Meet Mike Sniper, the label owner of Captured Tracks

The owner of Brooklyn’s own Captured Tracks once tried to jump out of a moving car. It was after a Dead Moon concert (one of many he’s attended) and the band played “the kind of music people let loose to.”

“The car was only going 20 mph, but my friends kept locking the door,” Mike Sniper said.

For the most part, Sniper’s devil-may-care attitude has served him well. Growing up on the Jersey Shore, Mike’s career in music began with his first band.

“Being in a band was another reason to hang out with friends who like the same stuff,” he said. “And in the summer, there were always places to play that picked up high school bands for all-ages venues.”

When he was 27, Mike started the band Blank Dogs.

“I play all instruments mediocre,” he said. “I’m okay at bass. I can play normal guitar, and very, very primal keyboard.”

With these allegedly mediocre skills, Sniper was still able to tour around the world, releasing his own music at other labels before realizing that he wanted to press his own records and start his own label.

Thanks to the experience he gained working within the independent music industry, Mike founded Captured Tracks in 2009 and its label group Omnian Music Group in 2014 as hubs for reissues and new music, like DIIV, Mac Demarco, Dum Dum Girls, and Wild Nothing.

His love for discovering artists still persists in his day-to-day, but here, he takes a few moments to share the twelve songs that have influenced his taste in music, and all of the memories attached to them.

“SHAKE DOG SHAKE” BY THE CURE

When I was finally able to freely walk around the mall when I was 10 or so, and not be dragged into whatever department store had a sale on slacks, I was usually given a few bucks to go to the arcade, comic book store, or (most often) the record store. In the Ocean County Mall, that was Camelot Music. A pre-Blockbuster, East coast chain that was largely based in the ‘burbs.

It was a pretty generic mall record store (I wish those would become the norm again) and the one cool thing it had was a section called “College/Punk/Skate,” which is a funny pre-Alternative designation. I was always gravitated toward that section because it had the bands whose names I recognized from older kids’ T-shirts and patches, with weird, dyed hair, thus making them very “cool” to me. The Cure won the first purchase from this section for two reasons: 1. I’d heard of them, at least, and 2. They had the most titles and I figured, if I like this one, I could go back for more, reliably.

I picked “The Top” for no other reason other than that I liked the psychedelic looking sleeve art and the names of the songs. The first track, “Shake Dog Shake” was the weirdest thing I’d ever heard. It was distorted and noisy. The lyrics were strange, and the mood was really crazy and dark. Now, of course, it sounds pretty tame, but to me at the time, I’d never been exposed to anything quite like that. I didn’t know if I liked it, but I knew I wanted to keep listening to it (and the whole album) again and again because it was one of maybe 15 full-lengths I had in my entire collection. This is the kind of “forced listening because of investment” kids lose these days with click-throughs.

“SOLITARY CONFINEMENT” BY THE WEIRDOS

When I was around 12 years old, I had this song on some weird mixtape I got from an older cousin or friend in grade school with a cool older brother/sister. It was the first “non-famous” band (i.e. Ramones, Sex Pistols, Clash, even Bad Brains or Black Flag) that I’d heard, and it blew my mind lyrically and musically. Almost immediately, I started looking in the back of magazines and the budget zones of local record stores to find more music from that era, just thirsty for anything, really. Even though the music was already 10 years old at the time, it was super fresh to me.

“THROWING BACK THE APPLE” BY PALE SAINTS

I went to high school in the early to mid 90’s. The revisionist opinion of this era as some kind of special epoch in American music is really weird to me. I’ve only been able to listen to Nirvana with clean ears recently. At the time, that sound was so beige and everywhere.

There were some American bands I really liked then, like Sonic Youth (of course), Pavement, Fugazi, but the overall landscape, at least in suburbia, was really earthy (in a bad way) and boring. You didn’t hear the good shit on the radio or MTV. It was 90’s Crapton and Alice in Chains. So, almost just to feel engaged in new music at all, I listened to a lot of British artists. Not just indie rock, but all the electronic stuff happening on Warp too. This meant that I got really into shoegaze as it was happening. I loved the second Pale Saints record so much. This track is such an all time great, so interesting.

“PRISON SONG” BY THE OUTSIDERS

I was a full-on 60’s psych/garage maniac by 1996-ish and quickly tore through the entire catalogs of Love, The Move, Left Banke, The Troggs, all that great stuff. Of course, compilations like “Back From the Grave” and “Pebbles and Rubble” really got my goat. When I found out about The Outsiders (the good Dutch one, not the bad horn, rock one from the U.S.) I was in Providence, RI for really no good reason, working at an ice cream shop. I couldn’t believe how beautiful and raw their music was. An article about them came out right around the time I got their reissues and I found out the crazy back story on the singer, Wally Tax. I guess that’s around the time I first germinated the idea of running a label and doing reissues, that archival aspect to stuff.

