My meeting with Local Famous Records co-founders Anthony Sosa (Temporal Distortions) and Michael Garcia (Double Bear) started with a handshake and ended with hugs — and at its core, that singular interaction is what Local Famous Records is all about.
Sosa and Garcia are just two of the ever-expanding crew at Local Famous Records.
If you’re like me (or, at least, like I was before I met up with the guys), you may have quite a few questions about what Local Famous Records actually is. I had heard a few people talking about them, and seen a little here and there on social media, but prior to this meeting, I really couldn’t wrap my head around what was going on. Was it a record label? A tongue-in-cheek name for a band? Some kind of creative conglomerate?
Turns out the answer is, Local Famous Records is a little bit of everything.
Sosa and Garcia have been a part of the local scene since the early 2000s, but the idea for Local Famous Records was actually born out of last summer’s Black Lives Matter marches.
“Organizing [protests] is like the same thing musicians do,” Sosa said. “Having a band practice is the same as having a meeting. We’re all working towards a common goal. Except in that instance, rather than it being a song or a record we’re trying to put out, it was this local issue that we were trying to fix, but I wanted to do that in the music scene too.”
Local Famous Records is not a record label in the traditional sense of the word. At its base, the idea around Local Famous Records is to build community and to give artists a platform to have their music heard.
Anyone who’s lived in Fort Worth for more than, oh, 15 minutes knows that North Texas is expanding quickly. And it’s not getting denser. Fort Worth has stretched and sprawled to the point where it encompasses over 300 square miles. Budding artists and musicians are having a hard time knowing where to play, how to meet people to create with, and how to break out into the industry in general. This is where Local Famous Records comes in.
“Calling it a label just gives it some weird form of legitimacy,” Sosa said. “We aren’t a ‘real’ record label. We aren’t trying to make money and sign bands and send them on tour or whatever. It’s more about ‘Hey, let’s build this community of local artists and musicians.’ The label doesn’t take a cut. It’s just a platform for the artist.”
“We came up with the idea of being a collective more so than a label,” Garcia added. “Calling it a label is just the easiest way to describe what we do.”
And what they mainly do is network their asses off. Local Famous Records is sort of like crowdfunding industry connections. Everyone involved knows a few people with resources in the music industry. Someone knows an engineer, someone knows someone with a studio, someone knows a PR guy. Through this expanding network of connections, Local Famous Records aims to build a tighter community of Fort Worth musicians and elevate and empower them to be successful in all of their endeavors.
“Our three- to five-year goal would be to have a physical space, to do shows, festivals, whatever,” Sosa said. “We wanna have a venue. We wanna have practice spaces. We wanna do it all.”
Sosa has lofty goals for the organization but ones that he’s confident will be achievable. Local Famous Records is a legacy project, he said, and it’s one that aims to create something greater than the sum of its parts. Their goal is to organize more shows, more festivals, and help people make more, lasting connections in their local scene. Sosa even mentioned the idea of expanding and helping other people open local chapters of Local Famous Records in their own towns, all over the country.
The first big, organized event from Local Famous is taking place Friday at Lola’s Trailer Park. Since the idea for this collective was born during the pandemic, this will be the first time that everyone who is a part of Local Famous Records will be in the same place at the same time.
Since they’re famous, they’ll definitely be posing for ussies when not onstage melting faces. #localfamousrecords
Local Famous Records Showcase
7:30pm Friday w/Teen Wolves, Double Bear, Temporal Distortions, and Glenn Wallace at Lola’s Trailer Park, 2735 W 5th St, FW. $10. 817-759-9100.
