Surviving as an independent band takes perseverance — but Carbon Leaf wouldn’t have it any other way.

She is the Boxer
She knows when and where to strike

In “The Boxer,” a song from an early Carbon Leaf album, lead singer Barry Privett tells of a fractious relationship with a faint Irish accent: the lovers are pugilists, locked in combat. The award-winning track is driven by a lilting mandolin and ringing bells, the Gaelic touch strong but not overbearing.

Honey understand
Honey understand
I won’t make demands

“Life Less Ordinary,” from their next record, is more firmly in the guitar-pop canon. As he appeals to the object of his affections to give him a chance, Privett’s vocals are clear and bright. In the chorus and bridge he harmonizes with himself to piercing effect, but there is a note, too, of pleading. Despite the song’s lightness, the listener suspects that this tale will not end well. It is this balance that Carbon Leaf strikes so well: behind love and loss, between joy and what shadows it. It’s a tension that has driven gem after gem of Celtic-accented, folk-flavored indie rock over the course of a 23-year career.

Carbon Leaf were the first unsigned band to play at the American Music Awards, and have forged a reputation as indomitable road warriors, sometimes notching 200 dates a year. They have played with the Dave Matthews Band and David Gray; Katy Perry once starred in a Carbon Leaf music video. All the members work on the band full-time. Now, however, Carbon Leaf are at a turning point. Their fanbase is broad, but they have not yet cracked the upper echelons of the industry. To build a foundation for their next 23 years, the band members have realized they must rethink the way they operate, outside the label system and the industry’s traditional structures. “We’ve been chasing the white whale — we’re obsessed with autonomy,” Privett said. In this new incarnation he’s no longer just a musician — he’s a manager, promoter, web designer. “You can’t say, ‘I’m in a band, I don’t do those things.’ You miss out on opportunities.”

They have approached the challenge of reimagining themselves with humility, as one might expect of a group whose rise has been gradual rather than meteoric, the result of decades of grit rather than one hit single. “We never had the luxury of deluding ourselves that we were on a higher pedestal,” Privett said. “We’ve always had to do it for ourselves from a young age. We were in the trenches. When we go to a show, we realize how much time, energy and money it takes for a fan to come out. It’s a humbling thing. They get a babysitter, take the night off, go for dinner with their significant other, drop a couple of hundred of bucks on an experience, and it’s one of their favorite bands. And they think, ‘are they going to deliver, are they going to take us there?’ That’s what keeps us grounded, knowing you can be that or you cannot be that, and that’s your choice, on any given night.”

Underlying Carbon Leaf’s own shift is a broader one in the music industry. In the 1990s, traditional distribution networks broke down as MP3 piracy soared, and recording-industry revenues began a prolonged decline. Labels still provide support that can’t be replicated — they invest billions every year in artist development and promotion — but that system is no longer the only game in town. Still, as Steven Johnson argued recently in the New York Times Magazine, the Internet economy has not caused the “creative apocalypse” that some predicted. “Musicians report their economic fortunes to be similar to those of their counterparts 15 years ago, and in many cases they have improved,” he observes.

Critics have contested Johnson’s data but agree with his underlying point — there are new possibilities for musicians who decide to go it alone. The Swedish pop star Robyn launched her own label; singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer raised $1.2 million on Kickstarter to fund her new album; superstar acts Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead have split from their labels and chosen to remain independent. Even for artists who enjoy less name-brand recognition, recording costs are lower than they’ve ever been, thanks to audio editing software like Protools. Videos can be filmed with smartphones. Touring can be immensely profitable. Building this kind of career is not easy, but it can be done.

Privett grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, and met future Carbon Leaf guitarist Terry Clark on their first day at Randolph-Macon College. He had never thought of himself as a singer, but when Clark and some friends got together to play cover songs — the Grateful Dead, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rolling Stones, Nirvana, REM — Privett joined in, and discovered a passion for music. Soon, armed with a name inspired by the bucolic, mountainous scenery they saw on a road trip to North Carolina, the band was playing gigs at collegiate social events. “I don’t think anything could replace those early shows in terms of, you’re young, the room is beyond packed, all your peers, girls, are looking at you, the whole thing,” Privett said.

After graduating they took jobs while continuing to play; Privett worked at a mobile-phone store in a mall, and during the long hours when there were no customers, Privett retreated to the storeroom at the back to make duplicate tapes of the band’s music. But as the months passed the band members began to feel irresponsible. Were they wasting their time by only performing other people’s music?

This prompted them, four years after they began, to write their own tracks. It was a bumpy transition — their first album was a “disaster,” Privett said, and the band lost their old, cover-loving audience. Gradually, though, the musicians felt surer in their approach. They realized that instead of reinventing the musical wheel, their goal was to create songs that were classics of their form.