“SHADOWS OF THE NIGHT” BY DEAD MOON

Dead Moon is one of my favorite bands of all time and I was lucky enough to make the posters for their last gigs (well, their first “last gigs” when they originally broke up). I think Dead Moon is one of a few perfect bands. Their approach was the antithesis of basically everything I hated about music in the 90’s (and largely still do). They had all of the components of being a real band, not just people who make nice records. I had many crazy late evenings with their music and this song in particular.

“LADIES FROM TOWN” BY MIRACLE LEGION

I love Marc Mulcahy’s songwriting and I really think he’s one of the most underrated songwriters of his generation. I have a huge promo poster for this record, and I just remembered I should frame it and hang it in the label office. I’ve probably listened to this song a thousand times.

“LOTTA LOVE” BY NEIL YOUNG

“Comes a Time” is my all-time favorite Neil Young album. Kind of a weird opinion, not that it’s maligned, but I swear Side One of this LP stayed on my turntable for weeks and weeks to the point where I wore it out and had to get another. I suppose that because it really didn’t have hits on it and my parents didn’t play it at home or anything, it was the first Neil Young record I’d heard without any hang-ups. And obviously from there, I was able to cut loose and dive into the entire amazing catalog, now cleansed of any parent-rock trauma. This song in particular, which was a huge hit when it was covered into a quasi-disco track, really has such an amazing sound and sentiment that cuts through everything. His lyrics are so perfect — right to the heart of the matter.

“LOVE’S HAPPENING” BY THE IMPRESSIONS

I’ve been through many phases of being obsessed with 60’s and 70’s soul that I will likely not listen to anything else. Curtis Mayfield is probably my all-time favorite soul songwriter, but more on that debate later.

This particular song is just pop and it’s so excellent. It’s almost like a “Pet Sounds”/”Sgt. Pepper” of soul music with the strange flow of melody and time, while still being totally singable.

“MOTORHEAD” BY MÖTÖRHEAD

I listen to a lot of indie rock/post-punk/etc. at work. A lot. If you only listen to that, it’s going to warp your perception of what is good versus bad, and it’ll just become monotonous. I don’t want that to happen — I want to keep loving indie rock, post-punk, etc. And this is why you need things like Motorhead to blast all of that away, like how a lawnmower maintains a nice field to play football on. Essential.

This is super interesting music played by one of my favorite bands. I like the slower Hawkwind version from ‘74–75, but this is the one I heard first.

“PLEASE OFFICER” BY EARL ZERO/AUGUSTUS PABLO

Sorta related to the above. I got deep into Jazz, Latin, and Reggae music from working at record stores and getting tired of 4/4 beats all the time. This particular 12" is one of the breakthroughs for me. I love the dark, ominous bassline and everything. You know, the whole outsider perspective on Reggae and Dub being for hippies with Marley posters kinda gatekeeps a lot of people from it, which is a shame. Musically, It has so much to offer that other music can’t provide. Now, I am a full-fledged, crazy Jamaican music collector maniac. Unfortunately, I gave this 12" as a tip to my favorite bartender one night after DJing. Oops.

“THE 15TH” BY WIRE

One of my first “budget bin” purchases (thank you $1.00 cassette section at Camelot Music circa 1991) was Wire “154.” This led me to many, many, many other amazing finds in there, but nothing quite compares to the impact of finding out about Wire. I love that no matter how artsy they tried to be, they couldn’t help themselves but to make super catchy melodies and I always loved their weird harmonies. The end trio guitar part is the “birth of slink” for me with guitar.

“MORE LOVE” BY SMOKEY ROBINSON AND THE MIRACLES

Going back to the above debate, Smokey is the other contender for best soul songwriter. Curtis Mayfield and Smokey Robinson are in my Top 5 songwriters, period. This was played a lot on classic soul radio in the car, of course, but it only recently hit me how great this song (and “Baby Baby Don’t Cry”) is and how emotionally and musically complex it is.

It tries to deliver the pain his wife (and he) were going through, which is basically impossible. The weird piano chords at the beginning actually remind me a lot of “Lotta Love” (see above). I wonder if it’s a reference to this song. Even so, it is such a darkly pretty song. I wish it never ends, especially after the middle-eight, where the tempo picks up.

Listen to Mike Sniper’s curated 12 songs playlist on Spotify.