‘Crazy’ new Sioux Falls record label aims to offer hand up to curated crop of independent artists

He knew it wasn’t the most lucrative idea.

Launching an independent record label in an era when physical album sales serve niche audiences and artists need thousands of listens to earn a penny on streaming platforms?

One might even call it crazy.

But after a successful career in marketing, Aberdeen native and University of South Dakota alumni Dave Pendry was less concerned about cash than he was about artists.

Thus was born, with some gentle nudging from musician friends like Mark Dahm, Crazy Poet Records. Crazy Poet adds to a rather short list of Sioux Falls-based record labels, including Different Folk, INIT and Small Step.

Pendry’s not out to lose money, of course. The goal is “to be financially viable, commercially viable at some point in the future,” he said.

But Pendry sees a less tangible but more meaningful mission for Crazy Poet. He wants musicians to grow into their best artistic selves with the aid of a musician and fan who can use his business acumen to strike deals on their behalf that help get word of their work out to the wider world.

As a songwriter and former keyboardist for the turn-of-the-century Sioux Falls band Search for George, Pendry said it’s satisfying to watch Crazy Poet artists grow and expand their footprint.

“It allows me to almost live vicariously through the artists,” said Pendry, who initially launched the label in 2022 and made it his full-time focus last year when he returned to South Dakota and took up residence in Sioux Falls.

Pendry is out to connect artists to the paid-for spaces where their music is most likely to fit. That means deals to use songs in commercials, in retail establishments or on social media or web platforms. 

Some of the Crazy Poet artists are set to appear at the label’s second  “Writer’s Round” performance at 7 p.m. Saturday at Phil’s Pub. The artists are Ben Gertner, Tyler VonEye and Morgan Harris of the band Red Maker. There’s no cover charge, but donations to the Bishop Dudley Hospitality House are encouraged.

The intimate performances are meant to lay bare the songwriting soul through stripped-down performances and stories about what inspired the songs. The shows mirror the songwriters’ nights at the famed Bluebird Cafe in Nashville, where superstars like Garth Brooks and Taylor Swift caught the ears of record executives, and where Dell Rapids native and Nashville resident Julie Eddy more recently presented songs she has since toured the nation singing.

“You sit real close,” Pendry said. “It’s meant to be an environment where people are actually paying attention rather than where the band’s off in the corner as just sort of background noise.”

Dahm, the friend who helped coax Pendry to don the yoke of full-time independent label executive, knows what it’s like to be the background band, but also what it means to be the draw. Dahm is the primary songwriter of Search for George, which toured the U.S. on the strength of albums like “Three Minute Pop Song.”

Dahm estimates that he has played Phil’s “hundreds of times.” 

“Phil’s never paid me,” Dahm said, but the no-cover shows helped cement the band as a draw in the Sioux Falls music scene in the early 2000s and paved the way for its larger success later on.

“They just gave us the opportunity to make money,” said Dahm, who serves as the talent scout for Crazy Poet.

If a musician wants success badly enough, “they’ll figure it out,” he said, even though it may take more work in the modern era.

Dahm’s place in the make-money math for Crazy Poet artists is to help them sound as good as they can. He has owned and operated a studio called The Warehouse for about a dozen years now. He secured a space on North Cliff Avenue about a year after he fell in love with recording as he mixed and mastered one of his own songs. 

Until then, he’d only played and performed.

At this point, he said, “I don’t really do anything else” but record music. “This is my only hobby.”

He used The Warehouse as a commercial studio for a few years but has used it more selectively for most of its existence. It’s supposed to be fun and a way to capture a musician’s most authentic sound, Dahm said, not a moneymaking enterprise.

He may set up a dozen microphones on a drum kit or gather musicians to clap in a circle around a mic in the garage to add unique layers to a song.

“We’ll take an extra couple hours to set everything up so it sounds good,” Dahm said.

He still plans to record friends he has worked with for ages on occasion, but at this point, the studio is the province of Crazy Poet artists.

Becoming a Crazy Poet isn’t as simple as sending a demo to Pendry, who said there are “all sorts of legal issues” if Crazy Poet accepts unsolicited music.

But it’s also not especially difficult to catch the ear of Pendry or one of the Crazy Poet collaborators in his circle.

There’s “a ton of talent” in Sioux Falls, Pendry said, and he’s out to find it and help when and if he can.

“We love live music, and we go out all the time. Mark and I are out, and so is CJ (Stroud), who’s our chief operating officer,” he said. “We’re always out and about.”