Quick Take
Smoke Chaser band members Ryan Masters and Jon Spivak have launched a new record label to promote and amplify new music and musicians in Santa Cruz and the Monterey Bay area.
In the old days, everybody understood what a record label was, as well as its role and purpose. (Siphoning away profits from deserving artists, right?) But these days, the record label is one of those mass-media middlemen that digital culture has pushed to the brink of extinction.
That has not stopped musicians Ryan Masters and Jon Spivak from launching Heroic Dose Records right here in Santa Cruz, which calls itself a “label,” though it has little in common with labels of yore.
The project started merely as a way for Masters and Spivak to promote their own band, Smoke Chaser. And, sure enough, the label’s first project was Smoke Chaser’s debut album, “Alazapul,” released in August. But the vision has now expanded to other artists, and earlier this month, Heroic Dose released a new single by local singer-songwriter Jim Rosenberg, a moving John Prine-esque tribute to those lost to the streets, titled “Finding Joseph.” The label’s goal is to release new recordings from Santa Cruz/Monterey Bay area artists whom it deems too good to be ignored.
One major difference between Heroic Dose and traditional record labels is a kind of wry self-awareness. Right there on the label’s home page, under “5 Weird Facts About Heroic Dose Records” is “We have no idea what we’re doing.”
“This is not a label in the old sense,” said Masters, who is also a writer, surfer and firefighter and plays with the longtime Santa Cruz nuevo-cabaret band The Suborbitals as well as Smoke Chaser. “It’s a platform for people making music. We’re not taking any sort of rights or money from anybody.”
Like other shoestring labels in the digital era, Heroic Dose has to act as a kind of curator. The problem is not that there’s too little music being released today, it’s that there’s too much.
“We’re losing the signal for all the noise,” said Masters, looking over the music landscape. “We want to get the signal out. The good news is that great, new, original creative music that has to be heard is out there. It terrifies me on some level that all these great songwriters, they can’t get their song heard unless it sounds some very particular way. So what little influence or amplification we can give it, we’re going to do it.”
Heroic Dose is planning to release four new singles from local artists in 2024, as well as Smoke Chaser’s second album. What those four new songs are, no one knows yet. Masters spends a lot of his time, like an old-fashioned A&R man, hanging out in clubs, listening to bands in a live setting, all in the hopes of finding something new and thrillingly original. Bands and musicians are also invited to submit demo recordings to the label directly. In short, said Masters, his ears are open.
“More often than not, the artists themselves don’t know what the good song is,” he said. “It’s usually the song you wrote last is the one you love the most. And you totally lose perspective. So it’s good just to go out and have someone else listen to your music totally objectively, and that’s what I like to do.”
When Masters finds an original song that he feels the world has to hear, he will invite the artist into the label’s Westside studio to record with sound engineer and producer Spivak, and release a single. The label’s first venture into that market, Rosenberg’s ballad “Finding Joseph,” can be tabbed folk or Americana, but Masters insists that Heroic Dose is genre-agnostic, meaning they will embrace just about any style or genre of music as long as they can recognize its worth as a good song.
“We’re allowing ourselves anything,” said Masters. “The quality of the song comes before the genre, for sure. If the song stops you in your tracks, we’re interested. I don’t care what you call it.”
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