There are interviewers who ask questions, and then there are interviewers who understand that the question is only a doorway to something bigger.

Anthony Mason has spent decades walking through those doorways for CBS News, sitting across from presidents, artists, musicians, actors, writers, and people who have lived right up next to history’s major events. But for many of us, Mason’s work has been especially meaningful in the world of music. His conversations with artists like Bruce Springsteen, Aretha Franklin, Dolly Parton, Paul Simon and so many others have never felt like celebrity check-ins. They come across as attempts to understand something a little deeper.

That same spirit is at the center of his new series, Alchemy with Anthony Mason, a long-form interview program filmed in his New York living room. The fact that we find ourselves in Mason’s apartment is meaningful. This is not a desk, not a studio, not the usual promotional network machine. It is a room built for deeper conversation. It’s an opportunity for an artist to think out loud and maybe find some unexpected answers.

The real subject of Alchemy isn’t fame; it’s transformation: how artists keep working when the world has already decided what they are supposed to represent.

In this conversation, I wanted to talk with Anthony Mason not only about the people he has interviewed, but about the act of interviewing itself. How do you create trust? How do you move past the polished answer? How do you ask a question that gives someone room to discover what they really think?

From one interviewer to another, this was a treasured chance to speak with someone who has practiced the craft at the highest level and who still seems deeply curious about the magic that can happen when two people sit down and really listen to one another.

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.

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.