Friend Club Records

Creative Director: Independent Music Label

During the pandemic, my friend Rob Froese approached me to create a logo for his fledgling label, Friend Club Records. I enthusiastically agreed, a process you can read more about here. Over the next year or so, I did a few more things for the label, like creating album art, formatting art for print, etc, and eventually Rob asked me to come on full-time as the label’s creative director. Of course, I said yes. 

I like to say that after art, my second great love is music, and has been for as long as I can remember. I found out pretty young that I had no aptitude for making it myself, but in one way or another I have spent much of my life adjacent to it. Some of my earliest memories as a child are of me flipping through my parents’ LPs – admiring the art and gaining a very eclectic taste in music. As I got into my teen years, I started working local shows and spent 13-16 going to multiple concerts a week. Into adulthood, I collected physical media and escaped into all of the new and new-to-me music I could find.

I always wanted to make album art, but I didn’t really imagine the opportunity would arise to do so. With so many dreams of one’s youth, it was set aside for other (more responsible) things. 

All of this background is to say: when the opportunity arose, I was so much more than ready to accept the challenge.

Over the next couple of years, we partnered with so many amazing bands, comics, solo acts, and other labels to produce a stunning amount of releases, digital and physical. It would be impossible to list everything and everyone I’d have to thank, to list every release I am so incredibly proud of being a part of. In the midst of this activity, we also participated in the revival of Furnace Fest, producing a limited number special edition releases from some of the most legendary acts to play that festival over the years. I was privileged to go in person two years in a row, representing the label and meeting bands, fans, and everyone in between. It was such a life-changing, soul-affirming  experience. 

Toward the end of 2023, Rob and I made the decision to pause the label for a while. Both of us had a lot going on in our lives, and the breakneck release schedule we had maintained for the previous years had left us both burnt out and spent. Rather than continue on with something we could not support in the way it needed, we decided to let it rest a while instead. 

In the time that the label was inactive, I had a lot of time to think about the experience – things I was proud of, things I would do differently – we learned so much in those years. Rob came to me last year, saying he wanted to restart the label. At first, I was unsure whether I could do it again. My art career has evolved a lot in these intervening years, and I was worried I wouldn’t have what it was going to take, and gave him my blessing to do it without me instead. 

Sitting on the sidelines, I can’t deny, I missed it. Old releases came up in my memories and I began to realize it was something I couldn’t not do. So, when Rob approached me again a few months ago, we started a real conversation about it: what it would take to make a go of it again, and decided to jump back in. 

So, we are going to have a much less agressive release schedule than you came to expect from us in the past, focusing on doing a few highly curated things as best as we can, giving them all the love they deserve. We took on another friend as “hype man,” and I am once again excited for the future. We’re looking at some of the most exciting things yet, and I can’t wait for you to see what we do next. 

Below Are Just a Few of the Amazing Things Friend Club Records Has Produced Over The Years