True Optimist Creates a Musical Getaway with ‘Parlor Palms’

The opening of True Optimist’s new single “Make Money All Day” suggests a soca madrigal entwining with a 1980s new-wave dancefloor hit. Shaking percussion rains down on ricocheting high-life guitars and a plangent, bittersweet bassline. Then a braided stream of swarming voices transforms the tune into a whirlpool of shifting rhythms and vocal harmonies:

“You make a dollar, you make a dime/ You save your pennies for another time … And you say, ‘till you’re blue in the face/ There must be something more/ Than make money, money all day…”

“Make Money All Day,” which drops today (listen below), is the lead-off single for the ambitious double LP Parlor Palms, composed and curated by Charlotte music scene veteran Evan Plante (Quad, Pleather, Light the Fuse and Run, Escapists, Black Market and more), who now creates music with his wife Susan Plante as True Optimist.

“It’s frustrating to know how hard you work and how you can’t seem to get ahead,” Evan says of the lead single’s universal message. “[I’ve decided] I’ve got to create music. I’ve got to care about things other than just making money all day.”

The song isn’t exploring a new concept by any means, but while the tune’s lyrics cogently describe and critique the endless treadmill of capitalism, it’s the music that is transformative and subtly startling.

Amid the mix of instruments, human voices predominate, as they do on all of Parlor Palms’ 20 tracks. As the chorus on “Make Money All Day” adds voices and repeats subtly shifting patterns at the edge of perception, it also sweeps the listener along in a life-affirming rush.

“The idea was to hover over on one note for the whole song and do all of the actual work with the vocals,” Plante says. “After the vocals start in that song, they don’t end until the song is over. There’s no break; there’s no bridge.”

Parlor Palms will release in full on Oct. 24, but in the lead up to that date, Plante will release a total of four more singles, one each month before the LP drops.

The rollout officially begins on June 26 with the release party for “Make Money All Day” at Evening Muse, where Evan and Susan will strip their songs down to perform as an acoustic duo, as will another married couple from the Charlotte music scene: True Optimist collaborators Madison Lucas and Harry Kolm of Modern Moxie.

The 20 tunes recorded for the double LP are winding shape-shifting entities, so it makes sense that the Plantes will restructure the songs yet again for True Optimist’s first official live show. In the lead-up to the gig, Evan bought a nylon string Spanish guitar and taught himself to play it.

Parlor Palms is a genre-shattering song cycle based on complex shape-shifting polyrhythms and left field vocal harmonies that seem to be extracted from the ether.

The album’s catchy tunes blend styles from bossa nova, mutant disco, soul jazz, sun-kissed tropicalia and breezy beachside pop. Such a concoction should startle like a flashing strobe light but, instead, the ambitious double LP caresses and cradles like a warmly proffered hand.

“The songs are … such a departure from anything else we’ve done before,” says Evan’s wife Susan Plante, who has collaborated with her husband on several previous projects including rock band Quad. “Everything feels so loose and organic.”

It’s the kind of iconoclastic music that could only be made by a true optimist.

Evan Plante invites his friends

Parts of Parlor Palms were inspired by a 2024 trip that Evan and Susan took to Portugal and Spain. There, Plante fell in love with the haunting songs of Portuguese-language street musicians. Plante’s Iberian holiday proved a touchstone for the new project, a follow-up to last year’s Mental Health.

“We stayed at the southern edge of Spain and I could see the shore of Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar,” Plante remembers.

Realizing that people had been migrating across the strait for thousands of years, Plante felt compelled to address human migration, particularly politicians’ cynical exploitation of a staple of human behavior since the dawn of time. Plante’s thoughts on immigration became the basis of the song “Nothing But a Slogan” on Parlor Palms.

In a broader sense, Plante’s experiences in Spain suggested the outline that Parlor Palms would take, as well as its title. In effect the new album became the story of Plante’s journey through the past year, from 2024 to 2025, from parlor to palms.

Disc one of the double LP is the parlor, Plante posits, a symbol of the constraints and stresses that America places on its residents and that Americans place on themselves.

