Sticky Jazz

If I asked most people “Have you ever heard of The Rosenbergs?” the honest answer would be a blank stare and a polite “Uh… no.” That’s not an insult. That’s the whole damn point.

David Fagin, the band’s lead singer, just published *Confessions of a Musical Masochist*, and it is the perfect autopsy of a career that came this close a hundred times and still somehow never quite made the leap. Near-hits. Spectacular near-misses. The kind of stories that make you laugh until you wince.

I actually knew these guys. Heard them. Met them. Crossed paths enough times that reading the teaser felt like someone had stolen pages out of my own notebook. Opening for Duran Duran one minute, playing in a Duran Duran tribute band at a Duran Duran after-party the next. Sitting in Howard Stern’s green room for two hours while Gene Simmons just… sat there, until somebody finally decided that maybe that was a problem. Driving Echo & the Bunnymen around (something Fagin and I both did, in different parts of the same tour). The almosts pile up until they become the story itself.

Fagin doesn’t sugarcoat it. This is a cautionary tale dressed up as comedy. The music business will chew you up, spit you out, and then ask if you’d like to open for the tribute band version of yourself. I’ve heard the same warning from people inside U2’s orbit. Hell, I’ve given the warning myself. And still none of us stay away.

Talent, it turns out, is not the secret. If it were, half the bands you’ve never heard of would be headlining stadiums and half the ones you have heard of would be working day jobs. Whatever the actual secret is, Fagin doesn’t claim to have found it. He just shows you, in brutal, funny detail, how many different ways there are to miss it.

*Confessions of a Musical Masochist* is required reading for anyone who still thinks the music industry is a meritocracy. It’s also weirdly respectful of the people who keep throwing themselves at that wall anyway. Because some of us just can’t help it.

Even when we know better.

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This program may contain copyrighted material which has not always been authorized by the copyright owners. We use this material of the artists we feature for interviews. This is done to promote these artists, and thus we believe that this constitutes "Fair Use" of copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US copyright Law. There is NO copyright infringement intended.

Alright, listen up.

Ana Sky was minding her own business in a biology lab — California girl with a little Deutschland in the blood — when somebody played a tape of her singing. She didn’t even know the damn thing had been recorded. Twenty-four hours later she’s standing in a real studio, microphones hot, career officially off the rails in the best possible way.

Her new EP *Prologue* is the proof. It’s got that deep, lived-in storytelling, the kind of lyrics that stick under your skin. We talked about the dark places she had to walk through to write this stuff, the kind of personal hell that either breaks you or turns into songs worth hearing. We talked books — *Alice in Wonderland*, *Dune* — and the fact that she’s a genuine Lou Reed / Velvet Underground devotee. And yes, we got into the classic car she got to light on fire for a video, because of course she did.

This is the interview. Hit play.

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Jonny Couch spent most of his career behind the kit, keeping time for other people’s songs. Then he decided the view from the back was no longer enough. He reinvented himself, stepped to the front, and started singing his own material with the kind of restless energy that only comes from someone who’s waited long enough.

The sound he landed on is pure sugar-rush 1980s: new wave snap meeting big, grinning rock hooks — Cheap Trick’s swagger tangled up with The Cars’ cool precision. It’s the kind of music that still feels like Friday night even when the calendar says otherwise.

He’s already shared stages with Josie Cotton and The Plimsouls. He came within a breath of opening for Modern English, which would have given him the full *Valley Girl* soundtrack trifecta. Instead he kept writing, kept playing, and kept showing up.

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We talked songwriting, the long road from drummer to frontman, the records that shaped him, and the particular madness of hovering over ticket prices at the last possible minute for a band still trying to hold onto world-class status. Through it all runs the new album, *Where The Sidewalk Ends*. One full listen is enough to wake up the part of you that still remembers when this stuff felt urgent, fun, and a little bit dangerous.

Jonny Couch isn’t chasing the past. He’s dragging the best of it into the present and making it sing.

This program may contain copyrighted material which has not always been authorized by the copyright owners. We use this material of the artists we feature for interviews. This is done to promote these artists, and thus we believe that this constitutes "Fair Use" of copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US copyright Law. There is NO copyright infringement intended.

James Bradley — just call him JBJ if you know what’s good for you — is one of those drummers who seems to have been born with sticks already in his hands and a grin that says the beat never stops. Before he even escaped high school he was already locked in with Chuck Mangione. From there it was a glorious, sweaty sprint through the Los Angeles punk-funk trenches with Mary’s Danish, The Beastie Boys and a thousand other projects that most mortals would kill to have on their résumé. The catalog is endless. Friends, sessions, side hustles, full-blown records — if it needed a pulse, chances are JBJ gave it one.

