Category: Blog

Well, it’s been an interesting few years, but here we are.  It feels like everything was different just a short while ago.  Back in 2013 we had just built a makeshift studio in our basement offices located on Lake and Lyndale.  The entire build out consisted of one double wall (for sound isolation), and two regular walls.  At the time, it felt like a massive undertaking.  Don’t get me wrong, it was a big deal, but would pale in comparison to what we would face in the future.

The studio was very small and the ceilings weren’t very high.  The control room was really one half control room, and one half my office.  The building was heated by a boiler system and the pipes that provided heat to the rest of the units ran right through the little live room.  When the boiler would fire up the pipes would bang… LOUD!  Sometimes when they got too hot and a small pressure release valve would spit little bits of boiling hot water out… so you better not put any gear in that corner or stand near it.  Only now do I realize how sketchy all of this sounds.   At the time, we didn’t think anything of it.  I mean, we had our own recording studio.  We built it ourselves, and it was right there in our label head quarters.  As far as we were concerned, we were living the dream.

We worked our asses off in that studio, too.  That live room is basically where my friends and I built Sonny Knight And The Lakers.  We rehearsed relentlessly, wrote songs, sharpened our stage show, and of course recorded.  We cut Sonny’s LP in there, as well as tracks for Wanda and Dérobé Dance Band.  Despite the small space with all of its quirks, the records sounded good.  Sonny’s LP in particular went on to receive great reviews around the world.

Then, in May of 2014 I received a devastating email.  Despite several conversations with our landlord about how much they wanted us to renew our lease, we were being given 31 days to vacate (the lease requires 30 days notice).  Someone wanted to turn our space into a bar (which finally opened a couple months ago, and apparently is awesome).  They had committed to spending $200K in renovations, and were going to pay something like 3 times more in rent than we were paying.  We had been in that building for 4 years.  We occupied their largest space, and had recently  spent a lot of time and money to build the studio.  Despite all of that, we didn’t get so much as a hint that they may not want to renew the lease.  In fact, the opposite, they were saying they wanted to renew.  Why?  The building manager actually told me.  They had interest from the future bar owner, but no commitment.  They didn’t want to tell me about it, because then we would start looking for another place.  If we moved out and the other people decided not to move in, then they’re just stuck with an empty space.  To make a long story short, we got the boot.  We found a temporary space to warehouse the label’s inventory and mothball the studio.  It was a real shit hole on East Lake.  We ran the label from our homes and took a lot of meetings in coffee shops.  Orders were packed and shipped from the temporary space.

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