This is the second installment in our ongoing "Label Makers" series. See our profile of Jeffery Drag Records here.
"I love music, I listen to it all the time, I love talking about it, collecting it, all the aspects of it. But I am not a musician, and I'm happy about it. Being a musician's the worst."
Michael Eades — the bespectacled, frequently bearded blogger/designer behind sites Yewknee and We Own This Town — is about the closest thing to a patron saint of the local rock scene as you could get. Since the days of Murfreesboro-based Spongebath Records, where he worked in Web development and ran their message boards, Eades has been synonymous with the indie-rock sector of music in Nashville — designing websites for Mercy Lounge and Marathon Music Works, assisting with SoundLand (once known as Next Big Nashville) and collaborating with countless bands on T-shirts, album art, websites ... you name it.
"I worked at Spongebath Records in Murfreesboro in college," Eades tells the Scene. "So when I was 18 to 21 or 22, I worked at Spongebath. I really loved working at an independent label. But I graduated from college in, like, 2001, so there's a long span of time there where I was just helping out my friends that were in bands and making websites for them and doing artwork for bands and screen-printing T-shirts and all these sort of peripheral elements of putting out and being involved with music."
Since 2009, Eades has channeled his work on those peripheral elements into YK Records, a boutique label focusing on vinyl releases that fills two needs: sharing music that might otherwise go unheard, and giving Eades, a designer by trade, an outlet to go completely nuts in terms of artwork, design and packaging. YK is styled after Catbird Records, a label started by blogger Ryan Catbird that offered ultra-limited, art-focused releases by indie bands like Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin and Apollo Ghosts.
"When I grew up with music, I had a shitload of CDs," says Eades. "I think anyone that's 21 or younger, they have iTunes art. They don't really have a shitload of CDs. So you know that's like 150 by 150 pixels on the screen, which is wildly different than holding a record in your hand."
With a total of 20 releases under his belt, the label has developed a reputation for high-quality if stylistically disparate releases — and it all began with Kindercastle's Ross Wariner, who once worked at Fido across the street from Eades' office in Hillsboro Village.
"I had no intention of releasing any of the music I had made between Kindercastle projects," Wariner tells the Scene via email. "[Bandmate] Cody [Uhler] and I were making tons of music specifically for our own experimentation, and [Eades] was very encouraging that we put that work out. It's crazy to think that the record I'll be releasing this summer will be the sixth record I've worked on for YK since 2009."
Uncle Skeleton, Kindercastle and Nahnee Bori — all projects Wariner is involved in — make up half of YK's output, but the plan for those records has never been to make boatloads of cash from sales. Instead, Eades describes the albums as promotional items — glossy résumés proving Wariner's talents credible in the eyes of producers and music supervisors.
That's the thing that separates YK Records from most other record labels: Because it's a hobby, Eades has the luxury of treating it like a benevolent service to bands that he happens to be into. Though his most recent releases — new albums by local rock veterans Hotpipes and Forget Cassettes — likely would have made their way into the world somehow or other, Eades views his label as an opportunity to help those bands find exposure and room to grow, musically and professionally.
"I think what's great about what [Hotpipes] are doing is it actually kind of symbolizes what I'm doing," says Eades. "I want to put out records as a hobby, as a fun thing. Like, help people out, help myself out to have this thing. Hotpipes broke up and then [members] Jon [Rogers] and Dan [Sommers] were like, 'Well, we kinda recorded some of these songs already, we really like recording music.' Jon wants to do music videos and be involved in that world — here's this perfect vehicle to help him do that. So he'll shoot music videos for Hotpipes. Dan'll go nuts learning all this instrumentation, recording on these things too. And I think it just became this crazy labor of love. The record exists just because they have a passion for this thing."
In the end, that's all Eades really wants out of the label: to encourage passion projects by shouldering as much of the business side as he can. His involvement lets Tipper Whore get drunk and write silly songs about getting drunk, without burning out on the logistics of being a band. Records by Shaboi and Codaphonic may have never seen the light of day without Eades' encouragement, and if they did, they wouldn't have been in the slickly styled shape that they are now.
Sadly, Eades intends to leave Nashville for New York City in the coming days, joining his comrades at the Brooklyn-based digital film distribution platform VHX. But despite those plans, YK Records still has a few more releases on the books — including new albums by Jasmin Kaset, Talking With Hands and, of course, Uncle Skeleton.
"I can speak for Nahnee Bori and myself and say that we wouldn't be where we are today without Michael," says Wariner. "Someone's got to give this guy a damn medal or something."
Email Music@nashvillescene.com.