“I’ve always gotten a thrill of creating something from nothing,” Privett said. At first the group would compose as a collective, the musicians riffing and trying out different chord combinations as Privett sought lyrics to fit them. He would listen for something — a guitar sound, a rhythm — that made him go, “What was that?” Over time their approach shifted, and Privett started to build songs around his words.

“I liked to think that our music is a good, organic mix of roots and rock and a message that isn’t entirely unhelpful,” Privett said, in his modest way.

How do you free yourself and leave the rest
To the beasts in the gilded cage?

Take “Circus,” the lead track on the album “Constellation Prize.” It is an inquiry into how one might escape a life that has become enmeshing. In the chorus Privett intones the question “Is this where I belong?”, his voice wavering on the last syllable; like a chorus, the rest of the bands shadows him with harmonies. The song ends with an image of a person looking up into the sky, as the word “sunlight” is repeated over and over, in ethereal tones. It suggests that beauty might be a way out, or a means of transcendence.

The track “All of My Love,” from the same record, takes the form of a six-minute folk odyssey. Its pace picks up, slows down, and then quickens again, never letting the listener drop, on a journey through a dissolving relationship. Again, in a device of which they are the masters, Carbon Leaf concludes with plangently repeating phrases and call-and-response harmonies:

All of my love
Carry it all away

At the beginning, Carbon Leaf were self-starters in every way. They had no public-relations guru to secure press coverage and certainly no label. “When we started, we couldn’t buy help,” Privett said. But thanks to their perseverance, and also to the Internet, they gained traction. Clark worked at a music studio, first sweeping floors and later in an engineering role, and spent his free time there online. He came across songwriting competitions and sent in some Carbon Leaf tracks. To his surprise, they won: $5,000, $20,000, even an offer to license a song for a Ford commercial. In 2002, on a roll, he submitted “The Boxer” to a new-music prize run by the American Music Awards, pitting the band against 1,000 other acts. Then came the thrilling part.

Over the subsequent months Carbon Leaf received updates by mail, informing them they had made it to the last 50, then to the last 10. In the biggest leap forward of their career, they were invited to New York for a battle of the bands and got through to the final, at which point they boarded a bus and went on a three-week, cross-country promotional tour for the prize. At last, at the AMA ceremony in Los Angeles, they performed the song. “It was a blast,” recalled Carbon Leaf guitarist Carter Gravatt. “We went from playing very small venues to the AMAs, where we’re standing next to Kid Rock and Lenny Kravitz.” Privett remembers their performance as distinctly average, but it didn’t matter. They were announced as the winners.

Thus began what Privett nostalgically calls the band’s “golden years.” They crisscrossed the country to play concerts and recorded their next album, the hit “Indian Summer,” which earned national airplay. “The American Music Awards didn’t make us famous, but they did help us get our touring legs and they got a couple of DJs supporting the band,” Privett said. They were even invited to provide several songs for the animated movie “Curious George 2” and, as if proving they had made it, a label signed them. It seemed as though a weight had been lifted from their shoulders; perhaps this would be their path to the happily-ever-afters.

Following the initial euphoria, however, the band began to realize that the label was a bad fit. They recorded their second album with the label in a rush, and the release plan seemed lackluster. Even so, they got it stocked next to the cash registers in Starbucks, and have funny memories of filming the video for “Learn to Fly” at a church in downtown Los Angeles. It starred Katy Perry, before her mainstream success, as a besotted fan rushing to attend a Carbon Leaf performance. “She was very bubbly, very sanguine — she was everything Katy Perry looks like,” Privett said. Ultimately, though, by the time of the band’s third album, they owed roughly five hundred thousand dollars to the label for production and promotional costs.

As Privett describes it, there was in fact an intolerable litany of expenses: “You’re going to a studio and paying $800 a day, and paying a producer $50,000 in points on the record to produce your album that you’ve worked on for a year, and hooking up with a record label that’s going to throw a little bit of marketing money your way in exchange for a high-interest loan that you’ll never be able to pay to back, unless your cross-collateralized albums are going to be in the black each time. And to keep that machine going you feel the pressure to hire a management company that has a lot of overheads, and so they’re going to charge you 20 percent of your gross even though they may not be really finding new money opportunities for you.”

Eventually, it was enough. “You see how all these things, all this infrastructure that you think you need, is really not applicable, at least to us at this stage in our life,” Privett said. They quit the label and found themselves back on their own. Instead of fatally dispirited, Carbon Leaf saw it as an opportunity to build a stronger foundation for themselves. Their first task was to find a new way to record their songs. Clark donated the garage at his Richmond home, transforming it into a recording space called Two-Car Studio, after the building’s capacity. The band would be able to record downstairs, in an isolation booth sourced from a local NPR station, and edit in a studio upstairs.

