The Hobbyist #16: An Interview with Songwriter and Label Boss Dan Knishkowy
We chat Ruination Record Co., bein’ a union man, and finding time to write songs
Graphic design courtesy of Thomas Euyang
When I first started getting tapped in with the New York City indie rock scene, one name I kept on seeing seemingly everywhere was Dan Knishkowy. His 2024 LP as Adeline Hotel, Whodunnit, is a stunning slice of experimental folk balladry, hushed and contemplative but with a few nearly-operatic gut punches spread throughout. I obsessed over it last winter when it was released, the perfect accompaniment to a dreary season in NYC (it helped that Knishkowy embraced the atmosphere by labeling it a divorce album). The project featured performances from Winston Cook-Wilson of Office Culture and excellent songwriter Katie Von Schleicher. It a who’s-who of stellar New York players, the sort of project that makes the stuff happening in the city so cool and so worthy of documentation. Just listen to a song like “Egg On My Face.” It’s perfect!
The album was released on Ruination Record Co., a label, it turns out, Dan founded with some childhood buddies. From there, I discovered a number of tremendous albums that were released via the label, like Enough from Office Culture, Melody Trail from Sam Sodomsky’s excellent The Bird Calls project, and Will Stratton’s Points of Origin, an album so good I dedicated last week’s newsletter to him! Alena Spanger became a favorite, as did Knishkowy’s collaboration with Rebecca El-Saleh, R&D. They have an album out next month. Color me stoked.
Following Ruination has felt like a full time job; one I’m very thrilled to do, even though I remain an unpaid intern. If I’m busy listening to all this music, imagine how busy Dan must be, managing a label doing better than he ever expected, his own songwriting ambitions, a soccer obsession, and his day job as a union rep. I’m becoming a sleepy boy just writing it all out. (How about that segue?)
Via my conversation with Dan, I began to realize how he makes Ruination work, which is, mostly, by creating a record label as a way to make the lives of his artist friends easier. He opened a home where people can drop records, hopefully get some fans to buy vinyl, and expose great songs to a supportive community. Anything extra is just gravy, and while Dan is constantly in search of a more equitable model in which the artists he works with can make good livings creating their art, Ruination is the next best thing: A record label that won’t fuck you over. It’s pathetic that that’s all we can hope for, but present circumstance doesn’t mean we can’t push for change and demand more. In the meantime, buy records from your favorite artists. It’s the easiest and clearest way to offer financial support for the work you love. I hope you enjoy my chat with Dan as much as I enjoyed speaking with him.
Ruination Records, Adeline Hotel, a host of other projects. How do you balance your writing with releasing other people's music?
Dan Knishkowy: For a while that balance was good, nice and easy. I feel like the label has taken off in a really nice way, but some reorienting was definitely needed. Two of my childhood best friends and I started the label as a way to release our own music and then slowly wanted to help out friends. Releasing music is such a emotional mind fuck, and if there's ways we can help people enjoy it more, that’s awesome. That was always the ethos. It wasn’t even a results based thing. It sucks to do it alone and it feels good to do it with friends. I happen to have friends who make really good music and a lot of it has taken off in a really cool way. That's been fun. But myself and my main business partner, we both also have real deal day jobs. So there’s that, making my own music and running the label.
It probably takes up most of your time, I imagine.
DK: It's a busy life sometimes.
Do you mind me asking what you do for your day job?
DK: I worked in a union as a labor rep, which is something that has been really nice. I went back to grad school during the early days of Covid. I got a master's degree in labor and then I started working for a union.
Oh, very cool. It must also be a tremendously wild time in that world.
DK: Yeah. I work with freelance artists in an industry that's been unionized forever and it’s so cool to see the different expectations people have of being valued for their work. Music, on the other hand, is so disparate and fragmented, and there’s a willingness to either let yourself be undercut or to undercut other people. We just don't have this ingrained history of solidarity. It's good to separate my job and my music in my brain sometimes, but I'm glad to do something for work that I really value.
That's kind of the dream for anyone, to do something that has meaning. Are you involved in the labor movement in the music industry too? Is that something that you're following or involved with, or are you trying very much to keep your labor focused?
