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.