Welcome to Liner Notes, where we interview music-obsessed curators and artists. In each interview, we get their three independent artist picks and learn about how their relationship with music impacts their lives.

With this installment, we're speaking with Rae Isla. Rae is a Americana/folk artist with a deep love of nature and an entrepreneurial spirit. She is also Harmonic's Director of Artist Success. In this interview, we talk about her musical upbringing, how she gets inspired, and what other artists she's excited about.

Three Indie Recommendations

Katie Phelan - Rae has been opening for Irish artists at LA's Hotel Cafe, and it's led her down a rabbit hole of Irish musicians. Newcomer Katie Phelan has caught Rae's attention.

Spotlight Track: "Nothing Stays the Same"

Andrew Montana - Combining bluegrass and country/Americana, Andrew Montana has been releasing a stream of great music. He's also a natural curator who has previously featured Rae on his playlists.
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Spotlight Track: "Crops"

Ali Angel - Based out of LA, Ali Angel is a collaborator of Rae's and a fellow queer Americana artist. Ali's music has a soulful edge and she puts on an incredible live show, featuring her girlfriend Austyn on guitar.
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Spotlight Track: "Stone Cold"

Full Interview

Let's start from the beginning. You grew up in the Pacific Northwest, right?

I did, I grew up on an island. There's a bunch of islands up there that most people don't seem to know about. But they're beautiful, and I grew up on one of them.

How do you get back and forth from the island to the mainland? Does everyone have a boat? Is there a bridge?

No, we learned to swim really young and yeah, I'm a pretty strong swimmer. No, I'm actually not that good of a swimmer. I can survive in the water, but I'm not a strong swimmer.  

There's ferries, kind of like the New York ferry, like a car ferry. I think it fits like 300 cars. And then on my island, there's a little bridge, but it goes to the Olympic Peninsula. So if you want to get to the city, most people take the ferry.

When you were growing up, what triggered becoming a musician and going down that path?

I think I'm constantly triggered into being a musician. It's triggering, for sure. But no, I think...

There were a lot of things. The earliest memory I have of music entering my life and sticking around was… well, I was three, so it's like a half memory, half a story for my parents. But I was three, and my parents decided we were gonna do an extracurricular and it was all gonna be the same so it could be easier for them, and that was music lessons.  And so my mom took me and my brother and my sister to a music store.

I’m pretty sure it was Dusty Strings, which is like an iconic, almost historic music store in Seattle that's still around — kind of like a McCabe's in Santa Monica, very similar vibe. Anyway, our mom took us there and basically said "Choose an instrument,” which was, you know, we didn't know what we were doing. So my brother chose the violin, I chose the cello, and my sister chose the piano. So our parents had to purchase a piano and have it in the house.

What was the music scene like in that area? Was there much of an independent music scene?

In Seattle, for sure. On Bainbridge, it's really interesting. I feel like my perspective of how and where I grew up really influencing me wanting to be a musician has changed over time as I've gone out into the world and then gone back. I think when I grew up on the island, especially when I was a preteen and teen, I was like, “Get me off this rock. I need to go out into the world.” This is such a tiny little town, surrounded by water. But now that I've lived in other places, when I go back to Bainbridge Island, I realize there's a really strong arts scene and a lot of community programs to support young people doing music and theater and visual arts.

The city of Bainbridge Island really goes all in on supporting arts programming and now I obviously really appreciate that. I think I took it a little bit for granted when I was growing up — because, you know, I was an entitled teenager — but it was almost like an incubation place for artist. There’s actually a lot of a lot of people who move there as an adult to go and, like, write a book. Just to escape the hustle and bustle of of cities and and create art.

Do you go back and perform there?

I'm actually doing my first ever show this summer on Bainbridge Island. I mean, a first official show. This isn't announced, but whatever, it's gonna be announced soon. We're doing a tour of the islands over the course of a week, taking the ferry to five different islands and performing at the local venue on each island. It's taken a lot of work to put together, because these are non-traditional spaces. 

But yeah, we're going back to Bainbridge on August 15 and kicking off the island tour there. It's gonna be cool. We're bringing a filmmaker.

You went to Berklee.  I think everyone, regardless of what they do with their life, has preconceptions about what life will be like as an adult. But I think that's especially true as an artist. You romanticize what being an artist is going to be like. What did you think being a professional artist was going to be like? And what has been the reality? What has changed from your preconceptions?

I think before I went to school, you know, when I was a teenager, because I really started in my teens, taking it very seriously and performing and writing and recording and stuff like that, I thought that going to school meant I would just have all the tools I needed and sort of be plugged into the industry as a worker, you know, as someone working. Kind of like how we glorify, ‘60s and ‘70s of the songwriting business. Carole King was like my number one growing up, mostly because my mom had Tapestry on CD, so it was just always playing from an early age. And I guess I thought going to school and moving to a big city would just sort of guarantee that I would be able to go to the Brill Building and just start writing hits and there would be systems in place for me to like make money and all that. 

And that isn’t to say that there aren't still pieces of that in the music industry, but it's really not the case anymore, as I think we all know.  I didn't realize how much of being an artist would be like being an entrepreneur and building essentially a small business from the ground up and running that business. 

There's a lot less opportunity and abundance in the traditional music industry itself. And so I sort of had to realize that if I was going to be an artist, I couldn't just rely on these companies in the music industry. I had to go figure out how to build a fanbase and how to build a community and a network of other creative people that I could rely on to have a career, essentially.