“The first half of these songs … are sad, frustrated with capitalism [and] mad that people are demonizing immigrants,” Plante says, noting that many of us feel traumatized by events unfolding in our home country.

Disc two of the project comprises the palms, which represent escape and finding comfort, Plante explains.

“I can disappear and … exist in a kind of bliss for a moment,” Plante says. “It’s just me trying to go into a different mindset, a different state, and see what it makes me want to do.”

That bliss, in the metaphorical shade of the palms, can be a moment of comfort, Plante offers. Even his drumming is no longer the forward-leaning, full-tilt approach of jackhammer punk, but the laid-back swing of bossa nova and jazz. It’s designed to comfort the listener.

Back stateside, Plante continued to compose the songs that would become Parlor Palms, casting himself in the role of studio-based songwriter-musician. He also realized that, while making Mental Health alongside his wife went well enough, he missed the sense of camaraderie that collaborating with other musicians brought.

As the new LP took shape, he grew determined to bring in other artists to augment himself and Susan on the project.

“Every time someone came in to lay down some tracks and put their style and interpretation into [the album], it was like watching a song grow and change in the most organic and beautiful way,” Susan says.

“Making Parlor Palms, I decided to try to be a great songwriter,” Evan says, “I want to write vocals that are full of hooks, that do all the work.”

A song happens in the words, Plante maintains, and with today’s short attention spans a songwriter only has five seconds to grab and hold a listener.

When Susan approached Lisa Ortiz to collaborate on Parlor Palms, the singer-songwriter and founder of Latin synth-pop trio Bravo Pueblo readily agreed.

Ortiz’s warm lively vocals join the stream of voices that cascade through lead-off single “Make Money All Day.”
Madison Lucas, songwriter-guitarist-frontwoman for Queen City alt-rock powerhouse Modern Moxie, is also one of the coursing chorus of voices on the song, along with Susan Plante and her partner in indie-rock outfit Faye, songwriter-vocalist-bassist Sarah Blumenthal.

“Recording vocals for that song is one of my favorite memories,” Lucas says. “Watching Liza, Susan and Sarah execute their vocal magic live in [the] studio is something I’ll never forget … It was a femme-powered evening of my dreams.”

Thomas Berkeau (Quad) and Stephen Warwick (Ancient Cities) also contribute to the tune.

Read more: Stephen Warwick of Ancient Cities Releases First Solo Music in a Decade (2020)

The album’s second single, a snaking Latin jazz-inflected track titled “Nothing But a Slogan,” drops on July 23. It’s inspired by Plante’s epiphany at the Straits of Gibraltar that migration is humanity’s default setting throughout history.

“On the first day we came here, didn’t know my name/ When I stopped to ask directions, they sent me back the way I came … On the third day we came here, they were ready for a fight, so we stayed below the margins and we hid inside the night…”

Ortiz sings the lead vocal in a low register that is atypical for her. “That’s what I felt the song called for,” she says.

With Plante encouraging a wide latitude of input and improvisation from his collaborators, Ortiz decided to add layered harmonies to add dynamics to the hypnotic yet shape-shifting song.

On the clattering Carnival-in-Rio crawl “Be Something Real,” Parlor Palms’ third single that’s set to drop on Aug. 27, Ortiz’s Bravo Pueblo bandmate Lee Herrera plays guitar. Madison Lucas also returns on an instrument she’s not widely known for playing: the trumpet, which Lucas calls her “first musical love.” She also plays the instrument on Parlor Palms’ “I Got You.”)

“Evan encouraged me along the way,” Lucas notes. “I needed a little push and he was the kindest motivator.”

Plante plans to drop two more singles in the lead up to the Parlor Palms release. The French-disco-meets-Malian-desert-blues “Bonsoir Regret,” which features drummer-percussionist Davey Blackburn (Curiosidades de Bombrile), drops Sept. 23. The polyrhythmic, tropical, funk labyrinth “Tough Guy” drops with the rest of the album on Oct. 24.

“The way Evan’s brain mixes influences together is so fascinating, and the final album is a mesmerizing journey,” Lucas says. “It’s a true work of art that must be heard.”

