Five Years Of Cantora Records: From MGMT To Bear Hands

PARK SLOPE, BROOKLYN: At Cantora Records HQ, aka The Rumpus Room, there are at least five guys jammed into a small office overlooking the BQE and the New York Harbor.

Cantora Records founders (l-r) Will Griggs, Nick Panama and Jesse Israel

This is mission control for a tight roster of bands that includes the Brooklyn-based Savoir Adore, Francis and the Lights and Bear Hands, and amid the obvious hyperactivity of the day, we’re getting a tour.

Led by a triumvirate of Will Griggs, Jesse Israel and Nick Panama, Cantora Records is an innovative indie-pop label and fully functioning creative collective with in-house recording studio, photo/video stage and roster of producer/engineer, designers and filmmakers.

These guys formed Cantora in the Spring of ’05 to put out MGMT’s Time To Pretend EP and help build the band to indie superstardom. Five years later, they’ve earned a solid reputation in the indie music scene by following the righteous road somehow still less traveled — they only sign bands they absolutely love.

We sat down with Griggs, Israel and Panama and got the whole story — read on…

From what I read, it seems Cantora started at NYU. That right?

Will: Jesse and I were at NYU — I was studying music business and Jesse was studying film — and when we all met up and started this company, Nick was still in high school in LA. But the company did actually form at NYU. We had our first powwow in Washington Square Park.

Tell me a bit about what led up to that meeting?

MGMT

Will: My cousin was a year above me at Wesleyan and my freshmen year he took me to see this band, The Management, which became MGMT. At that point they didn’t have any official releases — they were just giving out burned CDs. I brought it back and played it for everyone I knew because I just thought it was the most addictive music I’d ever heard.

Jesse and I were roommates and at that point we weren’t sure what we wanted to do — manage bands or put out records or what — but we knew we wanted to work with this band in some way. Around that time, Nick also caught wind of them out in LA and connected with us through a mutual friend.

How did it go from this idea of wanting to work with them to reality?

Will: We started helping them out here and there with shows on a casual/fan basis, but then a couple of opportunities came up that were a catalyst to making the band and our relationship more official — they were invited by Kevin Barnes and Of Montreal to open for them on a pretty substantial tour. It was at that moment when there was a real opportunity to support them — print up some CDs and some tee shirts, etc.

And that’s when you guys actually came together, organized as an actual company?

Will: Well that’s when it became clear to us that this was what the relationship with the band was going to look like. We knew they had these great songs so we got them into a studio and printed up some real CDs so they’d have something to sell on the road. It all came together really naturally. We had a buddy who was working in a studio who could help out with recording/production — our friend David Perlick Molinari, who’s now in French Horn Rebellion.

Jesse: Having an actual product made it all real and with that in place, we decided to start the record label and figure it all out as we went along.

So there wasn’t necessarily a grand plan, a real vision for how you wanted to run the label? Like contrary to what you saw going on out there?

MGMT's "Time To Pretend" EP was Cantora's first release in August '05

Nick: No, we had not the faintest idea. Even when we signed MGMT, we were unsure whether Cantora was going to be a record label or a production company, we really didn’t know. There was no long-term future grand vision that we had. There was no business plan; we didn’t fund raise. We each pulled out $600 to get tee shirts and CDs made. And we didn’t really know where it was going to lead — we were just thrilled to be working with this band and doing something that was a little outside our comfort zones.

And so you did that first release with MGMT, Time To Pretend. What was that like, watching that just totally take off?

Will: It was an unbelievable learning experience on a number of levels. It was amazing seeing it spread from friend to friend, just by word of mouth. We didn’t hire a publicist, we just put the thing out so they could sell it on the road.

Nick: And we barely put it out. There was no digital distribution or physical distribution. It was just Paypal through the website and the band on tour selling it.

Will: But it was unbelievable to see how powerful word of mouth can be when you have content that’s really compelling. I’m from Virginia and had a lot of friends at UVA and I could see they had a pocket of fans down there. And people were really enthusiastic about the music. There was an a capella group at UVA that was singing “Kids.” And there were all these little pockets of fans popping up on their own all over without much of a promotional push behind it.

Jesse: The moment when I really knew we were onto something was when they played Princeton. They’d been invited up to play one of those fratty weekend extravaganzas. So we went out there with the band and this is still at a point when they were pretty unknown. But at Princeton, this was a big deal. And when they played the song “Kids,” it was insane witnessing what happened — all these preppy Princeton kids in their seersucker shorts and pastels just LOSING their minds, going crazy over it. And we were there, with our beards and grimy clothes — totally out of place — just taking it all in. It was amazing.

Awesome. And then you got to have the experience of a major label coming into the picture…Was that intimidating at all? Did you feel you had a lot to learn, quickly?

Will: You know what, it wasn’t intimidating because we just had no context for it. It was just another opportunity presenting itself. And also the band still wasn’t thinking of themselves as career musicians. They were never in that mindset of needing to make it as rock stars or anything. They just saw it as a cool opportunity.

Jesse: They were writing songs to fit a genre and having fun with it. It was like dorm room fun to make these songs they thought were the catchiest, cheesy pop songs they could write. They’d never really taken it all that seriously.

What about Cantora? At that point, as MGMT’s popularity was growing, were you starting to look at other bands?

Savoir Adore. Photo by Shervin Lainez

Will: No, we didn’t start looking for other bands until everything with MGMT and Columbia was settled. At that point, we started looking at what had happened and saw that we actually had a real record label here!

