Soulive

Although founded by musicians with decidedly retro tastes, Royal Family Records embraces and likely embodies the future of the recording industry.

Soulive guitarist Eric Krasno, whose group is at the core of the venture, explains, “We want to start putting out music in a different fashion. We want to put together projects in a few days and then have them out the next day. Our website will be a portal where people can check out what we’re doing in close to real time with a video of how it came together, because we’re creating music all the time in the studio.”

“What I would like to see,” adds Krasno’s bandmate of just over a decade, keyboard player Neal Evans, “is the elimination of CDs. They sound horrible and they’re environmentally unsustainable. Once we have the infrastructure in place, we can offer that immediacy: We’ll cut something, master it and make it available online. Digital distribution has changed everything for bands and independent labels, so we don’t need to sit there and plan out, ‘OK, Neal’s is the next album on the schedule and Nigel [Hall]‘s album is coming out after that.’ We want to be able to put out music immediately with no limitations and no schedules because the more music we get out there, the more people we’re going to bring to Royal Family.”

The Family, which includes Soulive, Lettuce, Fyre Dept, Break Science, Nigel Hall and Chapter 2, is not only defined by nomenclature but also by kinship. Neal’s brother Alan, the drummer who completes the Soulive triumvirate and also has a solo release in the works, remarks, “I started playing drums when I was nine months old, and for Neal it was the same. Music was around the house and it was just something we fell into. It’s easier for us to play music than it is to talk.”

Back in March 1999, the Evans brothers invited Krasno, who was then playing guitar with Lettuce, to join them at their newly-built home studio near Woodstock, N.Y. for a spontaneous session that yielded Soulive’s debut EP Get Down! This album set the group down a path that carried the three musicians to the Far East, Africa, Europe and South America, while recording a series of albums for Blue Note and subsequently Concord/Stax.

The decision to establish Royal Family Records, which debuted last year with the band’s Up Here release, was a product of the group’s response to the aforementioned label settings.

“I wouldn’t say it left a bad taste in my mouth but I learned a lot from the experience,” Alan Evans offers. “I remember being surrounded by people just talking and talking. They didn’t listen, they just talked. They’d take us out to dinner, fly us here to there but then someone explained to me, ‘You know, it’s your money they’re spending. That’s coming out of album sales and they’re going to get their money back before you get any.’ We came to realize that if we did this on our own and sold 5,000 copies, we’d probably make more money than if we sold 50,000 with these cats.”

His brother is slightly more upbeat: “Both labels were great and had good intentions but then you see the timetables and sometimes you might find you’re not the priority or that there’s just a different vision of what people want you to be and how they want to classify you. When you have your own label, you make those decisions yourself. Once we decided that [ Up Here ] was going to be our first release on our own label, there was a difference in the energy. It was cut at Alan’s studio [Playonbrother in Hatfield, Mass.] and there wasn’t that feeling that we were on the bill even though we were. It was a totally different approach going in there and knowing it was all ours and we didn’t have to concern ourselves with anything but making an album because we wanted to. So we just went up there and had fun.”

All three members describe such an unfettered spirit in the creation and development of Royal Family Records as well. The label is not only the product of blood relations but also of another brotherhood that extends back to high school.

Lettuce

Eric Krasno was 16 years old when he enrolled at the Berklee College of Music Summer Program in the summer of 1992 between his sophomore and junior years of high school. There, he met drummer Adam Deitch, guitarist Adam “Shmeans” Smirnoff, bassist Erick “E.D.” Coomes and saxophonists Sam Kininger and Ryan Zoidis, the musicians who still perform together as Lettuce (even as they balance gigs with Robert Randolph, Rustic Overtones, The Game, DJ Quik and many others).

“All of us came from different, mostly suburban towns with kids who knew nothing about what we were into,” says Kranso. “We were the outcasts and we literally met each other within the first few days of this summer program and started playing together. We said, ‘We’re going to come back and go to school here when we graduate’ and we all actually did. So we started the band and then everyone all went different ways but we’re all still best friends. I talk to every one of them at least every other day. It’s crazy that we’re still this close but we can’t shake each other.” He laughs at the thought.

Deitch, whose post-Berklee career has included stints with the Average White Band, John Scofield, and most recently with Pretty Lights, as well as his own Break Science project, recalls, “In the beginning, we were kids trying to learn to play our instruments and because we were so honest, we kicked each others’ asses and brought everybody else up. You have a choice in music: either you can go on your own and do your own thing or you can say, ‘I’m going to align myself not only with the best musicians but also the coolest ones.’ It’s a decision you can make either way. I’m thankful that all of my best friends share my musical aspirations.”

They share a number of inspirations as well. Deitch is quick to name Donny Hathaway, Stevie Wonder, Tower of Power, Earth Wind and Fire and Herbie Hancock as the artists that first animated the young high school students and continue to energize them today. He is almost giddy as he describes a future Lettuce performance where it appears that the group will be joined by two members of James Brown’s original JB Horns – Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley.

This deep affection for the funk and soul icons of the ‘60s and ‘70s also informs the Royal Family sensibility. Krasno initially contemplated using the name for his new group that would eventually become Chapter 2 but ultimately concluded that it would be better suited for the label that he and the Evans brothers decided to form around the ambit of Soulive.

