![]() Buoyed by the deserved success of Something To Write Home About, both band and label began to flourish. Vagrant made us an offer and we decided to gamble on them.” “We knew we needed to get off Doghouse and were talking to major labels, but all those negotiations fell through. “Honestly, it was kind of an act of desperation,” explains Matt Pryor. In fact, signing on the dotted line was something they felt they didn’t have much choice about. “We knew a lot of bands that had a lot of positive experiences with Vagrant.”Īs for The Get Up Kids themselves, being the flagship band meant the allure that their success provided for others wasn’t present for them. ![]() “We signed to Vagrant because it was a label with a great reputation of taking care of their bands and helping them get to the next level, without having to compromise artistic vision,” explains Jeremy Ray Talley, guitarist for The Bled, who released 2005’s Found In The Flood and 2007’s Silent Treatment on the label. Quickly, they surfaced as our flagship band, and other amazing artists came pouring in.” “We were focused solely on The Get Up Kids and Something To Write Home About,” admits Jon today. Not that that was in any way part of the label’s plan. Off the back of the success of Something To Write Home About and the bands that signed to the label as a result, Vagrant soon became a nucleus – along with Drive Thru and Jade Tree – for what people decided was the new phase of emo. The record’s success firmly put the Vagrant on the map. Matt ’s voice and the infectiousness of the music was simply different from other music. “Rich was managing the band at the time,” remembers Jon, “and he played some early EPs for everyone. A polished but no less emotionally intense set of songs compared to their 1997 Doghouse debut, Four Minute Mile, it was released on September 28, 1999, and it changed everything. After starting the label in 1996, Rich Egan and Jon Cohen famously borrowed $50,000 from Jon’s parents to fund the recording of the band’s second album, Something To Write Home About. ![]() As a result, Vagrant was soon seen as a vital part of what would come to be known, rightly or wrongly, as the third wave of emo, before it went stratospheric with My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy.īack then, though, Vagrant’s wing of the scene – for want of a better term – truly seemed like the centre of it. Those bands might not sound anything like each other, but they played and toured together frequently, and built up a following that was as devoted to the label as it was the bands themselves. Even today, listening to those compilations, it feels like they were more than just an advert for the label. Artists at the top of the bill included big-hitters like Foo Fighters, Muse, Guns N’ Roses, The Prodigy and The Offspring, but over on the Concrete Jungle Stage, almost every band on the bill was signed to Vagrant (whose presence in the UK was bolstered by a licensing deal with Hassle Records and had songs on those samplers). That idea was reconfirmed at the 2002 Reading Festival. These CDs firmly established Vagrant as one of the pre-eminent labels of alternative music at that time. And there are fewer finer than those two featuring tracks from Alkaline Trio, The Get Up Kids, Dashboard Confessional, Rocket From The Crypt, Saves The Day, The Anniversary, Hot Rod Circuit, Face To Face, Hey Mercedes, Reggie And The Full Effect and more. This was before the internet had really revolutionised listening habits, when CD samplers still played a huge part in spreading the word about a label’s roster. In 20, Vagrant Records released the first two volumes of a compilation series called Another Year On The Streets.
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