Tunes to ease trauma

Plante adopted the name True Optimist to mark his return to writing and playing songs after several years away from music. Having spent his entire adult life touring and playing drums in punk bands, Plante was burnt out.

“I felt like I was going through the motions, so I tried to quit music,” he remembers. “I sold all my equipment and dedicated myself to working on my art and not making music anymore.”

Plante threw himself into Dockland Designs, a boutique print-and-design shop he founded with Susan to pay the bills while scratching his creative itch with art. Although Plante was no longer playing, he continued to listen to music. For two months, he devoted a full day of listening to music from one year only while he worked.

“I would put on music from 1961 all day … and never skip a song; then 1962 the next day,” Plante told Queen City Nerve in 2024. Moving chronologically through the years, he soon discovered his favorite time and place for music: Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas from 1980-83.

During that post-new wave and -disco era, sinewy Jamaican grooves and digital Fairlight synthesizers collided at the studio built by Island Records founder Chris Blackwell. The result came in the form of classic genre-fluid records by artists including Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Grace Jones and Lizzy Mercier Descloux that were experimental yet accessible and dance-oriented.

This eclectic lightning-in-a-bottle era would later inspire Plante’s approach to Parlor Palms. The palm tree design on his upcoming album is a conscious nod to Island Records’ 1980s logo.

In the meantime, after several years of denying himself the joy and challenge of making music, Plante realized that quitting music was making him miserable.

In 2024, he returned to music as True Optimist, recording at home with Susan to craft his debut solo album Mental Health. Plante describes the process as his attempt to reprogram how he approached music.

He embraced genres as disparate as pop and Latin jazz while eschewing the punk music he previously played. He started singing, something he had never done before, and altered how he played drums.

In hardcore punk, the drums lean into the beat and propel the music, Plante explains. For Mental Health, he leaned behind the beat like a jazz player, imparting the album’s compositions with a loose sense of swing. Plante also fell in love with the bass, teaching himself how to play the instrument.

“True Optimist as a project is .. me saying to myself, ‘You are not what you always have been, you can be more than that,’” Plante says.

Read more: Evan Plante Returns to Music as True Optimist (2024)

When Plante returned to making music, he made an effort not to fall directly back into the rinse-and-repeat cycle of recording, promoting and performing an album, deciding to simply record his music and let it fall where it would. He committed to never performing live in front of an audience again.

With Parlor Palms, however, he’s embraced the promotion process, taking new avenues that weren’t even available in his former music days. A Spotify playlist he’s created titled “True Optimist Presents: Parlor Palms Playlist” features True Optimist’s music as well as songs that inspired Parlor Palms.

In a coordinated promotional drop, the playlist will be heard all day at five Rhino Market locations, Divine Barrel Brewery and Triple C Brewing today to mark the release of “Make Money All Day.”

Plante also reversed his previous decision to not play his music live. He’s already tested some Parlor Palms songs before audiences at two under-the-radar gigs — a short solo set at Evening Muse’s Monday open mic in early June and a longer set accompanied by Davey Blackburn and saxophonist Brent Bagwell at Snug Harbor on June 11.

Bagwell, one half of experimental free-jazz duo Ghost Trees, plays on several Parlor Palms tracks as well.

At the Snug Harbor show, Plante told me immediately after his set that he had played solo gigs on acoustic guitar before and found the experience stressful. That night at the popular Plaza Midwood venue, however, was different, he noted. For a few minutes onstage playing tunes from Parlor Palms, Plante wasn’t anxious; he was completely in the moment.

What he felt was comfort, Plante says. Sharing that sense of well-being with his listeners is his primary goal with Parlor Palms.

“I’m trying to … create comfort in a world that’s increasingly uncomfortable,” Plante offers. “I’m trying to center myself … with these people, and center them with me, and have us all inhabit this moment. We don’t know what’s going to happen and we know that things are hard, but we can have comfort together just for a minute.”

Plante once decided to reprogram how he played and listened to music. Now with Parlor Palms, and input from some of Charlotte’s most creative musicians, he’s hoping to reprogram how we interact with an increasingly traumatic world.

Plante’s remarkable double LP is an accessible explosion of rhythm and invention — and it’s all in pursuit of forming a less stressful, more perfect world.