experience a band live and you’ll want to find out more.
I’ve been in and around music for so long that I don’t randomly go to shows anymore. Nine times out of ten, I’ll know who I am going to see. Even the opening bands I’ll have checked them out before going to a show. It’s always started online for me and Ruby as well. Post Trash is a really good source or sites like Ears to Feed because they’re usually onto artists that nobody is talking about yet. You have all of these little sites that are taking chances on baby artists and I like that. That is our M.O. We’ll always work with new artists from the jump.