Chief of new label is no naysayer

When Yeasayer’s debut album of tongue-wagging tribal psychedelia, “All Hour Cymbals,” hit in 2007, it arrived with a bit of mystery. The cover art featured a bizarre figure resembling a werewolf Bedouin, its face obscured in a dark shroud. Photos of the band were hard to come by, and the record company on the jacket was unfamiliar to even the most devoted scenegoers: The album came courtesy of We Are Free, its first full-length release.

All the smoke and mirrors were part of the plan for Jason Foster, the owner of Baltimore-based We Are Free Records and the manager of Yeasayer, one of the hottest new properties in avant-garde rock. Soundboard asked Foster about breaking a band and starting a label in the midst of the turmoil roiling the music industry.

You have a long history in independent music as the co-founder of Monitor Records. What was the ambition behind this new label?

I owned Monitor with a partner, and it was a lot of fun. But I was getting tired of new music. I was burned out. Then somebody sent me a few of the Yeasayer demos, only three 30-second clips, and I was like, “Wow, this is what I was looking for,” and it felt like the right time to start something new where it was my ship and I’m the captain.

When I heard Yeasayer, I knew their album needed to be somewhere where nobody had heard of the label, so people would only pay attention to the music. I didn’t allow pictures of the band to be released for the first four or five months after the single for “2080” was released. When there’s too much information about bands out there, there’s no creativity on your behalf as a label. The first band I loved was Led Zeppelin. I was 13 or 14, and all I had was a dubbed tape, but I was blown away. I didn’t know what they looked like. I just had the music.

It is a difficult time to be getting into the business of selling CDs. How do you plan to grow We Are Free, given the challenges of selling physical copies of music?

I’m trying to diversify. I manage Yeasayer, and it’s been working out well because we’re autonomous. We can control the records. They could have signed a three-album deal somewhere, but then they’d be stuck. It’s easier to make decisions like this. Right now, they’re flying over to the U.K. to play Jools Holland’s show, which is their equivalent of “Saturday Night Live,” and then they’re coming back to play the main stage of Lollapalooza.

You’ve been able to capitalize on some great reviews and online word-of-mouth, but how does the disposable MP3 culture particularly help or hurt a new label trying to break bands and keep them popular?

It’s not easy. Stores aren’t taking risks, and lots of people trade and burn. But I don’t mind as much. You could hide yourself and maybe sell 1,000 copies, but if people become fans through trading, they’ll still want to own the album. If you make a good record, there’s nothing that can stop it from being successful. I’m not scared. I put out good records, and you can’t put a noose around those things. If it’s good, people will buy it.

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august.brown@latimes.com

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