Eternity’s Children Reconsidered: Steve Stanley on High Moon Records and the Art of the Reissue
Description
For nearly three decades, Steve Stanley has been one of the quiet architects behind how we remember mid-century American pop. His work as a reissue producer and archivist has revived artists who slipped through the cracks of the industry machine, restoring not only their music but the cultural scaffolding around it. From Del-Fi to Rev-Ola to his own Now Sounds imprint, Stanley has built a body of work that treats forgotten pop not as nostalgia but as evidence: proof that the margins of the 1960s were sometimes more interesting than its center.
What distinguishes Stanley isn’t just the scholarship. It's intuition. He has an ear for artists who nearly made it, who should have made it, who made something exquisite - but briefly - and he approaches their histories with a precision that resists mythmaking even as it acknowledges the romance of lost possibilities. His design work reinforces that impulse. The packaging, sequencing, and annotation in his projects aren’t ornamental; they’re part of the narrative engine, a way of giving listeners the context they never got the first time around.
With the new vinyl reissue of Eternity’s Children on High Moon Records, Stanley returns to one of the great unsolved stories of sunshine pop. These albums have lived half their lives in rumor and scarcity, admired by collectors but underexamined by the larger world. Stanley’s work on this project gives the band’s complicated and fascinating legacy its first real chance to be understood on its own terms. Our conversation begins there, in the space between what history remembers and what it forgot to write down.
United States
