The Sharp Notes with Evan Toth

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 those recordings became the group’s first Vengeance Records singles and later appeared on Gravest Hits. Others remained unheard. Lux Interior and Poison Ivy returned to the tapes in 1989, mixed material for a proposed album called Gravest Gravy, chose artwork, and then, for reasons that seem to have disappeared into history, the record was shelved. Now, in 2026, that record is finally coming out. Helping bring it across the finish line are none other than Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye, working together as RAM Prod. on behalf of The Cramps Inc., which has revived Vengeance Records and begun digging into the band’s archive. Rollins and MacKaye went through the surviving quarter-inch tapes, compared multiple mixes, worked with engineers at Inner Ear Studios and Infrasonic Sound, and helped shape the material into the record that Lux and Ivy had once envisioned. For Rollins, there is also a much more personal thread running through all of this. He and MacKaye first saw the Cramps together in Washington, D.C. in 1979. Nearly half a century later, they are helping ensure that another piece of the band’s history finds its way into the hands of listeners. So this conversation is about Gravest Gravy, but it is also about something larger: what it means to preserve music without embalming it, what survives when analog tape is properly cared for, what gets lost when music becomes just another file on a screen, and why records, record stores, labels, liner notes and all of the strange little clues surrounding recorded music still matter. Henry Rollins has spent most of his life listening closely, collecting obsessively, tracing music backward and forward through history, and thinking seriously about the physical culture that surrounds it. That makes Gravest Gravy a very good place to begin a listeners journey into The Cramps’ history and into the musical lineage that preceded it.

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 especially meaningful in the world of music. His conversations with artists like Bruce Springsteen, Aretha Franklin, Dolly Parton, Paul Simon and so many others have never felt like celebrity check-ins. They come across as attempts to understand something a little deeper. That same spirit is at the center of his new series, Alchemy with Anthony Mason , a long-form interview program filmed in his New York living room. The fact that we find ourselves in Mason’s apartment is meaningful. This is not a desk, not a studio, not the usual promotional network machine. It is a room built for deeper conversation. It’s an opportunity for an artist to think out loud and maybe find some unexpected answers. The real subject of Alchemy isn’t fame; it’s transformation: how artists keep working when the world has already decided what they are supposed to represent. In this conversation, I wanted to talk with Anthony Mason not only about the people he has interviewed, but about the act of interviewing itself. How do you create trust? How do you move past the polished answer? How do you ask a question that gives someone room to discover what they really think? From one interviewer to another, this was a treasured chance to speak with someone who has practiced the craft at the highest level and who still seems deeply curious about the magic that can happen when two people sit down and really listen to one another.

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, analog-warm, dream-pop-adjacent transmission from the last five years of overload: media panic, emotional burnout, fractured relationships, and that low, constant hum of modern fight-or-flight living. The band has described this new sound as “low-key punk,” which feels about right — not punk as posture, but punk as pressure, restraint, abrasion, and some refusal. But Soft Palms are also doing something else with this moment. Alongside the album, Kugel and Montoya have written How To Be Self-Reliant In The Music Business , a plainspoken guide - a book - drawn from more than two decades of writing, recording, touring, booking, producing, organizing, and figuring out how to keep going when the music industry keeps asking artists to do more with less. And for physical media folks, IN ECHO is arriving in a fittingly tactile edition: black glitter vinyl with a band-exclusive Gold Rainbow foil jacket, a hand-screened and autographed insert, a 3-inch glitter sticker, and a 2-inch rainbow glimmer button — those versions are limited to just 75 copies worldwide. So today’s conversation is about IN ECHO , but it is also about the ecosystem that made it possible: independence, royalties, community, burnout, discipline, survival, and the stubborn belief that artists can still build something meaningful on their own terms.

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, Big Thief, The Breeders, TV on the Radio, FKA twigs, and many others. Before that, he co-founded Sonic Boom Records store in Seattle, helping build the kind of independent record store culture that places like The Sharp Notes still believe in: human discovery, conversation, curation, and the strange magic of finding something you did not know you needed. He is also the author of My Life in the Sunshine , a memoir that explores his life as the son of legendary musician Roy Ayers, not through a conventional father-son relationship, but through absence, imagination, inheritance, and the complicated ways music can connect us to people we may not really know. His writing has appeared in The New York Times , The Guardian , Rolling Stone , and GQ , and his podcast Identified continues that search into family, identity, and the stories we build around where we come from. So tonight’s conversation is not only about records, labels, or the music business. It is about the lives behind the music, the communities that keep it moving, and the questions that follow us when sound becomes memory. Please join me in welcoming Nabil Ayers to The Sharp Notes.

