Pink Sofa Hour Showcases Denver’s Music Scene With Interview Series

Last December, Pedro Urbina created the YouTube channel/interview program Pink Sofa Hour to showcase various Colorado musicians, but he first fell in love with local music as a college radio DJ in his hometown of Miami.

“I had an hour for several years that was specifically an interview show for local musicians,” he recalls. “I got to know a lot of the scene in Miami through that particular project, and I found it to be really fulfilling. That’s probably where a lot of this passion for the local music scene came from.”

Urbina, who was born in Venezuela, moved to Boulder four years ago to pursue a career in the tech industry, but found himself missing music. “I fell out of the music scene for a while,” he admits, “and about two or three years ago, I started back up.”

He had already been ruminating on how to break into Boulder’s music scene when he took a job at Sanitas Brewing Company. “I met some people there, in particular this guy named Jake, who was trying to start a project called Thunderboogie, and I joined up with that,” Urbina says. “I recognized that software wasn’t really where I belonged, even though I was good at it. I realized that I could be doing the thing that I did way back in college with interviewing people – having a platform to provide for people who are doing the work in terms of music. Because doing musical work is very taxing generally and creatively; to take on the promotional work on top of that is even more difficult.”

He resurrected his college radio show in the form of Pink Sofa Hour, which launched him back into the world of local music. And now Urbina is gearing up to host Pink Sofa Hour’s first concert, appropriately titled Pinko de Mayo, on Friday, May 5, at The End Lafayette, adjacent to Dog House Music Studios, where he practices with Thunderboogie.

Urbina’s goal with Pink Sofa Hour was not just to uplift local musicians, but also to address the fragmentation of the post-pandemic music scene. “This is a service that I feel is necessary to glue together the pillars of the musical community, which are the audiences, artists and venues. I want to continue to establish goodwill between different isolated cliques that exist in the musical realm, because there’s a lot, and COVID broke things up even more,” he explains.

Nearly six months after its creation, the channel is now home to a mix of previous Saturday streams, “Secret Transmissions” (livestreamed performances announced the day of), performance clips and, of course, the interview segments (which are usually pulled from the livestreams). “Since I do have a background in radio, my natural inclination is to make everything live,” Urbina notes. “It has a certain genuine notion to it. When people know they don’t have a second chance at something, they will try harder.”

While every artist’s appearance on Pink Sofa Hour includes a brief performance, the bulk of the show is dedicated to revealing the people behind the music. “It’s not just the music that these artists are putting out. They are also people, and they have personalities. You could listen to someone’s music and be like, ‘That’s pretty cool,’ but having them talk about who they are, where they come from and what it is that they’re doing provides a contextualization that makes things a little bit more interesting,” Urbina says.

The range of guests on Pink Sofa Hour is a testament to Urbina’s eclectic music taste. “I have a very broad taste in music,” he says. “I played classical guitar in college; I also was a DJ in college and everything in between.” Pink Sofa Hour has hosted singer-songwriters, indie-pop artists, folk singers, rock bands, bluegrass musicians and more, including its first hip-hop artist, Alex Blocker, in March.

“Hip-hop was kind of weird for me to break into, just because a lot of the shows that I went to were very indie-rock, shoegaze, punk-rock stuff,” says Urbina, who hopes that Pink Sofa Hour will keep bringing in other genres.

The one uniting factor is that all of the artists are based in Colorado: “Fostering the local music scene is the mission. It’s a lot of Denver, a little Boulder – and a lot of really cool Fort Collins artists will be coming on in the summer,” he says. “When I started this, I was mostly reaching out to people that I knew, and to adjacent bands that they would recommend to me, so it was a very tight-knit circle at first. It’s started to expand quite a bit.”

In fact, his network of musicians has expanded so much that in March, Urbina added a second show to the channel, Purple Underground, which caters specifically to electronic artists and DJs. “The intention with Pink Sofa Hour is to have everything except electronic artists, because they run their sets in a very particular way, with either looping or mixing. I thought it would be fun to have two sides of it, and the DJ thing is something that wouldn’t fit as naturally into the format of Pink Sofa Hour,” Urbina explains.

Deejaying, he adds, is “not really a side hustle, because in my mind they’re equivalent. A lot of DJs are also musicians, and a lot of musicians are also DJs.”

Purple Underground is also a live show, but currently with less of an interview structure and more of a party atmosphere, though that may change. “Purple Underground intends to be a more relaxed format, where people can come hang out, listen to people mixing and have a nice little dance party,” Urbina explains. “The intention is for us to branch out a little bit into recorded formats for Purple Underground. We are recording interviews, editing them and boiling them down into ten-minute segments. The idea is that I do also want to showcase these artists from their perspectives.”

The shared goal of Purple Underground and Pink Sofa Hour is to foster a more supportive and expansive local music culture here in Colorado. “I think there’s an onus on the creative community to support other artists. In order to create a good scene, people have to come together, whether or not there is a layman’s audience of people who are not necessarily musicians or artists,” says Urbina. “It’s clear when I go to a place like Fort Collins, for example. Fort Collins has a really cool music scene that is particularly supportive of very small shows and very small venues. Lots of people come out who are clearly not just showing up because it’s a cool bar, but because they heard about the artist and want to see them perform. They want to know who is in their community so that they can support them further, and that’s a vibe that I think is missing sometimes from the Boulder and Denver communities.”

According to Urbina, the unique beauty of local musicians is that they live, work and play in the community – just like their audiences. “If you’re out at a show, and you’re listening to a band that probably got paid $100 to play, it is a very different experience than going to a show that you paid $100 to attend. You can go talk to them after; they’re probably going to be hanging out in the crowd listening to the next band. They’re not crazy rock stars, and they deserve to hear from you directly,” he urges. “That is a really rare opportunity, and it means a lot more to these people, who are probably going to wake up tomorrow and go to their regular job.”

And that’s the opportunity found at Pinko de Mayo, which will see performances from Blankslate, Cellar Smellar and Little Trips, all of whom have appeared on Pink Sofa Hour. Proceeds from the $10 ticket sales will go toward Denver music education and concert nonprofit Swallow Hill Music.

“It’s a roundup of bands that fit a similar genre of indie rock, post-punk, psych rock – that sort of vibe. We’re stoked to be doing this, because it’s our first foray into ‘Hey, we’re not just a YouTube channel!’ And it is the first one, not the last one,” Urbina says. “We’re trying to actually support the local community more than just putting them on an interview show.”

Pinko de Mayo: A Pink Sofa Hour Production, 7 p.m. Friday, May 5, at The End Lafayette, 525 Courtney Way, Lafayette. Tickets are $10.