A love letter to T.O.
On the rise of Arts & Crafts’ annual Field Trip
‘You get to create a magical play land for kids of all ages’
It’s a drab and freezing February evening, the night before Toronto indie mainstay Arts & Crafts Records announce the lineup to their third annual Field Trip festival. Inside a cavernous, bright white boardroom at the label’s headquarters, frequent office guest Cooper, a spirited golden retriever, is pacing around looking for attention. “He’s a personable space invader,” Arts & Crafts co-founder, and leader behind Field Trip, Jeffrey Remedios warns. But the room is tensely quiet and laser-focused on matters, such as finalizing the upcoming event’s poster art and browsing through social media to gauge people’s excitement on the impending news. This is when Remedios receives a phone call about fonts.
“No, I know, we booked bands with long names this year,” Remedios jokes, as he and the design team behind Field Trip’s colourful blue-and-yellow poster go back and forth on the positioning of bands’ names. This is admittedly one of the few times Remedios had to pause our interview in order to assure the announcement the following day is ready to go. “This is what we do all day, we play with font names.”
Field Trip began in 2013 as a celebration of Arts & Crafts’ 10-year anniversary, a one-day extravaganza that highlighted the label’s storied rooster from the past and present. Its main draw and headliner was a reunited Broken Social Scene (one of Arts & Crafts’ most successful acts to date, who went on hiatus just two years prior) performing their 2002 breakout album, You Forgot It In People, with additional performances by Feist, Stars, Ra Ra Riot, The Darcys, Still Life Still and more. Its immediate success could be credited to its nostalgic appeal, for those who grew up on the Toronto collective in the early 2000s, but Field Trip also proved to be a highly curated event that stood out from other festivals.
“Kevin and I, we’ve spent the last 10 to 15 years going around the world, hanging out backstage, touring worldclass music festivals,” Remedios explains, of his and label co-founder/Broken Social Scene frontman Kevin Drew’s experience with attending and performing other festivals. “We used to say to each other, ‘Gosh, if we had a festival, we would change this or we would change that; Toronto needs this,’ and we just felt like now is the time to put the money where our mouth is and actually try to deliver that.”
And that doesn’t just apply to VIP pass holders; Remedios and Drew want to provide an exceptional experience for everyone. “It’s not lost upon us that we’re 12 years old,” Remedios says, of his label’s age and subsequently diverse audience. “Our artists are aging and while our musical tastes aren’t changing that much, our lifestyles are and most of our peers have kids. ... You get to create a magical play land for kids of all ages.”
This year’s lineup includes Alabama Shakes and My Morning Jacket as headliners, with supporting acts Arkells, The War on Drugs, Father John Misty, De La Soul, Dan Mangan + Blacksmith, Kevin Drew & Andy Kim and 18 more bands. One glance and it’s easy to understand why Remedios ran into a minor issue with the length of the band names.
Of course the biggest omission on this year’s lineup is Broken Social Scene. “Three times isn’t always the charm,” Drew muses, but this isn’t to say it wasn’t an option. Although Remedios and Drew had discussed the potential of Social Scene headlining again, Remedios has bigger goals for Field Trip, beyond Arts & Crafts. “It just made sense to give it some breathing space from the Social Scene point of view,” Remedios says. (He predicts the band will play again in the future.)
“We deliberately didn’t call it the Arts & Crafts picnic or anything,” he continues. “We called it Field Trip so that it’s distinct from Arts & Crafts, which gave us the latitude that if all went well, we could grow beyond our roster and widen out a little more.
“It all ties back to some Arts & Crafts philosophies where we want to help artists connect with fans and potential fans, how we do it is not so important as long as we are doing that. Field Trip is just the next evolution of that kind of thinking.”
It’s that kind of ambition that has helped the label transform from burgeoning collective to one of Toronto’s most prominent creative leaders, which ultimately boils down to Remedios, Drew and everyone at Arts & Crafts’ continued romance with music and their hometown — and what better way to commemorate a lasting relationship like that than a big, joyous event.
“It’s like a wedding,” Remedios astutely points out. “People plan a wedding to match their personality and different people approach it differently so, in a way, it’s like we’re putting on this love letter to the city of Toronto.”