In 2017, GenX, a PFAS compound traced to a Chemours plant near Fayetteville, turned up in the Cape Fear River and in Wilmington’s drinking water. Utilities have since added filtration and the state has pushed the company to cut its discharges, but the contamination lingers in the river long after the news cycle moved on.
Fort Lowell Records, a Wilmington-based label, answered with This Water Is Life, a series of split vinyl EPs that pairs a hip-hop artist with an indie rock act on every volume. Each sleeve carries an insert from Cape Fear River Watch and Coastal Plain Conservation Group on the health of the river basin. Each volume’s sales fund the next, so artists, many getting their first vinyl pressing, pay nothing to take part.
Label co-founder James Tritten runs Fort Lowell with his wife, musician Tracy Shedd, who shares Vol. V with MoeSOS DC. With Vol. V released on Earth Day 2026 and Vol. VI due next spring, I sat down with James for an extensive chat about the series and why he doesn’t expect it to finish.
Is there anything you’ve been listening to lately, new or old, that’s stuck out to you?
James: That’s a hard one for me because my wife and I are DJs here in Wilmington. We host a dance party every Saturday night called LET’S DANCE, so most of what I listen to day to day is strictly for that purpose. I don’t want to give you the easy answer, like “I just picked up all the new Kylie Minogue reissues” — though I was actually ten minutes late to this call because I was picking up the new Hot Chip reissues I was missing from my collection.
But if I’m being honest, my real answer is this test pressing that just arrived yesterday. It’s a Posthumous Release from a band called Doggy Daycare, out of Wilmington. They existed for a pretty short window, 2023 to 2024, and were a phenomenal shoegaze/indie rock band. Perfect if you’re into Drop Nineteens, gritty-era Dinosaur Jr., Starflyer 59, Swervedriver, that kind of punchy, textured shoegaze rather than the dreamier stuff.
One of the members, Joshua Sullivan, was a close friend and neighbor of ours. When he told us he’d joined a new band, we went to see them play a show right down the alley from our apartment, and Tracy and I just stood there with our jaws on the floor.
Tracy and I are 52 and 51. We grew up going to a club in Jacksonville, Florida, called Einstein A Go-Go, where bands like Polvo, Archers of Loaf, basically every Merge Records band from the 1990s and every great underground indie rock act used to come through. Nirvana played there. Jane’s Addiction played there. I saw the Cranberries on their first tour in front of maybe fifty people. It was a legendary club, on the level of CBGB, and it shaped everything Tracy and I love musically.
So when Doggy Daycare showed up in Wilmington pulling from that same well, we were floored. We put out two digital singles with them early on — “acid walk” and “(forgetting) sarah marshall” — that were meant to lead into a full album. Then the band broke up before they finished it. It took them a couple more years to wrap up the work, but they finally did, and we’re releasing it this year. That’s genuinely the thing I’m most excited about right now.
How did the label come together? Was it always the two of you?
James: It’s always been the two of us. Tracy and I have been married for 26 years and have been playing music together for 33. Tracy performs under her own name, Tracy Shedd. She’s a former Teen Beat artist, if you know that D.C. label. Her first two albums and her fourth were all on Teen Beat.
I tend to be the face of Fort Lowell because Tracy doesn’t love being on camera, but we make every decision together. We never had kids, so we’ve put all our energy into music and building a community around it.
The label itself traces back to a piece of art. We were living in Tucson in 2008, working on Tracy’s fourth album, Cigarettes and Smoke Machines, which came out on Teen Beat in 2008. By then, we’d spent eight years working with different labels and understood what a label could actually offer a band.
I’d also been collecting vinyl since 1992. I was around 2,000 records deep by 2008, probably 5,000 now, and I’ve always loved records partly as physical art objects. Around that time, we bought the most expensive piece of art we’ve ever owned: a $3,000 painting from a friend of ours in Tucson, an artist named Victor Navarro. It’s still hanging in my living room. And I remember thinking: this $3,000 bought one piece of art that only has impact if someone physically comes to my house and sees it. For that same money, I could put out a record, reach a lot more people, and bring multiple artists together.
