So, there’s the creative side where you’re making music, but then you also have the business side. How does that work for you? What has that been like for you both to manage being artists yourselves while also managing a business and being a steward of so many other artists’ work?

Laura: I think it helps that Mac and I have really different personalities and roles that we play. I tend to be more bottom-line oriented, or business oriented. He’s always been more creative focused. Of course, we both go back and forth on those things.

Mac: As Merge grew and Superchunk was also still active and busy, I think a lot of it just became [about] time management and structuring…not just your week but your year. Like…Superchunk’s going to be on tour for these six weeks then we’ll be here. Especially once we had a couple of other people working at Merge, we could do that more easily. But at the same time, it’s happened gradually over 30 years. There was never one tipping point where it was like all of a sudden, we have to figure out how to do all this stuff. You’re just kind of learning as you go. Little by little.

Laura: I have to say it was never my fantasy when we started the record label that I would have to deal with personnel management and things like that, and there are times where I wish it was just the creative part because the rest of it wears on you sometimes.

I feel like for most people there’s that reality or duality if you’re working in a creative field.

Mac: Yeah because you start it out like it was a fun art project. And then 30 years later a lot of your time is contracts, talking to other artists’ managers, finding the right distributor for your records in another country. All this stuff that you never had to think about for a while.

Was there a moment in the existing arc of Merge where you were like, “Wow…we’ve really arrived with the record label?”

Laura: A lot of them, I think. I think the first time we put out a full-length record and Touch and Go shipped it to us and we held it in our hands…we were like, “Damn we’ve done it now!” But then we had the 69 Love Songs box set, and it was so much more in demand than we anticipated. That was another moment when we were like, “Wow we’re doing something right except that we’re not making enough of these.” That happened again with Funeral– the Arcade Fire record. We thought, “This is a good band, this is a great record. We can sell at least 4,000 of these.”

Mac: Which would’ve been great for us.

Laura: That would’ve been great. But instead people immediately wanted way more than that, and we had committed to a very elaborate packaging that involved this silver foil that took a long time to dry, so when we printed them they had to sit there for a while or they would get messed up in the folder.

Mac: It wasn’t a normal job.

Laura: Had we known we would’ve made more in the first place.

When you are speaking with bands about coming to join Merge, what is your pitch? What makes Merge a good place to be an artist?

Laura: What I try to get across to bands is that we’re people you can trust. We’re also artists. We have been through everything we’re going to ask you to do, and we wouldn’t ask you if we wouldn’t do it ourselves…and if you say no, we understand. We’re not the biggest label, and we don’t have the most money. We’re never going to be the one to offer any band the biggest advance, but we want people to come here that want to be on Merge and want to be part of the family.

Mac: Just the fact that Merge is artist-run can give people an immediate confidence in the place that we’re coming from. Also, we have a staff of people that work here who are dedicated to what they’re doing which is trying to present your music in a way that you envision it being presented to the world and to make sure your music gets heard by the most people as possible without having to do things that are distasteful. Everyone who works at Merge including us always works with that in mind. [We’re] thinking about how the artist would want their record out there. How they would want it talked about to fans, to record stores, to distributors, to people at radio stations, to people who write about music. I think that we do a really good job at doing that.

We’ve been around long enough that I think it’s clear that we can adapt to all the different changes in the music industry. We’re always trying to come up with new ways to do what we do to make sure that we’re still doing the best job that we can in getting music out there. There are so many ways you can consume music, and there’s so much music out there which is great, but it also means that if you’re a label or if you’re an artist, you’re trying to cut through a lot of noise to make sure that people hear what you’re doing. Hopefully, the name Merge being on a record helps do that because we have 30 years of putting out records we love. I think people really trust the name to the point where yes, of course, they’ll listen to a new Lambchop record or a new Superchunk record, but also, they’ll listen to the new Ibibio Sound Machine record even though they’ve not heard of them before. Because it’s on Merge they want to check it out.

The tagline for Come Hear North Carolina is “The roots of American music run deep in North Carolina. This year we tell that story.” I would love for you to reflect on that idea as it relates to the universe of music that y’all have been working in: North Carolina’s indie music scene. What is unique about it? What is special about it from your perspective?

Mac: When I was in high school listening to college radio around here, I was hearing bands that were from North Carolina that had been making independent music and putting out records since the 70s. These were bands that were still around at the time like The dB’s, Let’s Active, Corrosions of Conformity. You could even go back to the bands that those people had been in before like Sneakers in Winston-Salem. It was really cool because you’re like, “Wow these are bands that people have heard of all over the world, but they’re from North Carolina and they’ve been doing this for a long time already.” It was cool to know that there already was this foundation or history of people making the kind of music that you were into right in North Carolina.

There were a couple of compilations that came out on Dolphin Records – like Mondo Montage – and they were more like pop records. Maybe you would call it college rock or indie music, but there was something southern about it, and there was something North Carolina about it. It wasn’t twangy necessarily. Even if you couldn’t put your finger on what it was, there was something unique about it which gave you a feeling of, “this is something to be proud of.”

What has made North Carolina a good place for Merge to be?

Laura: North Carolina has always been a good place for Merge to be. If you think about trying to be in a band, or trying to run a record label from inception when you have no resources....it’s best to live somewhere where the rent is cheap and supplies are cheap and people have free time because they don’t have to work all the time so that they can be in a band. They have time to be in a band and rehearse and do all of the hanging out that you have to do if you’re going to be in a band. Early on when we started Superchunk, people were like, “Why didn’t you move to New York City?” I was like, “Why would we do that?” We’d have to rent rehearsal space, haul our amps and our guitars to the rehearsal space and work our butts off to be able to afford to pay rent. This was a great place to incubate that kind of lifestyle with a whole bunch of other people who could do the same thing.

Mac: I also think that North Carolina’s a super interesting place to make music and be in a community of artists because the politics here are…I’ll just say interesting for lack of a better word. There were a lot of punk bands protesting Ronald Reagan in the 80s. In North Carolina, in particular, we had Jesse Helms as our Senator, so punk bands around here had a lot to talk about.

Laura: It’s true.

Mac: So, I think it was a great place to be to see how progressive people can live and express themselves and try to change things when maybe the overarching politics are regressive. You look around and there are people in all fields really working to try to make things better in North Carolina. I think it’s very inspiring for us as artists running a business to partake in that…to partake in the thing that we’ve seen other people do in the past.

Laura: On top of that, there are a lot of good universities in North Carolina. Usually, those are surrounded by or attended by people who are open-minded. Usually, there are college radio stations and music venues near the universities, and those were essential to growing a punk rock or indie music scene.

Mac: And of course, record stores.

How can North Carolina better support the music business?

Laura: Healthcare would be a great support to artists and would enable a lot of people to worry less and make more art.

Mac: And I think that this kind of initiative is important in terms of talking about the arts in North Carolina to the rest of the country…but also I think raising awareness so that people who live here see what they have and see how valuable it is. As artists and as people who’ve been artists in North Carolina for a long time, it’s a great place to make music and be in a band and make art. But I think that at a certain point it’s easy to do when you’re in your 20s when you can have another job…but if you want people to keep growing and keep doing what they’re doing it is important to provide things that would allow people to have a life…like health care. I think that would be huge.

*This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.