DK: I love following it and reading about it. I want to have more time to be involved, but it just hasn't been able to happen so much.I’m working on this long-form music piece about labor right now. I don't really know what it's going to be, but it's been a nice break from my usual stuff.
Do you write every day? Is that part of your practice?
DK: It used to be. It has become harder, but I’m trying to get back to that.
Is it a balance that you're currently okay with?
DK: I think the balance swung too far away from writing. I've been trying to reorient and carve out some space for it.
What’s your role in the union?
DK: I help members understand their various contracts and get paid if they’re not getting paid. Whenever I talk to music friends about what I do, they're like, ‘Oh my God, we need people like this for musicians.’ Obviously, there are some institutions in music, but I think they traditionally cover musicians that are a little bit outside of the scope of the world that I live in. And I mean, maybe I'm being too general with that. Symphonies and Broadway are historically covered by unions, but indie rock is definitely a different situation. It's nice to learn how this could work in theory, but I still haven't figured out how to put it all together for music folks in practice.
It would be ironic if your label operated like a major. What’s the structure of Ruination, if you don't mind me asking?
DK: We don't own anything. It's really important for us to give people as friendly of deals as possible. Ideally we would lose less money, but we're definitely not looking to capitalize on anyone’s art, especially because a lot of the artists are our friends. If there's a situation where everyone can come out of it feeling good, that's all we care about. It's definitely been a challenge for us.Some people have gotten bigger where they've almost outgrown the infrastructure that we have, and so then we do need to formalize things a little bit more. One thing we did is we spent time learning how to do PR, which we just offer to artists. It’s a good way to help them save costs.
Even though we can't really invest a lot in things, we can find ways to invest our labor into to save them from having to spend elsewhere. We try to operate off a profit share, so it's a little bit more success based rather than “we expect to get X, Y, and Z back from your record.” There's no money in this anyway, so I don't think that would be a good reason to do it. If people do well, they benefit. If a record doesn’t do as well, it's not like anyone is ever on the hook to us. I know bigger labels will give out advances, which is amazing, but then the artist is beholden to them and that doesn't really make sense for the size or type of thing that we do.
Does it ever get tricky working with friends when that disappointment inevitably happens? A lot of records don’t do as well as artists hope they would.
DK: That's probably been the biggest learning curve for me, delivering bad news or no news to friends. It's hard. It took a while to get adjusted to being okay with that. I put myself in that position, but then I don't always like it because it's not easy to be in that position.We've learned through that to try to be upfront about what we can and can't do before we get started. Something that I found really interesting that I don't totally understand yet is we've started having people submit to the label who are effectively, at least from my point of view, on bigger or “better” labels. What I've gleaned from talking to people and maybe from my own experiences, is that ultimately there's so little financial payoff, unless you're at a certain level, basically having people who care about you and give a shit is worth more than whatever relatively small amount of money you might be getting from somewhere else.
I've become more comfortable with the fact that we can't actually guarantee anything and we can't offer lots of things other people could, but we can offer something that a lot of places can't, which is a friendly arm around the shoulder, and the idea that we will do everything we can. We care about you. Once I felt a little bit more secure in that, it became easier to work with friends and understand that there will be some disappointments. I know what it's like because of my own music—sometimes releasing music just feels shitty and it's no one's fault, but it's how this world works, but we'll just get through it together.
You have to explain to people that there just aren’t very many outlets to cover music any more. Especially independent music.
DK: Even when I started doing this four or five years ago, there were more places to hit up and more people who were down. As you know, writers are getting paid very little to submit a review for a record that they're going to spend a ton of time with. It's a labor thing too. The less staff jobs exist and the more people that are freelance, the less they can guarantee doing anything or take risks on smaller stuff.
Actually, to your earlier question about being involved in labor stuff around music, something I've been thinking about is that while it's cool to hate on labels or industry people, I'm starting to feel like we are all in this together, to some extent. Everyone I know who works at a booking agency, for example, is my age too, getting paid shit, working terrible hours. All the writers I know have been laid off, sometimes multiple times. We're all part of the same ecosystem of getting exploited in some way or another by our employers. If there's a way for us to see each other as allies, that would be useful in the long term.