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 powerhouse, it was a record store built on humor, deep knowledge, and the stubborn belief that great records should not disappear because the industry had moved on to the next thing. This is also a conversation between two record store owners from different eras. Foos opened Rhino in the 1970s, when independent shops were everywhere and the major labels were letting huge pieces of musical history fall out of print. I’m building The Sharp Notes now, in a very different world, where vinyl has returned, physical media has become meaningful again, and curation may matter more than ever. So what has changed forever? The prices, the technology, the business model, and the way people discover music. What has stayed the same? The need for taste, the value of a good recommendation, the thrill of putting the right record in someone’s hands, and the belief that a record store can still be more than a place to buy things. It can be a classroom, a clubhouse, and sometimes, if the timing is right, the beginning of lifelong love of music.

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 remains a restless student of sound. His new album, Sangú , is his 49th, a number that happens to match the year of his birth, 1949. It began during the pandemic with hundreds of iPhone recordings: fragments, grooves, chord changes, and ideas captured at home. His son Arturo “Tury” Sandoval III and his daughter-in-law and manager Melody Lisman helped shape those sketches into one of the most personal records of his career. Even the title came by accident. You’ll soon find out how a slip of language became a statement of purpose. The album is rooted in Afro-Cuban rhythm, but it is not nostalgic. It is Sandoval still moving forward, still practicing every day, still chasing freedom through discipline. In our conversation, he talks about forbidden jazz in Cuba, the Voice of America on the radio, Dizzy, Clint Eastwood, vinyl, yes even Rachmaninoff. This is a conversation about Sangú , but also about never stopping the creative process. About carrying Cuba inside you. About finding freedom in music, and then earning that freedom again every day. At 77, Arturo Sandoval does not sound like an artist looking back. He sounds like one who is still beginning.

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 pressing. For collectors and audiophile listeners, that pressing has long held a special place because of its clarity, balance, and unusually vivid presentation of the album’s dense production. My guest is reissue producer Tom “Grover” Biery, who helped trace, verify, and bring these tapes back into the conversation with the help of Chris Bellman and the archive teams. We talk about why this source matters, what “three-dimensional mono” means, how a single-channel recording can still feel layered and spacious, and why the 1972 pressing may reveal something important about how Pet Sounds came to be understood after its original 1966 release. We also get into the practical side of making a record like this: tape boxes, archive clues, test pressings, quality control at RTI, the cost of producing a limited One Step edition, and the challenge of honoring a masterpiece without flattening it into mythology. Here is my conversation with Tom “Grover” Biery on Pet Sounds, the 1972 Brother/Reprise source, and the continuing search for the clearest way to hear one of Brian Wilson’s greatest achievements.

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, where music was not only performed, but lived. In 1975, he released Valley of Search , a debut whose title seemed to name something larger than a record: the artist as seeker, moving toward a sound, a feeling, a kind of musical truth. Now, with Anthem for Peace , Braufman returns with a new studio album produced by his nephew Nabil Ayers and recorded in a single day with Patricia Brennan, Chad Taylor, and Luke Stewart. The music is direct but open, melodic but untamed, rooted in free jazz while still reaching for song, spirit, and forward motion. His work has often been called optimistic free jazz, and maybe that phrase gets close to the center of it. Freedom can be beautiful, but it is not always easy. Searching can last a lifetime. So today, we ask Alan Braufman what he has been searching for, what he has found, and whether Anthem for Peace brings him closer to the freedom his music has been reaching toward all along.

