No, You do it!`

[May 4th, 2005] I love Chad Crouch.

I hate Chad Crouch.

I love him because he runs Hush Records, the Portland record label that has been home to some of this town's finest singer-songwriters, from Colin Meloy to Corrina Repp to Ben Barnett of Kind of Like Spitting. Many of those young experimental singer-songwriters will perform Thursday at Holocene when the label celebrates its 50th release, a compilation called Mile that includes 14 tracks from the label's first seven years, plus 36 MP3s that can be played on the computer.

I hate him because the success of his label, and others like it, have made my job hard. Thanks to people like Crouch, I don't spend my afternoons sipping daiquiris and listening to the new 50 Cent album for the 37th time. Instead, I am buried under piles of CD-Rs, the easy-to-produce vehicle for musicians who lack an established label but have songs to play and a computer to record that music. When Hush was launched in 1998, not everyone had access to the technology. But Crouch did, and he shared it.

"At the time, a lot of people didn't know you could record onto CD-Rs at home," says Crouch. "I do think we were the first. But the CD burner cost about $600, individual CD-Rs cost about $1.75, and it only burned at two-times speed."

Now CD burners run at 52-times speed for $30, and a spindle of 100 CD-Rs can cost as little as $15. The tottering stack of CD-Rs sitting next to my desk is evidence of how much easier it is now to break down the door to home recording and production.

In early 1998, Crouch's label released its first album, a split disc with Kind of Like Spitting, Jeff London and Reclinerland. The triple split meant more voices of emerging musicians in more listeners' hands, and it also meant more emerging musicians' hands were available to help assemble the CDs.

"We'd record the album over the weekend," the 31-year-old Crouch says of those early recordings, "do the artwork on Monday, master it on Tuesday, assemble it on Wednesday, have a listening party on Thursday and a release party the next Friday."

Unlike early DIY labels like SST and Dischord, Hush exists at a time when production and distribution options for independent labels are everywhere, so the switch to manufacturing was an easy one.

"We'd made one thousand copies of the Kind of Like Spitting album," recalls Crouch. "At that point, there is no question. There was an audience for it; it was time to go to a manufacturer."

Since that release in 2000, the label has continued to grow. Crouch even managed to draw a modest salary from the label for the first time ever last year. But Hush isn't just a story of a small label making good; it's the story of technology giving a group of like-minded individuals a voice.

"We're a really tight community," he says. "It's not like a commune, though. We don't have bake sales."