On Drowning — The Format’s Former Manager on the Band’s Breakup

Holy shit.

Speaking of things I missed, the link above is to a post written by Tom Gates, The Format’s former manager, about the band’s breakup. He wrote it in 2009, exactly a year after Sam Means called to break the news to him.

Recalling the crazy reality of managing a band that got dropped from their major label and recorded an album that didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of succeeding, he writes:

[T]hese two guys (and their band of merry men) would work nonstop, doing almost anything that I asked them to do (the bad examples are hilarious and, given my ego, must appear in their stories and not mine). We opted to release their second record with only the help of the company that I worked for, a concept which is now gaining popularity but seemed like assisted suicide at the time. We tricked out the internet, trying almost anything that was invented in any given week, with the band’s newfound freedom allowing us to out-maneuver the clumsy beasts that are known as Major Record Labels (not without making some hilarious errors in judgment along the way). Nate answered the same ten questions about 5,000 times, in twenty languages. Sam minded to the business, phoning daily to keep tabs on finances and projections.

In short, we kicked some serious ass and, in my opinion, created our own luck using the technology that confused most other contemporary recording artists. Our ship may have looked beautiful from the outside but inside all of the passengers were screaming the same thing as we hurled along into uncharted space.

‘Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.’

Wonderful, heartfelt writing about a band that will always have a special place in my heart.

Read it now.