The Sharp Notes with Evan Toth

Evan Toth
  • 4.5 (8)
  • Music Interviews
  • Updated Weekly

The Sharp Notes is a conversation podcast exploring music, sound, and the craft behind the records we love. Host Evan Toth speaks with musicians, producers, and industry voices about the art of listening and the stories pressed into every groove.

  1. 2d ago

    Benny Sings on "22 Durnham Dew", Family, and the Beauty of Being “Boring”

    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 tension is at the heart of his latest album, 22 Durnham Dew. Written during a period of significant change in his life, the record follows a move away from central Amsterdam and toward a quieter, more domestic existence with his family. It’s an album about home, parenthood, transition, and the weird way that everyday life can seep its way into pop music. Our conversation travels back even further: to his parents’ record collection, his fascination with American pop culture, Sesame Street, Chet Baker, Judee Sill, Rupert Holmes, the Carpenters, and the enduring appeal of music that sounds light even when its emotional center is anything but. We also talk about vinyl, working alone versus collaborating, why his daughter helped rescue a song he wasn’t sure about, and why—after years of touring, producing, collaborating, and making records—Benny Sings may now be increasingly interested in something much less glamorous: routine, simplicity, and what he jokingly calls “ambitionless music.”

  2. Oct 14

    Eddie Brigati of The Rascals: Live at The Sharp Notes

    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, songwriting, recording, family, and a lifetime in music. What you’re about to hear is that conversation, recorded live in the shop. And if you enjoy this one, we’d love to have you join us in person sometime. We’ll be hosting more live interviews and events at The Sharp Notes, and there’s really nothing quite like hearing these conversations unfold in the room. So, with that, here’s my introduction from that evening—and my conversation with Eddie Brigati.

  3. Oct 7

    Peter M. Bernstein: Ghostbusters, Elmer Bernstein, and the Art of Film Music

    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 connection to that music. Peter M. Bernstein is a composer, orchestrator, arranger, and the son of legendary film composer, Elmer Bernstein. He worked alongside his father on the original Ghostbusters score and has built a substantial career of his own in film and television music. Today, he is also helping bring that score back to life for Ghostbusters in Concert, where the original film is performed with a live orchestra. We’re going to talk about Ghostbusters, of course, but also about composing, orchestration, musical inheritance, and what it means to revisit work you helped create more than four decades ago. Peter M. Bernstein, welcome to The Sharp Notes.

  4. Sep 4

    Tiny Vinyl, Big Idea: Neil Kohler and Jesse Mann on the 4-Inch Record

    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 already stretches from BTS and Olivia Rodrigo to Bob Marley, the Rolling Stones, and beyond. Founders Neil Kohler and Jesse Mann see Tiny Vinyl not as a replacement for the records we already love, but as another way into physical music, especially for listeners who may have grown up with streaming first and playing records second. And once you see one spinning on a turntable, it is difficult not to be a little charmed by the whole thing. So how did a record small enough to fit in a Funko Pop box become its own format, and where might it go from here? Welcome Neil Kohler and Jesse Mann to The Sharp Notes.

  5. Aug 20

    Henry Rollins on The Cramps, Gravest Gravy and Why Records Still Matter

    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.

    Henry Rollins on The Cramps, Gravest Gravy and Why Records Still Matter

  6. Jul 29

    Anthony Mason on Alchemy and the Art of the Interview

    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.

  7. Jul 15

    Soft Palms Interview: IN ECHO, Black Glitter Vinyl, and the DIY Music Business

    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.

  8. Jun 18

    Live and In the Sharp Notes Shop | Nabil Ayers: Sunshine, Sound, and the Stories We Inherit

    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.

    Live and In the Sharp Notes Shop | Nabil Ayers: Sunshine, Sound, and the Stories We Inherit
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About

The Sharp Notes is a conversation podcast exploring music, sound, and the craft behind the records we love. Host Evan Toth speaks with musicians, producers, and industry voices about the art of listening and the stories pressed into every groove.

Information

  • Creator
    Evan Toth
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    215
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The Sharp Notes with Evan Toth
  • Show Website
    The Sharp Notes with Evan Toth

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