So who was the next band you signed? And at that point, what were you looking for?

Will: The next band we signed was Savoir Adore. For me it’s about what do I get addicted to? What can I not help but share with everyone I know? I feel like if there’s one thread that ties together all the artists on our label it’s great songs, and an adventurous and forward-thinking approach.

Most of what we have on our label could definitely be called pop music in some way, but they’re all artists who are doing something new with it — a new twist, their own sound. But we spend a lot of time working on each band, so it’s really about whether or not we love it enough to spend the next many months or years working on it without any guarantee of success.

You just have to be passionate about the music, or else you’re wasting your time. If we looked at it from the perspective of ‘will this make us a lot of money?’ this would be a very different company. Not to say that the stuff we put out doesn’t have a wide appeal…

Are there other labels out there that inspire you guys and how you build your business?

Jesse: XL is a label that’s done a really good job of branding themselves and that’s something that we’ve always focused on. Obviously the music that we put out is #1, but we’ve also always felt that it’s really important for Cantora to have a presence in the music space as well. Not to just be a silent partner in an artist’s release process — but to build our brand so that as more artists come to our label, we have a built-in fan-base and a built-in brand that already means something.

Nick: I’d say French Kiss is another label that’s just killing it. They’ve been around for awhile and they’ve been able to transform themselves from this proto-pop, post-punk label to today, where they’re putting out Passion Pit, Local Natives, Antlers, Dodos, Freelance Whales, Suckers, etc.

Will: To me, a label like Merge that can be fully independent yet able to scale with a band like the Arcade Fire, and still be that label where you’re interested to check out whatever they’re putting out there. That’s the kind of label we want to be — a label whose releases audiences will check out because it’s a part of what we’re doing and they like what we’re doing.

Jesse: We’ve all experienced that on some level as fans. I was really into hip-hop when I was younger and when I was in high school, Definitive Jux, is what did it for me. If something came out on that label, I was excited about it. And part of what I think about with Cantora is how to connect with that younger me, and that excitement I would feel around Definitive Jux and everything they did.

So what do you guys actually do to build your brand, outside of just working each release?

Francis and the Lights signed to Cantora in '08

Jesse: A big part of it has been to build our brand outside of just the artists we’re working with, to cultivate the music community here in NYC and in LA, through Cantora Live and Cantora Creative.

With Cantora Live, we’ll put on a show every month or six weeks where we pick a cool venue and invite bands we really like who aren’t signed to Cantora as well as a couple who are and put on a showcase. Sometimes there’s not a single Cantora band on the bill and that’s a way to reach out to even more fans, a way for Cantora to be a part of something else that’s meaningful and cool.

And we also do a similar thing with our production company, Cantora Creative, where we’ll create video content for artists — some on our label, some not. Or this new web series we’re working on called “Show Me,” where we’re doing these :90 shorts with 10 of our favorite bands showing a band leading up to a performance.

You also have some facilities here — a recording studio and in-house producer/engineer, rehearsal space, video stage — do your artists come in and record here? How do you and your bands benefit from you having these things?

Will: Having the resources here adds to our ability to be as nimble as possible and be able to act quickly when there’s an opportunity or an idea that we think is cool.

For example, we invited Francis and the Lights to play our CMJ show a couple years ago, and they mentioned they had a couple new songs and wondered if we wanted to team up and do a single to release at the show. Because we have a studio in-house, we were able to bring the band in here and they recorded with the head engineer Albert DiFiore and we were able to turn it around in time for the show. And that was the beginning of a relationship that lasts to this day — we just put out his full-length debut this summer.

Also, with Bear Hands, we did a live video shoot here, called it the “Rumpus Session.” And we invited a bunch of friends and some press down, had tacos and beers and the band played a few new songs. We shot it and put it online. We weren’t thinking ‘how can we make money off of this?’ it was more about this being a cool way to debut some new songs.

Awesome. So, now that you’ve been at this a few years…what do you think about what’s going on in the music industry right now and what opportunities are out there for a label like Cantora?

Bear Hands' "Burning Bush Supper Club" came out Nov. 2.

Will: On the one hand, the collapse of the music industry and the lower point of entry in terms of the cost of recording and online distribution means we can have the same distribution reach as any label on earth via the Internet but the flip side to that coin is that so can everyone else!

So it means we have to be spot on about the bands we want to work with and able to continuously develop our fan-base and artists so that we can stay competitive at a time when anyone can put out a record and the market’s completely flooded. We’re playing with different approaches and different ways to create and put out content.

It’s clear that the excitement surrounding music has never been more intense than it is now — it’s just a question of how to package music and get it to people in a way that can keep a business like our growing at a time when music fans can pretty much get whatever music they want for free.

If there’s clear growth in one area of music it’s music discovery. People are thirsting for reliable sources of new music. Hopefully we can continue to establish ourselves as one of those reliable sources.

What’s coming up next for Cantora?

Nick: We just debuted the full-length from Rumspringa, Sway, and we’re excited about that. We have the new Bear Hands record, Burning Bush Supper Club, coming out on November 2. The Francis and the Lights record It’ll Be Better came out over the summer so we’re still working that. And we have a new artist, Emil & Friends — it’s fantastic, lush, dance-poppy music. Check it out!

For more on Cantora Records and their entire roster of artists, visit http://www.cantorarecords.com. And check out their latest release, Bear Hands’ Burning Bush Supper Club on iTunes.

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