The Indie’s Turn
Carrot Top Records
By Shel Desormeaux

Carrot Top Records sprung up in Chicago just over twelve years ago, simply as a labor of love.  That’s what it remains, but for such a tiny label, it’s got a big rep.

The Coctails, a beloved band both in and out of Chicago, were touring in the summer of 1992 and had released vinyl recordings but had nothing available in CD format.  Fans along their tour route were starting to clamor for CD releases from the band.  Patrick Monaghan, a longtime fan of the band, took the money he’d socked away, and with what he knew about music retail and distribution, launched himself a label.  Its first release was The Coctails’ The Early Hi-ball Years, now considered a classic.

“I was terrified that we wouldn't sell the first thousand CDs that were made,” recalls Patrick, who runs the label with the help of his wife Julia.  “I think that it's still the best selling CD that we've ever made, at least in US sales, but it did take a while.  We had an advantage in that they'd already released two albums and several singles and were fanatical about their art and images, so they were already pretty well known outside of Chicago.”

Carrot Top only releases four or five albums each year, and they pull very, very few bands on board.  One of the label’s more intriguing bands is the Handsome Family, otherwise known as married folk pair Brett and Rennie Sparks.  The duo originally hails from Chicago but recently relocated to Albuquerque, New Mexico and now record their material in their garage.

“I think Patrick came to see us play at a little bar in Chicago called Phyllis’s,” recalls Rennie.  “We were so drunk that Brett’s glasses fell off and he stepped on them by mistake.  Some guy came in the bar while we were playing and said he was going to roll a bowling ball down the street and everyone ran out to watch.  Patrick was the only one who stayed and he asked us if we wanted to make a record with him.  We just laughed. We couldn’t believe he was serious.”  Patrick was very serious, and with the release of their debut album Odessa, The Handsome Family began a relationship with Carrot Top that has spanned about a decade.

The Handsome Family’s most recent release, Singing Bones (2003), is a languishing collection of dark, midnight walk songs that manage to make me smile once in a while.  Brett and Rennie are about to hit the road for a while, and the two appeared in a weirdly enchanting BBC film production entitled Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus.  The recently released The Rose and the Briar, a collection of writings edited by Sean Wilentz and Greil Marcus about traditional and modern American ballads, also features an essay by Rennie about the song “Pretty Polly.”

Along with the Handsome Family and the Coctails, Carrot Top hosts other such artists as Archer Prewitt, Megan Reilly and The Naysayer.  In response to questions about how Carrot Top decides who to add to their label, Patrick acknowledges that there are no cut-and-dry answers, although every record Carrot Top has released has been the result of his liking of both the music and the artist(s) behind the work.

“I would not release a record I liked made by somebody I didn't like, or vice versa,” Patrick asserts. “Since we only release two to four records a year, and since the distributor takes up 50-60 hours of my work week, I'd have to think that somebody was pretty special to add them to the label.”

“The difficult part of the question is to try to describe why I fall in love with something or not, and I'm not sure that I can. I think that every artist on the label has special qualities, but they are all so different from each other that I've never really been able to find a common thread other than the quality of their work.  That might be easier for somebody else to figure out from the outside and might reveal more about myself than I really want to think about.”

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