Frank Zappa was one of the most interesting and idiosyncratic artists ever to achieve pop culture fame. Born on December 21, 1940 and passing away on December 4, 1993, he was an American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and bandleader and his work was characterized by nonconformity, free-form improvisation, sound experiments, musical virtuosity, and satire of American culture.

While many musicians just love Frank Zappa, many "regular people" just don’t get it. Some truly want to, but just don’t get it. It can be a bit hard when you have truly great albums like Hot Rats, then have some crazy song like “Why does it hurt when I pee” or “Hot Poop.” He’s also released so much music that it’s nearly impossible to find a great starting place, releasing 62 albums in his lifetime and 50 posthumous albums, making a total of 112 albums. That is a lot of music to sift through.

Fortunately for everyone out there, on today’s show we’ll be diving into Frank Zappa’s music as we discuss our Favorite Frank Zappa albums. Hopefully on today’s show we’ll demystify Frank Zappa for everyone and give you an excellent starting point for appreciating the amazing force that was and is Frank Zappa.

We also have an amazing guest to help us out on our Frank Zappa quest.

Joining us today is Aaron Levinson.

Aaron is a Grammy award-winning producer, musician, composer and record label owner who has produced and released 26 albums since starting his career with Inner City Records in 1981. He also has written extensively about music of the Americas and is an engineer, arranger and educator. Levinson is the owner of Range Recording Studios in Ardmore, Pennsylvania and served previously as president of Bell Tower Music. He was an adjunct faculty member at Temple University from 2010 to 2016 and from 2014 until 2019 he was an appointed master lecturer at The University Of The Arts. He is also a former governor of the Philadelphia chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.