Carl Edwards Carl Edwards has a new passion to keep him busy away from the track, a record label called Back 40 Records.

“I’d come home and my little brother and my buddies would give me these CDs that people were making and they’d have to go to Kansas City or St. Louis to record stuff,” he said. “It cost too much for them to do on a regular basis. And we all were just sitting there at the house and we thought, why don’t we just take this room of the house and make it a recording studio? And it’s turned into a lot of fun.”

The label name comes from Edwards’ days in Columbia when he and his friends would race junk cars. “We’d have all these cars together and go race them out in this field that my buddy called his Back 40 because it was his back 40 acres,” he said. Edwards’ personal musical tastes range from Johnny Cash to Jewel to Metallica to Jay-Z.

“The biggest thing for me when I listen to music is just that it’s somebody who is passionate about what they do and they have a story to tell and that I can gain some insight from their artistic expression,” he said.

The first CD, “That One CD,” will be released in a few weeks. It is a compilation of songs by six different artists with musical styles including hip hop, R&B and acoustic rock. More info is available at www.back40records.com.

York Dispatch