The Sharp Notes with Evan Toth

Soft Palms Interview: IN ECHO, Black Glitter Vinyl, and the DIY Music Business

There’s a particular kind of band that doesn’t just make records; they build a whole working language around the survival of their career including community, self-reliance, all betwixt the strange weather of modern life. Soft Palms — the Long Beach duo of Julia Kugel and Scott Montoya — are just that. The duo’s new album, IN ECHO, is not background music and it is not nostalgia. It is a tense, analog-warm, dream-pop-adjacent transmission from the last five years of overload: media panic, emotional burnout, fractured relationships, and that low, constant hum of modern fight-or-flight living. The band has described this new sound as “low-key punk,” which feels about right — not punk as posture, but punk as pressure, restraint, abrasion, and some refusal. But Soft Palms are also doing something else with this moment. Alongside the album, Kugel and Montoya have written How To Be Self-Reliant In The Music Business, a plainspoken guide - a book - drawn from more than two decades of writing, recording, touring, booking, producing, organizing, and figuring out how to keep going when the music industry keeps asking artists to do more with less. And for physical media folks, IN ECHO is arriving in a fittingly tactile edition: black glitter vinyl with a band-exclusive Gold Rainbow foil jacket, a hand-screened and autographed insert, a 3-inch glitter sticker, and a 2-inch rainbow glimmer button — those versions are limited to just 75 copies worldwide. So today’s conversation is about IN ECHO, but it is also about the ecosystem that made it possible: independence, royalties, community, burnout, discipline, survival, and the stubborn belief that artists can still build something meaningful on their own terms.

Live and In the Sharp Notes Shop | Nabil Ayers: Sunshine, Sound, and the Stories We Inherit

Tonight we’re very pleased to welcome Nabil Ayers: a writer, podcaster, record store co-founder, label executive, musician and someone whose life and work sit directly at the crossroads of music, identity, memory, and family. Nabil is the president of Beggars Group, one of the most important independent label groups in the world, with a roster and history that includes artists such as The National, Big Thief, The Breeders, TV on the Radio, FKA twigs, and many others. Before that, he co-founded Sonic Boom Records store in Seattle, helping build the kind of independent record store culture that places like The Sharp Notes still believe in: human discovery, conversation, curation, and the strange magic of finding something you did not know you needed. He is also the author of My Life in the Sunshine, a memoir that explores his life as the son of legendary musician Roy Ayers, not through a conventional father-son relationship, but through absence, imagination, inheritance, and the complicated ways music can connect us to people we may not really know. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and GQ, and his podcast Identified continues that search into family, identity, and the stories we build around where we come from. So tonight’s conversation is not only about records, labels, or the music business. It is about the lives behind the music, the communities that keep it moving, and the questions that follow us when sound becomes memory. Please join me in welcoming Nabil Ayers to The Sharp Notes.

Richard Foos on Rhino Records, Reissue Culture, and the Record Store That Started It All

Rhino Records began the way so many great record stories begin: with a little bit of money, a lot of taste, and a store full of people who believe that - above it all - it’s the music that matters. In this episode we speak with Richard Foos, co-founder of Rhino Records, about the independent shop that became one of the most important reissue labels in music history. Before Rhino was a catalog powerhouse, it was a record store built on humor, deep knowledge, and the stubborn belief that great records should not disappear because the industry had moved on to the next thing. This is also a conversation between two record store owners from different eras. Foos opened Rhino in the 1970s, when independent shops were everywhere and the major labels were letting huge pieces of musical history fall out of print. I’m building The Sharp Notes now, in a very different world, where vinyl has returned, physical media has become meaningful again, and curation may matter more than ever. So what has changed forever? The prices, the technology, the business model, and the way people discover music. What has stayed the same? The need for taste, the value of a good recommendation, the thrill of putting the right record in someone’s hands, and the belief that a record store can still be more than a place to buy things. It can be a classroom, a clubhouse, and sometimes, if the timing is right, the beginning of lifelong love of music.

Arturo Sandoval on Sangú, Freedom, and the Sound of Home

Arturo Sandoval has lived several musical lives: Cuban-born trumpet virtuoso, Afro-Cuban jazz pioneer, Dizzy Gillespie protégé, composer, bandleader, and one of the most decorated musicians of his generation. He is a multiple Grammy winner, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, and a Kennedy Center Honoree. And still, after all of that, he remains a restless student of sound. His new album, Sangú, is his 49th, a number that happens to match the year of his birth, 1949. It began during the pandemic with hundreds of iPhone recordings: fragments, grooves, chord changes, and ideas captured at home. His son Arturo “Tury” Sandoval III and his daughter-in-law and manager Melody Lisman helped shape those sketches into one of the most personal records of his career. Even the title came by accident. You’ll soon find out how a slip of language became a statement of purpose. The album is rooted in Afro-Cuban rhythm, but it is not nostalgic. It is Sandoval still moving forward, still practicing every day, still chasing freedom through discipline. In our conversation, he talks about forbidden jazz in Cuba, the Voice of America on the radio, Dizzy, Clint Eastwood, vinyl, yes even Rachmaninoff. This is a conversation about Sangú, but also about never stopping the creative process. About carrying Cuba inside you. About finding freedom in music, and then earning that freedom again every day. At 77, Arturo Sandoval does not sound like an artist looking back. He sounds like one who is still beginning.

Grover Biery on The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and the Search for Three-Dimensional Mono

Today, we return to one of the most discussed albums in pop history: The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Nearly 60 years after Brian Wilson assembled its world of harmonies, longing, bass lines, sound effects, and impossible emotional detail, Interscope-Capitol’s Definitive Sound Series is preparing a new mono One Step edition sourced from analog tapes connected to the revered 1972 Brother/Reprise pressing. For collectors and audiophile listeners, that pressing has long held a special place because of its clarity, balance, and unusually vivid presentation of the album’s dense production. My guest is reissue producer Tom “Grover” Biery, who helped trace, verify, and bring these tapes back into the conversation with the help of Chris Bellman and the archive teams. We talk about why this source matters, what “three-dimensional mono” means, how a single-channel recording can still feel layered and spacious, and why the 1972 pressing may reveal something important about how Pet Sounds came to be understood after its original 1966 release. We also get into the practical side of making a record like this: tape boxes, archive clues, test pressings, quality control at RTI, the cost of producing a limited One Step edition, and the challenge of honoring a masterpiece without flattening it into mythology. Here is my conversation with Tom “Grover” Biery on Pet Sounds, the 1972 Brother/Reprise source, and the continuing search for the clearest way to hear one of Brian Wilson’s greatest achievements.