Jackson Free Press

It's a no-brainer: Zombies aren't known for their caring nature. But when songwriter Renee Arozqueta began piecing together her nation-spanning independent label Zombies & Lizards, her love of those doe-eyed flesh-eaters combined with her craving for a cooperative music community.

Arozqueta had drawn her variation of these monsters as mascots for her solo project, Renee Is a Zombie, since 2011, and they were an obvious choice for her values as a label owner.

"A really good zombie movie, like 'Dawn of the Dead,' forces you to look at the kind of monsters that humans are," she says. "My zombies are so emotional and pure, even naive, that they force you to look at ... how super sweet humanity can be."

Arozqueta, 29, wanted to form a support system for her fellow songwriters, built on kinship, kindness and a realization that the music industry has changed forever.

"Long ago, back in the '90s," she says jokingly, "people just wanted to get signed. If you could just get signed, you could do it. But slowly, we realize our dreams aren't going to come true. You have to do it yourself."

Through her performances as Renee Is a Zombie and her folk duo, Silo, Arozqueta honed her skills as a self-made musician and saw others doing the same.

"Everyone who's out there doing it, I mean, they are a record label," she says. "They do their own booking, they do their own promotion, they press their own albums, and they produce their own albums! I was already doing all of that, and I wanted to do it for others."

Over the course of the summer, Aroz-queta did everything needed to make her label a reality. She completed the website, printed T-shirts, booked her current tour and enlisted acts from across the United States, including Spider + Octopus of Missoula, Mont., Leland Clay of Mobile, Ala., and her tour-mate for the fall, Rachael Haft, also known as Flossie and the Fox.

Though Haft, 28, has only performed under her stage name for about a year, she's written songs since she was a child, around the same time her older sister read her the book "Flossie and the Fox." In the story, a little girl tricks a fox into doubting his species by comparing him to similar animals.

"The moral of the story is supposed to be that if you're clever, you can outwit threats, but to me, the fox was the hero and the little girl was a jerk," Haft says. "What I got from it is (that) identity is really important, and people will try to steal that from you. ... I want to empower people to find their own identity."

While the negotiating with a record label is often arduous and unfruitful, Haft's experience was somewhat different.

"Well, Renee basically just told me I was on her label," she says with a laugh. "She wrote me one day and said, 'I have this label I've been working on, and hopefully you're on (it).' ... She invited me to go on this tour having not heard my music in something like seven years. She just knew I was passionate about it and willing to put in the work."

The pair's October tour kicks off Saturday, Sept. 27, in Haft's hometown, Pensacola, Fla., with a release show for three Zombies and Lizards' albums—Renee Is a Zombie's "U Are the U," Flossie and the Fox's "A Fox Just Be a Fox" and Leland Clay's greatest-hits-style release, "The Heatest Grits."

Renee Is a Zombie and Flossie and the Fox perform at Hal & Mal's (200 S. Commerce St., 601-948-0888) at 8:30 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 1, as part of Singer-Songwriter Night. For more information, visit zombiesandlizards.com.