So we sold our Jeep — a 1976 CJ5, a real rock-crawler beast — for $9,000, and that funded our first three releases. I got a Vespa to get to my day job, since the label has always been a labor of love alongside regular work, and Fort Lowell Records was born.
How far into the label’s history did the idea for pairing hip-hop and indie rock come about, and what was the vision behind it?
James: Our first release came out 4/20, 2010 — that was purely coincidental, not intentional. We moved to Wilmington in June 2018, and our first release tied to the city came out in 2020, which was catalog number 30. So it took us ten years to put out 30 records.
That 30th release changed everything. It was called GROW: A Compilation in Solidarity with Black Lives Matter, made in direct response to George Floyd’s murder. Wilmington has its own deep history with racial violence — the 1898 coup and massacre — so the moment carried real weight here. Tracy and I had lived through something with parallel emotional weight nine years earlier: the 2011 shooting of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords in Tucson, which killed six people. We’d been part of the community response there, a compilation called Luz de Vida that raised money for the families through an organization called Homicide Survivors. We’ve since done a second volume of that project.
With GROW, we partnered with the local NAACP chapter, and all the proceeds funded scholarships for kids. It felt genuinely good because my mom was a teacher, and it meant a lot to see that kind of impact. But making that record took a real emotional toll on both of us. And in the middle of that, we started noticing something.
We’d lived in Raleigh before Wilmington, and even back then — around 2016 or 2017 — there was national news coverage of the GenX/PFAS contamination in Wilmington’s drinking water. When we decided to move here anyway, we called friends first to understand what we were getting into. That stuck with us: we’d just poured enormous personal energy into a record confronting racism, and we started to feel like there was an even more foundational issue underneath it.
I’ve said this to friends, and I’ll say it here, even though I’m nervous about how it lands: you can’t even get to the point of being racist or not if you don’t have clean water to survive on. I’m not saying it’s fine to be racist; I’m saying there’s a more basic layer of human need that has to be addressed first.
GROW and Luz de Vida were also, by design, one-and-done fundraisers: make the record, sell it, give the money away, finished. We wanted something without an endpoint, because the water problem doesn’t have one either. That’s when we started thinking about a sustained, ongoing project instead of a single fundraiser.
How did the actual concept — the hip-hop/indie rock pairing, the environmental partners — come together?
James: This Water Is Life isn’t a fundraiser in the traditional sense. It’s self-sustained: the sale of one record funds the next, on a loop, which means the artists involved never have to put up any money themselves. For many musicians, getting their music pressed to vinyl for the first time is a real milestone, and we can offer that to them at zero cost while using the release to carry an ongoing educational message about the Cape Fear River Basin.
I’m not an environmental expert, so I partnered with the two organizations most people in this community would point to as the real authorities. Cape Fear River Watch is a nonprofit focused on the river and the water itself. Kemp Burdette is their executive director now; Dana Sargent held that role when we first got involved, and Kemp was the Cape Fear Riverkeeper then. The other is Coastal Plain Conservation Group, run by Andy Wood, who’s the expert on regional wildlife and land.
I asked both of them to contribute liner notes. I’ve always found vinyl interesting because liner notes can be almost anything, from tour stories to something that has nothing to do with the music at all. Every release has a double-sided insert: one side from Cape Fear River Watch, where I asked Kemp to write specifically about how the water affects human beings, and the other from Coastal Plain Conservation Group, where I asked Andy to write about the impact on wildlife. It’s also posted as a download on the Bandcamp page for each release.
The hip-hop and indie rock pairing came from a friend, Josh Putnam, a poli-sci professor at UNCW and one of my neighbors. Josh isn’t a professional artist or photographer; he just takes photos on his walks around downtown, and he has one of the most distinctive eyes for a shot I’ve ever seen. He showed me a series he’d taken of the King Tide flooding downtown, capturing reflections of the city in the floodwater. The juxtaposition of the urban and the natural was incredible.
