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provided by Dreamy Life Records
Cameron Smith at Dreamy Life Records
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provided by Dreamy Life Records
Cameron Smith at Dreamy Life Records
It’s 3 p.m., Saturday, on the slow corner of Main and Dashwood at Main at South Side (M.A.S.S.). Dreamy Life Records co-founder Cameron Smith is manning the label’s record store and talking about the merits of different music mediums with Lamberth Carsey, guitarist for up-and-coming alt-emo band Desert Museum.
“We wanted to have a storefront,” Smith says. “It’s an actual place where people can hang out, and it feels like the lobby to this scene.”
Surrounded by the vinyl treasures one would hope to find in a used record store, Dreamy Life’s growing body of releases can be found in the center of the store alongside a plethora of other independent records.
Moving from the Fairmount Community Library to the space inside M.A.S.S. in 2018, the record store is just the latest accomplishment in Dreamy Life’s longstanding history of giving a platform to disparate voices in the Metroplex’s growing music scene.
In 2011, Smith was running a small punk label called Lo-Life Recordings when he met husband-and-wife duo Robby and Jennifer Rux of Dreamy Soundz Records, a dream pop, shoegaze, psychedelic outfit.
“We kept doing shows together, and we came up with a crazy idea to try to do a compilation together where we had Lo-Life bands and Dreamy Soundz bands,” Robby Rux recalls from the live recording that took place at the Where House on Hemphill Street Nov. 11, 2012. “Recording Group Therapy Vol. 1 was a real communal experience where six bands were chanting and doing singalongs under each other’s stuff. We were all from different types of bands, but we were always playing together and respected the hell out of each other.”
“If anything, the point was to find the least Fort Worth stuff in Fort Worth and put all that together,” Smith adds. “There was nothing really going on here at the time. Whiskey Folk Ramblers and Quaker City Night Hawks were big, and a lot of the Americana and country was popular, but there weren’t a lot of rock bands, underground bands, punk bands, shoegaze bands, or anything like that.”
Lo-Life and Dreamy Soundz would continue to collaborate together on shows and recordings for another year and a half before Jim Vallee entered the picture and put some business sense behind the two independent labels.
“I met these guys in March of 2014 through mutual friends of ours,” Vallee remembers. “I’ve always thought about how it would be great to have a Sub Pop or Lookout Records kind of thing. We knew Britt Robisheaux who was part of the Group Therapy sessions and opened up Cloudland Recording Studio as well. So, we had a store, label, and studio combination.”
Cloudland sits just down the street in the Fairmount-Southside Historic District, where small bands from around the country have come to record.
“Lo-Life and Dreamy Soundz found each other in this neighborhood, which is why we’re still in this neighborhood,” Smith says.
“Every town has its little neighborhood where all the cool kids — the artists and the Bohemians — live,” Rux adds. “I guess we always nestled together. That’s a weird thing about music — it seems like such a small community, but you get to know people from all over the world, and they know people that have made it all the way to the big time. You’re not that far separated.”
Since the founding of Dreamy Life Records in 2014, the label has expanded its roster of artists to 12 active bands, released 70 albums from bands around the Metroplex and beyond, and sent their 50 alumni off into the world with a clear sound with which to sell themselves.
“Our main goal is to try to push these bands out of Fort Worth,” Rux says. “We don’t want them just to be a local band. We want them to make it; we want them to achieve their dreams and go to bigger labels. We’re not doing this for ourselves. It’s always been about the art and trying to make the artwork and grow and be successful.”
