Between appearances on stage at The Pour House, Dave Hedeman changes his baseball cap at least once.
It’s fitting that Dave wears multiple hats, seeing how he shifts from one role to the next during a September Sunday afternoon of live music in Raleigh.
Keyboardist for rock band Rotoglow. Frontman for the Gone Ghosts.
Duet partner with his daughter Eliza Mae.
Same with fellow All Y’all Records co-founder Nick Stroud, who pulls triple-duty playing guitar for Heat Preacher, co-emceeing with Dave and ordering a ridiculously generous number of pizzas for everyone.
They’re all here for the collective’s Last Call Y’all: Hopscotch Hangover Day Party, a showcase of Americana, alt-country, and indie rock artists with local or regional roots.
The event, which followed the finale of this year’s Hopscotch Music Festival the previous night, was the official release of All Y’ll Records: Volume One, a compilation album of artists from the collective, including several who performed that day.
The showcase and album, which was also pressed at The Pour House, is the latest endeavor from Triangle-based All Y’all, which Dave and Nick founded in 2024 to collectively lift artists in the local “y’allternative” music scene.
“I think because a lot of these bands are from the South, they flirt between Americana, country, and just traditional American rock bands like Tom Petty … that all have these themes of truth and love and loss,” Dave says.
All Y’all bands Rotoglow and Van Meter performed at the collective’s Last Call Y’all: Hopscotch Hangover Day Party at Pour House in Raleigh on Sept. 7.
Dave and Nick enlisted a core of about 10 bands (including their own) and began hosting showcase events to help promote artists within the All Y’all family, taking the “old DIY punk rock approach” and applying it to the current era.
“What if we created this thing where all these bands kind of work together as one entity and, especially in the age of social media, aggregated all of our following into one hub that we could use as a promotional tool to introduce people to our music but draft off of each other’s audiences to try to bring them together?’” Dave wondered.
That’s crucial to survive in today’s climate.
“There’s just virtually zero ways for independent musicians to make money and support their passion without working together,” Nick says.
“I mean, yeah, sometimes you break through; sometimes you get a song with a million streams or something. And we have artists that have done that. But at the end of the day, if that momentum wave isn’t perfect, then you crash. And it’s discouraging. And you have to do it all over again. You have to keep building; you have to keep grinding.”
Nick says he and Dave set out to make that process “a little less daunting for everyone.”
And the mission of the group is different than that of a traditional record label. They don’t want to “meddle or involve ourselves” in the artists’ musical vision or process, Dave says. “We just want to be a voice and a megaphone to help connect their bands and music to different audiences and grow their followings.”
All Y’all has no monetary interest in any of the bands in the collective. They don’t take a cut.
“That way they have control and they can make whatever records they want to make,” Dave says. “And we’re here to just help them put it out. And I think the only product that we’re trying to put out are the compilations.
“That gives us hopefully a little bit of a revenue stream to take that money and dump it back into the bands for promotion or putting on events. … But that’s about as far as we really want to go at the moment, is just to give bands the platform.”
That’s crucial, given that live music — particularly at the local independent level — has a lot of competition, with endless options for a night out. Consolidating shows, especially for artists with a similar sound and following, makes sense.
“Rather than ask a person to go out to see 15 shows in a month at different places … why not put four bands on a bill and just make a really awesome one night?” Dave asks. “And then in return, the audience will be like, ‘Wow, I just got four amazing bands for the price of one amazing band.’”
It also draws a bigger crowd into one space, instead of splitting the audience, and drives recognition for All Y’all as an entity that puts on great shows.
Shows like their Hopscotch Day Party.
“What we want when people walk into a venue like Pour House, even if they’re just hearing it and coming in off the street … as they look at any of these bands (is for them to say), ‘Wow, these guys are as good as anything I heard at the festival,’ because we truly believe that,” Nick says.
The All Y’all events have held even deeper purpose, as well.
They held a similar showcase at Hopscotch 2024 as a fundraiser for the late Reese McHenry, an artist on the label who was facing a second battle with cancer at the time. The group included an unreleased song from McHenry on the compilation it released in September to honor her memory, as well.