The second I saw those photos, the whole concept clicked. Up to that point, in ten years and thirty releases, Fort Lowell had been strictly an indie rock label. But I realized if I only reached the indie rock audience, I wasn’t doing the broader community justice.
North Carolina hip-hop was the natural second genre. I grew up on hip-hop in Florida in the ’80s, and once we moved to Raleigh, we got exposed to the Jamla Records scene — Rapsody, 9th Wonder, and others — along with local artists we played shows with. It was eye-opening. North Carolina hip-hop, especially here in Wilmington, has a really distinct, intelligent sound. The artists I’ve worked with are some of the smartest, most thoughtful people I know, and those friendships have made me better. Once the idea clicked, there was never a question of using any other genre. It had to be hip-hop and indie rock, side by side.
Having put out five compilation volumes, it seems like y’all have accelerated the label’s release cadence since moving to Wilmington.
James: Absolutely. To put the growth in perspective: it took us ten years to release 30 records. GROW was number 30 in 2020. We’re now at number 95 in 2026, so more than 60 releases in six years alone.
How does the artist selection and production process work for a given volume, using Vol. V as an example, and what have you learned along the way?
James: Every volume has come together a little differently. Volume V lined up well with our vinyl pressing schedule and landed right around Earth Day, which felt perfect. So much so that I’ve now made Earth Day the fixed release date for every future volume. It gives the whole project a cadence I can plan around.
One of the biggest lessons has been about timeline. With compilations like Luz de Vida or GROW, you’re getting one song per band, which comes together fast because bands often already have a spare track sitting around. This Water Is Life is different: each artist gets a full 13-minute side. I originally assumed artists would hand me B-sides or leftover tracks. Instead, almost every artist has wanted to write something new and specific to the project.
The best example is from Volume II: Ross Langdon Page, who records as Color Temperature, wrote a 13-minute indie rock track called “The River”. It was a narrative following a single leaf falling into the Cape Fear River and everything it encounters along the way. It’s one of the most impressive pieces to come out of the whole series.
Because that process takes so long, I’ve started building in a full year of lead time. We’d already started talking with the Volume VI artists before Volume V was even released—I had those conversations with them in November and December of last year.
The Tracy Shedd/MoeSOS DC pairing on Volume V came out of a live show at a venue called The Place, one of the last shows they ever hosted, on a bill with our band Blab School, MoeSOS DC, and Tracy. Watching Moe play right before Tracy, I could hear the throughline from his lyrical depth to her emotionally direct songwriting (people have compared her voice to Sade’s) work the same emotional register. I told Moe on the spot, probably four years before the record came out, that I wanted him on it. He picked his own songs and sat on them with me for nearly three years before release.
For Volume VI, the hip-hop artist is Louis.. I always start with the hip-hop side and build the pairing around it. Side A is always hip-hop, Side B is always indie rock, on purpose: H and I, for “HI.” Louis wanted to write new material specifically for this project, and he actually requested the band Lady Die for the indie rock side. Tracy had already talked to Lady Die roughly two years earlier, so it came together easily from there.
Anything else you’d like to mention before we wrap up?
James: Just how much the community has stepped up for This Water is Life. Gravity Records and Satellite Bar & Lounge are both sponsors of that project, and they’ve been essential to getting the word out. Gravity often gets copies a month ahead of release to sell exclusively in-store, and we always throw a release show at Satellite.
Looking ahead, I’ve been talking with RizzyBeats, a hip-hop artist who also works at Gravity Records, about expanding the project beyond Wilmington proper. He pointed out that the river runs well past the city, and there are hip-hop artists all up and down it we haven’t reached yet. That’s probably the next direction for the series.
One more thing for anyone who wants to explore the catalog: on streaming platforms, I release the tracks under each artist’s own name, but I also created a separate artist page called “This Water Is Life” that aggregates every volume in one place. So if you search that name on Apple Music or Spotify, the whole series comes up together.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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