That entrepreneurial spirit seems like so much a part of who you are and how you present yourself. Was that something that you had to learn and adapt to, or was it something that you really wanted to do from the beginning? It sounds like you learned that that was necessary, but did that feel natural to you, or did you have to grow into that?

I think a little bit of both. I wasn't expecting to have to need to be so industrious and literally just figure shit out. But I think that's the case with any sort of creative career, because oftentimes when you make something, that thing isn't what's gonna keep the lights on for your business or for your life.

it's something maybe outside of that thing, you know? And I think that's probably always been the case, but I think especially now where everything is sort of decentralized and everyone has social media and everyone can put their music out and we're all sort of on the same playing field. 

I don't know, my dad had a restaurant and my mom is really entrepreneurial. She worked for nonprofits, and then she worked for herself most of the time when I was growing up. I don't know if I was aware of it until I really got out into the real world, but technically my parents didn't really have jobs when I was growing up. They ran their own thing, and I now appreciate how hard they had to work for that to be possible for them, you know, not to go work for a corporation or whatever to be able to make their dreams a reality. But I didn't think that I was going to have to do that, so it was a funny surprise.

One thing I've loved learning about you is how important  some non-music stuff seems to be, particularly hiking, canyon traversing, rock collecting — it's stuff like that that I think adds a lot of depth to an artist once you learn who they are outside of their recordings.

It seems like the natural world generally is very inspiring to you. It's all over your Instagram — all your videos are you out performing in nature. Tell me a little bit about that, and how that influences your art.

I think it goes back to the island, especially the first eight years of my life. We lived on the south end of the island, which 30, 40 years ago was farmland, so I grew up running around in the field or the forest or by the beach, just doing whatever, and so I think that that was just very much in me. But now that I'm an adult and I have less time — or at least it seems like I have less time — to do the things that are really soul-fulfilling, I'm more conscious about why I spend time in nature. It's my church. When I’m traversing a canyon, I’m in a temple. Mother Nature or whatever you want to call it is my god, essentially, and I think that those ideas and even those words do come out of my songs. Not that I'm going to nature to get inspired to write a song, but when I’m out hiking and just absorbing, it's kind of the same thing that I'm doing when I'm songwriting. It's just easier to feel it when I'm out, you know, traversing, as you said.

Before we get to your independent artist picks, you just released a single, “Years Beers Her Tears.” You've got an island tour coming up, which is a kind of wild sentence to say. But what are you excited about right now? What would you want people to be checking out of yours? How can people find you?

I mean, Google is doing a pretty good job of aggregating my search results. I don't know, I started saying, like, “Google me” as a joke at shows when people are like “Where can I find you?” I'm like, come on, it's 2025; obviously, I'm on every streaming platform, every social media platform. But honestly, you know, it depends on how you want to engage with my music. I'd say come to a live show, if you can. That’s the most fun, and maybe the most powerful, way to experience songs. But I’ll be sharing some alternate versions of my songs on Harmonic, which you can't necessarily get on streaming or YouTube or any of those places. if you want to hear something that's more special, I would say find me on Harmonic.

But we also have a lot of really beautiful videos on YouTube. I'm loving YouTube these days, and we're leaning into making longer form videos again, just because I'm sick of the, you know, little bites of inspiration on Instagram and TikTok.

Speaking of live shows, you perform, it seems, pretty regularly in L.A. at places like Hotel Cafe. Is that the most reliable place to find you performing?

I’m around town, I’d say. You can go to my Bandsintown page and see what's listed. But yeah, I have a really great relationship with Hotel Cafe, which is awesome because not a lot of venues like that still exist and still thrive. And I grew up in spaces like that — folk clubs, non-trad, non-Live Nation venues, dare I say — so yeah, I'm at Hotel Cafe at least once a month or the Desert 5 Spot once a month. But I will be touring in Colorado next month, and doing some other Pacific Northwest dates this summer.

All right, Rae, your three independent artist picks. Tell us who we should be checking out and why you love them.

I'll go through periods of not listening to any new music and just going to my, you know, nostalgia albums. And then I'll go through a period of only listening to new music. Thankfully, I'm just entering a new period of that.

The three that come to mind… number one, I just discovered this artist named Katie Phelan. She's an Irish singer-songwriter and she has a song called “Nothing Stays the Same,” which I found while I was going down a rabbit hole of Irish artists because for whatever reason, there's these Irish bands that are breaking in the States and they all come do their first show at Hotel Cafe. I've become like the de facto opener for the Irish breakout artists, which I love, maybe because I'm also from an island. But I think Ireland is having an amazing moment for music. 

In a lot of ways, the origin of folk music comes from Celtic. So I'm loving it. And Katie Phelan, I think she's pretty young. She's just getting started, and I love her music. 

Number two would be this singer-songwriter out of, gosh, I think he's in Alabama. I hope I'm not wrong, but his name's Andrew Montana. I discovered him last year, because he's a playlist curator as well. He's like a bluegrass sort of country Americana artist, but he has a playlist and he featured one of my songs on it. And then I started following him and he's been releasing a lot of bangers lately. So Andrew Montana is great. 

The third would be my friend and fellow L.A. queer Americana artist Ali Angel. We've done a number of shows together and writing, and I love her music. It's definitely more like soul. Her live show is incredible, and her girlfriend Austyn is in the band too, playing guitar. Just a great time.