For some troubled musicians, help is at hand
Indie label Royal Mountain unveils a fund for artists’ mental-health needs
The stereotype of the artist as a bit of a mess exists for a reason, admittedly, but there’s no reason an artist has to be a mess.
That’s the thinking at Toronto indie Royal Mountain Records, anyway, which this past week took a step unprecedented for a record label, independent or otherwise, and introduced a fund to assist the acts on its roster in obtaining treatment for mental-health and addictions issues.
As of Feb. 1, every act signed to Royal Mountain has access to $1,500 to expend at the act’s discretion on mental well- ness. No strings attached, all completely confidential. As the memo that went out to the more than 30 bands with whom the label works — Alvvay s, Mac DeMarco, U.S. Girls, METZ, Chastity and Calpurnia among them — on Thursday stressed, the money is “out of our pocket, and will NOT be a recoupable label expense. To reiterate, the bands will NOT need to pay the label back for these expenses.”
This is, believe it or not, a genuine case of a record label doing something for its artists because, as Royal Mountain boss Menno Versteeg — also the frontman for local rock outfit Hollerado — puts it, “it’s the right thing to do.”
“It’s literally an everyday occurrence where you run into something,” he says. “In every band you know, there are people who are in art because they have something inside them that needs to come out, and often a professional helping that thing come out will serve a totally different purpose than it coming out just through your art.
“I don’t want to say it runs deeper in any industry — I’m not friends with a lot of bankers so I don’t know — but there’s a normalization of mental illness in the arts. It’s like, ‘Of course that person’s suicidal, he’s an artist.’ That idea that great art comes through pain, there’s a lot of truth to that, but that doesn’t mean
that you need to live in pain your entire life and exist in pain.”
Versteeg came to the idea of starting a mental-wellness fund for Royal Mountain’s artists honestly: He has benefited from therapy in recent years, but it was “never an option” on an indie musician’s income.
It’s only, he laughs, because his wife — actress Annie Murphy, who plays daughter Alexis on the hit CBC sitcom Schitt’s Creek — has had “a good job” for the past few years that he can afford to go now after spending 15 years in a touring band that very nearly blew apart a couple of times due to its members’ inability to deal properly with various afflictions. So when recent circumstances unexpectedly brought Royal Mountain Records the repayment of a debt he’d “totally written off as a loss,” he rang up his accountant and asked “What can we afford?”
Not that $1,500 per band will be a cure-all or anything, but it’s a start. The goal is to increase the fund to $1,500 for every individual on the roster, with “full health benefits ... very much our long-term goal,” last Thursday’s memo explains. “In future years, we plan to increase the fund to the point where we can include budgets for dental, physical therapy and pharmaceutical costs as well.”
Versteeg has already been contacted by two private donors willing to donate “significant” dollars to the wellness fund, so the potential for growing it is there. Ideally, he says, he’d love to see it turn into a resource that all Canadian musicians could access. But this is Royal Mountain Records we’re talking about, not a multinational like Universal Music. Thinking small is a matter of necessity.
“By no means can I expect to solve any of these problems, but I’ve literally seen them in every shape and form, in myself and in the bands I’m in and in the bands I work with,” Versteeg says. “The music industry is late nights and long days and hard work for low pay and big highs and big lows. That’s just built into it, and people want to be part of it because they love music and they love the emotion behind it. And these are all things that lend themselves to this stuff ... It’s not my job to be, like, ‘You need help.’ ... But I want people to know ‘This is real, it’s there and if you need it or maybe your bandmates think you need it and they can convince you, here’s some money. It’s there.’
“Basically, the first step was just doing it — having the mon- ey there and ready to go and encouraging the bands to use it. That’s the hard part ahead. There’s been an incredible response and now people know it’s there, but let’s see how many who need it are going to take that next step.” The reaction from Royal Mountain’s signings and their associates has, unsurprisingly, been swift and grateful.
“I think it’s great. I think we should take this and run with it and do more with this concept,” enthuses Brian Borcherdt, who has released two albums as Dusted through Royal Mountain during his time off from local electro-punk duo Holy F--k. “For musicians, a lot of things are not available to us, regardless of the mental-health conversation. On top of everything else that makes our careers difficult and our lifestyles difficult, there’s really no infrastructure to, y’know, go to the dentist. We’re already kind of having a hard go, and you can’t just moonlight as musicians while working day jobs that have full coverage for these things. So it puts us in a difficult situation.”
The email that went out last Thursday had extra resonance for Taylor Brode, who manages mysterious West Coast singer/ songwriter and recent Royal Mountain signee Orville Peck.
She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder 17 years ago and knows firsthand the lack of support available to those who work in the music industry for mental-health afflictions, especially in the U.S., where she resides.
“It brought tears to my eyes because no one is doing enough about this,” she said from Chicago on Friday.
“A lot of artists think if they treat it their creativity is going to go away, but they addressed that. They actually said in the email that went out: ‘We think this will help our artists become better artists,’ and I just thought that was an amazing thing to say. I’ve never heard anyone put it that way.”
Versteeg is modest about his efforts. It was only through gentle urging and the prospect attracting more resources that he even decided to publicize Royal Mountain’s mental-wellness fund at all, but he concedes that “if this raises the bar just a little bit, where other labels do it or bands are asking, ‘Why doesn’t my label do this?’ or other labels are, like, ‘Maybe we should do a little something,’ then wow.”
Royal Mountain isn’t rolling in cash, after all, but at least it’s trying. It’s good to set an example.
“It’s staying afloat, and growing slowly,” Versteeg says. “And I want to grow it slowly. But before investing in a new recording studio or buying a new touring van for our bands and all these things I’d love to do, I think the health of the people who work with us is paramount. It’s really No. 1.”