“It just made sense because the whole concept is having the same large group of people in different configurations. Sometimes one person’s the leader and the next time, he might play a support role. It’s kind of an umbrella for all the different projects we do. We’re not going to be out there signing hundreds of acts. We’re heavily involved in each project, which will be created by us, produced by us, engineered by us, mixed by us – the musicians are us. Everything, even down to the design work, is our camp.”

That camp includes Soulive’s managers, Jeff Krasno (Eric’s brother) and Morgan Young, who also run the Velour label, which has re-issued the early Soulive records along with a remix disc and is home to artists such as The Cat Empire, Kaki King and Sonya Kitchell. But while the two help out on the administrative side, the Soulive trio opted to create Royal Family Records to establish their own identity with the creative license to focus exclusively on their hand-picked acts.

Krasno comments, “We really wanted to do our thing, produced out of our studios – kind of like how Stax and Motown always did it. Same musicians, a lot of the same writers, and it was just a community.”

Nigel Hall

One early wrinkle came when Eric Krasno opened an e-mail to discover that keyboardist Marco Benevento had launched his own label named Royal Potato Family.

“At first we were like, ‘What’s all that about?’” Krasno says. “I thought it was a joke but he didn’t know about our name and I guess his is based on some Bob Dylan reference. It’s no big deal because [the artists on the label are] friends and it’s good music. It would be a lot worse if was something that I didn’t like. We have the same publicist now [Kevin Calabro, co-founder of Royal Potato] which must be really confusing for him, but it’s fine. We haven’t had any major issues and we’re all just moving forward.”

The Royal Family momentum has seen the label realize its initial collaborative ideals on releases by Soulive and Krasno and most recently with its commitment to Nigel Hall, who had been based in Ryan Zoidis’s home state of Maine. Krasno recalls that Zoidis called him and raved, “This guy’s amazing. He does the greatest James Brown but he sings like Marvin Gaye.” On this recommendation, they flew Hall to New York (the musician’s first airplane ride) and he swiftly became a member of the family.

“He fit in so perfectly,” Krasno explains, “that within a few months, he was on the Lettuce album, the Soulive album and my album. We had him on everything and decided we have to make an album for this guy. That’s our first major project inspired by having this label – ‘Hey we have this great artist, let’s make a record.’”

Hall remembers his initial encounter with Krasno and Deitch, who now back him in the Nigel Hall Band. “We all got into this conversation about the Headhunters, and I don’t know how we got there, but I sat down at the Wurlitzer, Kraz picked up the bass, Deitch got behind the drums and we started playing the Herbie Hancock Flood album from start to finish,” he says. “We were having so much fun and geeking out. I’m the biggest music nerd on the planet and they are too – everybody in the Royal Family is. So if I’m looking to do something with a 1973-74 vibe, they can pick that right up.”

Although Deitch and Krasno are ever-willing to delve into the early ‘70s, this is by no means the only era that occupies all their time and interest. The pair has formed a partnership as the production team known as The Fyre Dept that has crafted hip-hop beats for artists such as 50 Cent, Talib Kweli, Norah Jones and Justin Timberlake (even as Deitch continues to develop his Break Science project where he joins Borahm Lee to deliver live trip-hop, broken-beat and dubstep sounds). Although Royal Family has embraced an old-school aesthetic, it is also in touch with the challenges and opportunities of the present – hence its principals recognizing the need for an online distribution model.

Alan Evans has witnessed the paradigm shift in his role as owner of Playonbrother Studios where he regularly engineers and produces the music of emerging acts.

“A lot of younger cats come into the studio and it’s interesting to see how the vocabulary has changed,” he says. “I remember back in the day, [when I was in] my late teens, early twenties, the words being thrown around were A&R and demo tapes – ‘We’re going to go send this demo tape to the A&R person over there.’ That was what you did but those are words you never hear anymore. Most of these younger cats don’t even know what an A&R person is. (The artists & repertoire department typically handles signing new artists within the major label hierarchy.) They’re putting out music on their own and it’s cool. They’re always asking me for advice and I’ll tell them, ‘If you figure it out, let me know.’”

What he does know is that Royal Family has “enough music of our own to last a couple years.” Soulive released The Beatles’ covers record, Rubber Soulive this past September. Neal, who recently scored the three volumes of the HBO documentary series The Blacklist, has already completed Bang, “an album of cinematic breakbeats.” Alan checks off the various other releases that he anticipates will follow: “Lettuce, Break Science, Nigel, me, an official Chapter 2 album – and we’re already talking about another Soulive album. We know Soulive is the driving force at least for now, so if we have an idea for a Soulive album that’s going to go out but other than that, whoever’s done is up at the plate.”

As for the future, Alan acknowledges, “We’re a new label teetering on the edge of the old school and the new school. We’re trying to figure it out – how we’re going to deliver our music, what’s the best way for us. I hope in the next three to five years we can figure out something that works. What I can say is that we’re going to do this on our own for as long as we can. The best things have always happened to us when we were doing what we loved, putting that energy out there in the universe.”

His brother Neal, adds his own succinct assessment of Royal Family: “It’s all about having a home.”