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. The result is a record that resists easy categorization, less concerned with genre than with feel, instinct, and forward motion. There’s also a personal dimension running underneath the music. Now based in Nashville, and navigating life as a new father while maintaining an international touring schedule, Lawson is working through questions of balance, identity, and creative evolution in real time. That push and pull shows up in the music, but so does a sense of release. The album’s title is not accidental. It reflects a shift toward trusting the process, letting songs reveal themselves rather than forcing them into place, and allowing a broader set of influence - from ’90s R&B to classic soul - to coexist without overthinking it. What makes this conversation compelling is that Lawson is not looking backward, even as he carries those traditions with him. He’s building something that feels lived-in but not nostalgic, technical but not clinical. This is an artist who understands the lineage, but is more interested in what happens when you loosen your grip and let the music take you where it wants to go.

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 Los Angeles County, the record holds a strong sense of place. But Graceland Way is after more than mood alone. These songs move through heartbreak, longing, beauty, uncertainty, and the uneasy balance between light and shadow. There is warmth in the music, but also tension, and that tension gives the record much of its power. The album features a number of special guests, though its real center remains Davis herself and the emotional language she builds through the harp, the songs, and the world that surrounds them. What makes this record compelling is not only its sound, but the larger set of questions inside it: how environment shapes creation, how collaboration changes a song, how memory and myth blur together, and how music can alter the way we feel and see. Today, we’re talking with Mikaela Davis about Graceland Way , about songwriting, duality, and creative partnership, and about making a record that feels both intimate and transportive.

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 on the broader culture. But that version doesn’t quite explain what Spin is now. Under CEO Jimmy Hutcheson, the brand has been rebuilt with a dual mandate. Honor the legacy, but don’t get trapped in it. That means a quarterly print magazine that leans into curation and permanence, alongside a daily digital operation pushing out a steady stream of coverage. It also means thinking beyond publishing: record labels, film and TV partnerships, live events, even a foothold in music tech. What does editorial authority look like in an era where artists can bypass media entirely, where algorithms shape discovery? Jimmy Hutcheson joins me to talk about rebuilding Spin , the value of holding some paper in your hand, reaching a new generation without losing the old one, and the ways in which a legacy music publication fits in a landscape that barely resembles the one it came from.

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 sound like. I never owned it on vinyl, but always have my eyes peeled for a copy. That tension, between structure and looseness, runs through Hannon’s career. Alongside the arena legacy is a deeper Bay Area lineage. Improvisation, atmosphere, and the influence of players like Dickey Betts. It comes into focus on his new album, Reflections , and especially on “San Francisco,” an open-ended, first-take piece that leans into that psychedelic tradition, visually and musically, tracing back to the Summer of Love. So what happens when a player known for precision follows instinct instead? Frank Hannon joins me to talk about that side of his work, the road to Reflections, and of course, Tesla.

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. Larry wrote Record Store Day: The Most Improbable Comeback of the 21st Century , the inside story of how a scrappy idea turned into the biggest annual holiday on the record collector calendar, and why independent shops went from “endangered species” to cultural town squares again. But Larry’s not just chronicling the vinyl revival. He’s trying to rewire it. This interview was recorded just days before he moved to Iceland to co-found Thermal Beets Records , a geothermal-powered pressing plant concept aiming at making plant-based records from sugar beets instead of traditional PVC. So yes, we go from limited edition RSD lore to the question lurking behind every new release: what does it cost, environmentally, and otherwise, to keep this format alive and thriving?

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, but the road never seems to double back. Each visit opens a new corridor into the music. She also happens to be the author of one of the most perceptive pieces written about my own record , The Show . Warne has built a reputation for listening carefully and writing even closer, tracing the emotional and sonic contours of artists with the kind of patience that modern music coverage rarely affords. Whether she is unpacking the layered harmonies of America or the cool, shifting grooves of Boz Scaggs, her work reminds us that great music writing is not just about facts and timelines. It is about translating sound into story and helping us hear familiar records with fresh ears. This conversation was recorded live in front of an audience at The Sharp Notes record store in the Garden State Plaza in Paramus, New Jersey. As you will hear, when thoughtful music writing meets a room full of serious listeners, the result is exactly what you hope for: curiosity, discovery, and a few moments that might send you back to your turntable.

