The Sharp Notes with Evan Toth

Benny Sings has spent more than two decades refining one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary pop music. The Dutch singer, songwriter, and producer has a knack for creating songs that feel immediately familiar—warm keyboards, melodies in soft-focus, touches of soul, jazz, R&B, and 1970s singer-songwriter pop—while often hiding something far more complicated beneath the surface. That...

On this episode of The Sharp Notes, we’re doing something a little different. We recently welcomed Eddie Brigati of the Rascals to The Sharp Notes at Garden State Plaza in Paramus, New Jersey for a live conversation in front of an audience of about 50 people. It was a wonderful night—part interview, part celebration, and a chance to hear some remarkable stories about New Jersey, the Rascals, songw...

There are certain film scores that become so closely associated with the movies they accompany that it’s hard to imagine one without the other. Elmer Bernstein’s music for Ghostbusters is one of those scores: playful, eerie, sophisticated, and somehow able to take the supernatural seriously without ever forgetting that the film is a comedy. My guest on this episode has a particularly unique connec...

Record collectors have never exactly demanded convenience. We like shelves, sleeves, turntables, careful handling, and we have the occasional mild panic over a fingerprint. So perhaps Tiny Vinyl makes perfect sense. At just four inches across, these playable records shrink the familiar vinyl experience into something portable, collectible, and undeniably fun and maybe even adorable. The catalog al...

There are records that disappear because nobody wanted them, and then there are records that somehow manage to wait nearly 50 years for the right moment to arrive. Gravest Gravy belongs firmly in the second category. In October of 1977, the Cramps entered Ardent Studios in Memphis with Alex Chilton and recorded a body of material that would help define the earliest version of the band. Some of tho...

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...

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, a...

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...

Rhino Records began the way so many great record stories begin: with a little bit of money, a lot of taste, and a store full of people who believe that - above it all - it’s the music that matters. In this episode we speak with Richard Foos, co-founder of Rhino Records, about the independent shop that became one of the most important reissue labels in music history. Before Rhino was a catalog powe...

Arturo Sandoval has lived several musical lives: Cuban-born trumpet virtuoso, Afro-Cuban jazz pioneer, Dizzy Gillespie protégé, composer, bandleader, and one of the most decorated musicians of his generation. He is a multiple Grammy winner, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, and a Kennedy Center Honoree. And still, after all of that, he remain...

Today, we return to one of the most discussed albums in pop history: The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Nearly 60 years after Brian Wilson assembled its world of harmonies, longing, bass lines, sound effects, and impossible emotional detail, Interscope-Capitol’s Definitive Sound Series is preparing a new mono One Step edition sourced from analog tapes connected to the revered 1972 Brother/Reprise pressin...

What does it mean for a musician to be free? Not free as a slogan, or a genre label, but truly free: free to search, free to return, free to follow a sound across a lifetime. Alan Braufman has been asking that question, in one form or another, for decades. Born in Brooklyn in 1951, Braufman became part of the New York free music community in the 1970s, connected to the downtown loft jazz scene, wh...

Jarrod Lawson returns at an interesting moment in his career. With Just Let It , his third studio album, he’s not simply refining the sound that first brought him attention, he’s reshaping it. Long associated with a polished blend of soul, jazz, and R&B, Lawson leans into something more expansive here, pulling in hip-hop textures, contemporary production, and a wide circle of collaborators. Th...

Mikaela Davis makes music that feels grounded, but never predictable. She has built a singular voice around the harp, and she uses it as a real expressive force, not as an ornament. On her new album Graceland Way , that voice carries the listener into a world shaped by atmosphere, instinct, and reflection. Made with close collaborators Dan Horne and John Lee Shannon in a hillside home studio in Lo...

There’s a version of Spin Magazine that most people remember. The 1990s disruptor. Irreverent, artist-driven, willing to challenge the norms of mainstream music coverage while helping define the alternative music conversation in real time. For me, it was essential reading. At a moment when many magazines felt increasingly commercial, Spin made space for something weirder, without losing its grip o...

There’s a version of Frank Hannon most listeners think they know. As co-founder and lead guitarist of Tesla , his playing helped define a more grounded, blues-informed alternative to the excess of late ’80s hard rock. Melody over flash. Feel over spectacle. But my entry point wasn’t the studio records. It was Five Man Acoustical Jam . I wore that CD out as a kid. It reshaped what a rock band could...

Welcome to The Sharp Notes Podcast . I’m Evan Toth, and this episode was recorded live in front of an audience at The Sharp Notes record store inside the Garden State Plaza in Paramus, New Jersey . My guest is author, journalist, and vinyl-world lifer Larry Jaffee , a guy whose career has basically been one long field recording of the music business, from punk chaos to pressing plant logistics. La...

We welcome back a familiar and always thoughtful voice in music criticism and biography, Jude Warne . With the recent paperback release of her acclaimed authorized biography America: The Band , and the arrival of her deep-dive study Lowdown: The Music of Boz Scaggs , Jude joins us at a moment when her work continues to expand its reach and sharpen its focus. We have spoken together a few times now...

This episode is a little different, because what you’re about to hear was recorded live, in front of an audience, right here inside The Sharp Notes record store at the Garden State Plaza in Paramus, New Jersey. You might catch the room in it: few laughs, knowing nods, and shoppers walking past our front window.  My guest is author and music journalist Alan Light . Over the years he’s written as a...

This episode’s guest is one of those rare studio minds who makes the control room feel less like a workplace and more like a laboratory with excellent taste. Sylvia Massy is a producer, mixer, and engineer whose credits stretch from punk grit to arena-scale rock and beyond. Her name is often spoken as she produced Tool’s Undertow , but her story doesn’t start with platinum plaques. It starts in th...

Some conversations begin with music. This one begins with language. A little French. A little English. When this interview takes place, it's a late night in Brussels, where the streets are quiet, the restaurants are closing down, and Lucien Fraipont (fray-pon), who records and performs under the names Robbing Millions and DUID , is generous enough to stay awake a bit longer and talk about his...

There are musicians who treat tradition like a museum, and then there are musicians who treat it like a passport. Stéphane Wrembel belongs firmly in the second category. You may know his work from the soundtracks to Midnight in Paris or Vicky Cristina Barcelona , those melodies that drift in from another time but somehow land right in your lap. His newest release, Django New Orleans II: Hors-Série...

Independence in music is usually described as freedom. In practice, it is a long sequence of decisions that can’t be outsourced. Writing the songs. Recording the tracks. Producing the record. Paying for the mistakes. Owning that outcome. That path has shaped Tamar Berk’ s career from the start. Working largely outside the industry’s infrastructure, she has built a body of work defined by personal...

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...

It’s a remarkable moment to be a record collector. Music lovers have never had more ways to hear their favorite albums in whatever format feels right: hi-res files, streaming on the move, the whole buffet. And yet, there’s a meaningful difference between a solid pressing and a pressing built to be the definitive document of an album. Audiophile labels have chased that ideal for decades: each worki...