That's the importance of what you're building with your label in particular. There's so much communal support, both among fans of the label and fellow musicians. That feels as important as getting a look in a publication.
DK: I kind of think so too. I try to tell everyone—not to make them feel dispirited—but a nice piece of press feels good for maybe an hour at most, but honestly, five minutes. A nice word from a friend in the community, however, can really resonate for a long time. That can get you by for a while. Leaning into that as a really beneficial piece of the process has been cool.
This may sound silly, but would you like the label to be bigger?
DK: I don't know. People ask me this all the time. I can't figure out my answer to it. I think there was a time when I thought the answer was yes, but I think I've actually changed my mind. I don't, because the best part about having it be this size on our terms, both having day jobs that we really care about, is that we don't have to decide what to do or specifically what not to do based on money. For the label to become bigger or maybe even its own employment, we would have to start saying ‘Damn, I love this record. I love this person, but I just can't throw money at something that's not going to make it back.’ That would be going against the ethos of why we started it. I'm content with it as it is, honestly.
The word has lost its meaning, but Ruination really does feel like an amazing encapsulation of the “hobby,” something you’re passionate about, that gives you joy, and may not bring you money.
DK: There's such a drive of ‘Oh, I picked up this skill. How do I monetize it?’ Some shit doesn't need to be that way. I definitely want everyone else who's involved with it to be compensated, but I don't think I need it to be more than it is. If anything, our biggest success stories are with people who use the label as a jumping board to graduate beyond us. That's awesome.
Do you have any time for other hobbies?
DK: I have this whole life that my music friends don't know about and are always surprised about, which is that I play soccer twice a week. I'm a soccer obsessive and watch soccer all the time. I meet a lot of music people through that, or I'll meet a music friend who I only knew from the internet, and then we'll both realize that we love soccer, and then we immediately vibe harder. One of the drummers I play with is also a big fan of the team that I support. We hang out outside of music now, which isn't something we used to do.
Who’s your team?
DK: I'm an Arsenal fan.
I decided to have a Premier League team this season, and I picked Bournemouth.
DK: That’s a very fun choice. They're not a traditionally big club, but they have some really fun players. They’ve got a great manager, too.
Do you go to an Arsenal Pub and watch games when you're in town?
DK: Sometimes, yeah, or I'll go to friends’ or something. I did a semester in London when I was in college, and so I got tickets to every game, which is really sick. I've been back a few times and it keeps overlapping with my music life in a cool way. There’s a label called Worried Songs. I met this guy over the internet. He lives outside of Liverpool, and I was going over there to see a game and just travel by myself two years ago. We met up and we went to a game together, and I met his baby and his wife. Now, we co-release and distribute stuff together. He’s coming over to the States this week and we’re about to go on tour.
Did you grow up playing?
DK: Yeah, I grew up playing and still do. The dude who runs the team I play on owns Elsewhere, the venue, so there’s another connection. A lot of people I play with are involved in music or art in some way.
Where'd you grow up?
DK: I grew up in Connecticut.
Did you play in high school?
DK: Yeah, I played in high school and college. I decided I wanted to focus on other shit, which is a good thing, I think. I love sports, but I don't necessarily have that elite mentality to do them at all costs.
When you got to the city after college, did you start playing immediately or did you get back into it more recently?
DK: Yeah, this was over a decade ago, but it was early on. Even on that first team, there was someone who worked at Partisan Records, someone who worked at Domino Records. There has always been an overlap between soccer and music, for some reason.
Do you still play twice a week?
DK: I did for a while. Then music got too busy and now I’ve been living outside of the city for a while. I've been missing it as much as my music community.
What was the league that you played in in the city?
DK: I play in this league called NYC Footy. They've grown a lot. They're all over the city. I sometimes played down at Brooklyn Bridge Park, which is really nice around the water. I lived in New York City for 12 years, so I met a lot of people through that. There was this dude I used to play against all the time. We didn't even really know each other. When I went over to England, I just saw him across the pub right before a game, and then we started hanging out in the city. I got to know him. This is tangentially related to your question of what it’s like working with your friends, but it's really healthy for me to have some non-music friends in my life. No shade, but I do think we're all kind of a little bit insane, and it's good to get a break from that sometimes [laughs].