The Sharp Notes with Evan Toth

✓

Claim

Drew Ryder Smith has been around music for a long time, even if you’re only hearing his name now. He grew up between Middle Tennessee and Muscle Shoals, got into radio while he was still a kid, worked for Sam Phillips, became a professional songwriter in Nashville, and eventually had one of his son…

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 197…

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…

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…

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 experi…

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…

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 peo…

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 t…

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 indepe…