Some fathers build treehouses with their kids. Robert Ellis Orrall built a record label.
Nearly a decade ago, songwriter/musician Orrall founded Infinity Cat Recordings in Nashville with his sons Jake and Jamin, then 16 and 14. Soon after the boys began working to put out other bands’ recordings they started cutting their own, and Jeff the Brotherhood was born. As the label slowly grew, so did the Brotherhood — with Jake on guitars and vocals and Jamin on drums — sharpening its fuzzy guitar blowouts and garage-pop songs on limited editions and splits with bands like Best Coast and the Greenhornes, constituting much of Infinity Cat’s 60-plus releases.
“It’s been a long, slow climb, and our ethic has always been completely DIY,” Orrall says. “But people started to poke in the last few years.”
One of those pokes turned into an 18-month negotiation and, finally, an announcement in May: Jeff the Brotherhood had signed to Warner Bros., which would distribute the duo’s “We Are the Champions” album on June 21. Continue reading