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 rock critic for Rolling Stone , served as editor-in-chief at Vibe and Spin and he’s a regular contributor to The New York Times . He’s also the author of books that take pop culture seriously without draining it of feeling, including The Holy or the Broken , his deep dive into the long, strange ascent of Leonard Cohen's, “Hallelujah.” His newest book is Don’t Stop : a kaleidoscopic look at Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours . The tome is not just the well-worn legend of who was breaking up with whom, but how that record became a kind of emotional public square, the way it keeps pulling in young listeners nearly fifty years later, and why it still shows up everywhere, from TV and comedy sketches to the streaming era and TikTok. Alan’s reporting brings in artists and fans across generations, asking a simple question that turns out to be hard to answer: what is it about Rumours that refuses let go? In this conversation, we dig into the album’s mythology, its musical intelligence, and its afterlife. So, here's our live chat. Maybe - next time - you'll join us.

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 the mid-’80s trenches, making compilations, working with punk bands, engineering metal records, and learning the kind of hard-won lessons you only get when the tape is rolling and the stakes are real. From there, she becomes a crucial behind-the-boards force in Los Angeles, intersects with the Sound City recording studio mythology, and winds up in the orbit of Rick Rubin’s American Recordings era, touching projects that helped define what “big” sounded like in the ’90s. But the reason I wanted Sylvia on the show isn’t just the résumé. It’s the method . Sylvia is obsessed, in the best way, with recording technology and the physical stuff of sound. Consoles, mics, outboard gear, oddball techniques, and the kind of creative decisions that make an outsider sit up and pay attention. Her approach is curious, practical, fearless, and frequently hilarious. We also talk about Studio Confidential , a new live, in-person onstage conversation series launching in New York City. It’s designed to pull back the curtain on legendary sessions and the people who actually built those records from the inside out. The official residency runs February 3 through March 1, 2026 at NYC’s Sheen Center for Thought & Culture , with multiple shows each week. If Studio Confidential is about pulling back the curtain, Sylvia’s the person you want holding the flashlight.

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 multifaced career in music. What follows is less an interview and more a map of how a musician becomes himself. How jazz training folds into electronic textures. How a teenage obsession with Nirvana morphs into a lifelong interest in improvisation. And how a home studio project grows into something restless and alive. Here, alter egos are less about costume changes and more about giving different parts of the same creative mind room to breathe. We talk about playing alone onstage with samplers and pedals, the strange discipline of improvising inside machines, the Brussels underground, working with Mark Hollander on Aksak Maboul records, and the beautiful problem of wanting to do everything at once: produce, perform, collaborate, wander. If you care about how music evolves, how scenes survive, and how curiosity keeps artists young, this conversation is for you.

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 , leans into that same sensation. It’s a record that threads Django Reinhardt’s Jazz Manouche through the brass-soaked spirit of New Orleans, recorded with a nine-piece ensemble of some of New York’s most serious improvisers, and shaped by Wrembel’s own restless sense of exploration. The album moves easily from classic repertoire to new original compositions, and along the way, Wrembel steps into new territory by singing for the first time on record, offering up two Serge Gainsbourg songs with a shared Parisian accent and an almost disarming sense of vulnerability. “Hors-Série” means special edition, but this feels more like a field journal. It captures an artist testing new ground without abandoning the old maps. Today we talk with Stéphane about that journey, about what happens when Django meets New Orleans, about why Gainsbourg mattered enough to get him to finally step to the microphone, and about treating music not as something fixed and finished, but as something alive, breathing, and in motion.

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 control, emotional directness, and the pressure of doing it all yourself. Her new album ocd was released in late 2025 and it moves through looping thoughts, emotional unraveling, and the patterns that repeat whether we want them to or not. Fuzzed guitars, reverb-heavy textures, and melodies stay close; it is a record about the mind when it refuses to let go. Raised on classical piano and early Disney soundtracks, later influenced by the Beatles, David Bowie, Liz Phair, and Elliott Smith, Tamar developed an instinct for melody and emotional clarity that has carried her through years of work in the Chicago, Portland, and San Diego scenes. Her previous releases include The Restless Dreams of Youth , Start at the End , Tiny Injuries , and Good Times for a Change . Along the way, her music has been recognized by KCRW, Fader, Creem, and Shindig, with multiple nominations from the San Diego Music Awards, while she has continued to write, record, and produce her work on her own terms. What follows is a conversation about the lived reality of that independence. The creative control, the isolation if you will and maybe even a little bit of the financial strain. But, also the satisfaction of hearing something finished and knowing exactly how it got there. ocd is the current chapter in Tamar’s story.

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.