Carbon Leaf, Philfest’s headliner, recently announced they’re leaving Vanguard Records to create their own label. The Weekly spoke to lead singer Barry Privett, who said the band is busy “pretty much just writing and recording around the clock.”

How has this year been?

We’re doing our own recording and producing, cutting out the middle man… The label model is just kind of tired. There’s just not a whole lot that a system like that can offer a band that knows how to run their own music. You just waste so much time and money, and you never see any money, yet they’ll make money. You just don’t get a lot out of what you put into it. Another big reason is just the schedule that they put you on. You can’t really release an album out every two years. We’d rather release three or four every year. We’ll still make physical products-that obviously hasn’t gone away-but you don’t need to set up these big expensive distribution deals where they go into all these stores, you know. Most people aren’t going into stores to buy records. We’ll put it on our website, and we’ll put in on iTunes and we’ll see what happens.

What are your plans for the future?

We’re kind of working on the plan right now, and obviously we’ll have some more staff, you know, just start out small, really focus on the music side and not really over-reach. We just invested in a bunch of gear and kind of fit it into our rehearsal space, and we go there every day and chip away at whatever we’re working on.

What’s it like to tour on your own most of the time?

Generally we’ve built our own thing, doing our own thing. When it makes sense to pair up with other bands, that’s awesome. We love to go out and we like to play long shows, and it’s really been getting as much music out to our audience as we can.

Philfest is co-hosted by Students for Ecological and Environmental Development on campus. What are your feelings on going green?

There’s a lot to consider when you’re doing that-if you’re green, if you’re really not. I’ve needed to do a lot of research in finding out the balance of how we operate and how we’re contributing. It’s a lot to consider, and there’s a lot of great organizations that are really spearheading that like Reverb. Their mission is to educate and green bands’ touring efforts, so our goal this year as part of the whole record label and the fact that we’re touring more is to kind of really, really for the first time take a long, hard look at our practices and what our footprint is and how we can reduce that. Anything we can do to support that is awesome.