WE Fest Preview -- Eskimo Kiss Records Showcase & Goodbye Throwdown

The Eskimo Kiss Records showcase at the Soapbox in Wilmington is Sunday night, May 30 at 9pm. See our WE Fest preview here & the fest site here.

mp3: The Good Graces -- "Working Title"

My first experience of Eskimo Kiss Records was a sticker on a fire hydrant in Decatur, GA. Later when I moved to Wilmington, NC and wrote a story about Eskimo Kiss, I found out that Eskimo Kiss was started in Wilmington and that founder Kim Ware had moved to Atlanta.

What a weird, wired, small world.

Anyway, Kim is closing up Eskimo Kiss after 10 years and is returning to WE Fest in Wilmington for a shutdown celebration or something. She's bringing along Chapel Hill's North Elementary, which is one of the bands I totally enjoy--and I found out about them thanks to Kim.

Eskimo Kiss has one last release, called "Let's Do Art and Be Best Friends" which is a ten year recap and will be released in June.

The label has a crazy beginning story, so I'll let Kim tell it and talk about "Let's Do Art" after the jump...

I started eskimo kiss records on a cold winter’s day in early 2000. It was snowing, which was somewhat atypical for the southeastern tip of North Carolina. Not a fan of cold weather, I felt sort of trapped, I think both due to the snow and also the confines of our tiny coastal town. Perhaps I was bored.

A few months prior to that snowstorm, which became known as the “Blizzard of 2000,” my then-husband had randomly won an all-expenses paid vacation to Las Vegas. While we were there I hit the jackpot on a slot machine. I came home with $4,000, not a huge sum by most people’s standards, but still, you can do a lot with $4,000. It just so happened that our band was sitting on a record we had just finished recording, wondering what to do with it. Suddenly, we had the money to put it out. And so on that snowy day, we decided it made sense to start a record label.

But since then, eskimo kiss has released 21 records. And me, I’ve divorced, moved
(several times), and fallen in love again. I’ve made lots of new friends, many through this label. I’ve lost some people really close to me. I’ve changed careers. And I’ve written songs about all of the above. Through it all, the only real day-to-day constant has been my label, the songs, and my cat. (I wrote a song about him too.) So as I began putting together this collection of songs, to serve as the final release for eskimo kiss, I realized it’s basically a documentation of the past 10 years of my life. As I listened to all the releases, trying to decide which songs to include, I couldn’t help but think of the moves, the new friends, the old ones … the heartbreak and the happiness that I felt along the way.