One of their most notable recent projects was born there. In 2013, the band decided to re-record their album “Indian Summer” — the label owned the rights to the album in its original form but not the song copyrights, which belonged to Carbon Leaf. To pay for the venture the band tried a new tactic: They turned to crowdfunding web site Pledge Music, promising rewards such as album lyrics handwritten by Privett ($350) and an unplugged performance at a house party ($5,000). To make the original version of the album, it cost $80,000. “Indian Summer Revisited,” released in 2014, topped out at $6,000, all of which came from the online campaign. “It sounds better than the original,” Privett said. “And we did it in a quarter of the time.” For listeners, the intervening decade is palpable. On “Life Less Ordinary,” for instance, Privett feels more seasoned, or simply older, and seems to take more time to feel out the lyrics. All the pop gloss has been stripped away. Indeed, for Privett the song has a different meaning now; he no longer thinks about the girl who inspired the track, and who he lost, every time he sings it.

Come live a life less ordinary
Come live a life extraordinary with me

Next the band decided to rethink their tours, which are their main source of revenue, as well as their passion. “People say, ‘what’s your favorite venue to play?’ And I say wherever there’s people,” Privett reflected. “When I’m performing it’s about really connecting.” Carbon Leaf are a reliable draw — each gig can attract anywhere from 200 to 1,000 punters. In the past, they had toured at a relentless pace, booking dates a few months in advance and relying on social media to drum up sales. Typically they would arrive at a venue at about 2pm, set up until the late afternoon, attend paid meet and greets, rush through dinner, perform, sign autographs, and get back on the bus to sleep.

“At a certain point we did the math and realized we didn’t need to be out there as much,” Privett said. He wanted to focus on events that were more meaningful to the band, and also to generate more revenue from fewer dates. In 2014, he decided to book an entire tour a year in advance. It was both respectful to fans, who would be able to plan around the concerts, and it would free the band from the churn of promoting looming gigs. It took Privett 150 days to put together 100 dates. He holed up in his office with a calendar and map, and worked with an agent to line up the venues. “It’s this constant gamble, this amorphous shape,” he said. “You’re constantly doing this: ‘Well, New York’s not available on Friday, but Boston is. And that’s gonna make travel from our show in Baltimore more difficult, so let’s blow out Baltimore and do Burlington because it’s closer to Boston.” In the end Carbon Leaf got 80 percent of the dates they wanted, playing prestigious venues like Yoshi’s in San Francisco, and reviewers were appreciative. “Their concerts feel like more of a family get-together rather than a label-sponsored tour,” one wrote.

The musical life — the touring, the long studio hours, funneling income into the next song or album — can leave space for little else. As Privett says, “I’ve been a workaholic to the point where I’ve lost out on key relationships. And I envy the people that say, ‘I have no regrets.’ But I do.” He notes that he is currently the only bachelor in the band. “I think you really only fall in love a couple times in your life,” he said. “There’s been definite women in my life, two or three, that seem to come around every seven years or so, where you’re kind of like, ‘What kind of major life changes am I going to make right now, would it be worth it?’ And I think the older you get, the answer might ultimately be yes.”

In 2016, the band is testing a more digitally inspired approach. “We’re using this year to trim back some of our touring and try to embrace some new technologies,” Privett said. He’s learning how to use Squarespace in order to oversee a web site revamp. And the band has a new release — not an album, but an app for the Apple TV, making them among the first musicians to embrace that platform. They see it as a means to reach a new audience; it features videos of live performances and interviews with the band.

Privett is looking forward to Carbon Leaf’s 25th anniversary, in 2018, but he’s also taking time to reflect on the journey the band has taken. “Certainly you think about it the older you get. You start getting a little bit more metaphysical about it, and thinking maybe that part of the art is the art of not quitting.” At heart Privett is still an artist, but he now also sees himself as a businessperson — his efforts help provide for all those other band members, after all — and, indeed, as a person trying to solve a puzzle that will only reveal its secrets across the course of a lifetime. “I think it’s an obsession, if I’m honest with myself,” he said. “It’s almost like a Rubik’s Cube. I want to keep figuring out Carbon Leaf. I want to keep peeling back that onion.”

Thank you for reading this piece from Creators & Creatives magazine! If you’d like to read future stories from Creators & Creatives, join our mailing list! (We’ll only send emails about future stories, and about the magazine). To learn more about how Carbon Leaf uses Airtable to manage touring schedules and more, see our writeup here.