These days you’ll find him living in Stockholm, Sweden, still deep in the music and, for pure kicks, belting it out with a local blues band. The man cannot quit the circus. He even scored a cameo in the holy grail of cool, *Cool Hand Luke*. No job too big, no stage too small, no groove left un-stomped. JBJ just keeps showing up and making everything swing harder.

Then there’s Doc Decibel — music historian, podcaster, and long-suffering, long-loving Mary’s Danish disciple. James didn’t just play the drums for him; he helped pull Doc into sobriety, which is the kind of quiet, life-saving riff that never shows up in the liner notes but matters more than most chart positions. We sat down and talked the whole glorious, battered, beautiful Rock & Roll Circus — the chaos, the camaraderie, the near-death experiences, and the pure stupid joy of it all.

Two lifers still deep in the game, still laughing, still playing. The beat goes on.

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This program may contain copyrighted material which has not always been authorized by the copyright owners. We use this material of the artists we feature for interviews. This is done to promote these artists, and thus we believe that this constitutes "Fair Use" of copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US copyright Law. There is NO copyright infringement intended.

Step into the smoke-choked back alley of some half-remembered 1940s picture and you’ll find Wendy Bevan already waiting there, cigarette glowing like a dying star, voice curling out of the shadows before the picture even starts rolling. The English singer doesn’t just sound like Film Noir—she *is* it. That low, velvet-and-venom delivery pulls you into rain-slick streets and half-lit rooms long before any video ever hits the screen. You don’t watch her songs; you get abducted by them.

She’s already walked the atmospheric high wire with Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran on earlier projects, learning how to make beauty feel dangerous and silence feel loaded. Now she’s weaponized every one of those lessons on her forthcoming album Alone With The Unknown, due September. This isn’t background music for people who like pretty darkness. This is the full descent—torch songs for the terminal hour, melodies that feel like confessions whispered through a two-way mirror.

We talked the imagery, the history, the exact corner of the night where her music first grew teeth. The lyrics don’t just flirt with philosophy; they drag it into a back booth and interrogate it under a bare bulb. Love. Bravery. The long, hard stare into the self. Bevan turns those big, bruising themes into something you can taste—bitter coffee, cold metal, the sudden rush of air when the door finally swings open.

Alone With The Unknown doesn’t ask you to listen. It dares you to step inside and see if you make it back out the same.

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It's when you go to a concert that you know is going to be crazy, and before the main act even takes the stage, you are prepped by an opener that just knocks your socks off.

That was my experience with "The Rubin Brothers", Colescott and AJ, two Boston based Vaudevillian performers when the warmed up for Haute & Freddy. They delighted the crowd with and old school circus performance, riding unicycles while playing a piccolo trumpet, and an upright bass.

Nothing could have prepared us for that evening anyway, but these two managed to get everyone in the mood, laughing and asking for people to heckle them with suggestions for songs they wrote and performed on the fly.

They were lauded with their audition to American Idol by Lionel Ritchie and Katy Perry (She did invite them to perform at her daughter's birthday party), and in the meantime they are charming the audiences across the country who are lucky enough to catch them opening for Haute & Freddy.

We talked about the almost forgotten art of Vaudeville performances, improvisation, and we even geeked out about old recording methods dating back to almost 130 years.

Comedic, and rapid firing of answers, these brothers will give you a show you will never forget.

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Hailing from Sydney Australia veteran vocalist Jacqui Hunt has just released her new opus "Desiderium" a darkwave/dreampop masterpiece.

Jacqui Hunt was the vocalist for the goth tinged band "Single Gun Theory" who I got into 10 years into their tenure. (They hadn't broken through in the states till 1996). She invested a great deal of time into writing the music, and delivering some phayntastique recordings.

Her voice is angelic, sounding like Kate Bush meets Dot Allison, and makes this album a sheer pleasure to listen to. Her lyrics evoke imagery from so many different mythological sources, you feel like you just finished a masterclass in literature.

This album is one you do not want to miss.

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Iranian American refugee SHAB has released her new album "One Suitcase", with a slough of great singles. The album cover tells so much of her story as a refugee to where she is now.

This album has some great songs with some wild themes, "Say It With Your Chest", the newly released single "Perfume", use your imagination, they are some fun tracks.

She tells a heart wrenching personal story with "Skin and Bones", that will really make you think what is important in life.

Lot's of lines about Ferraris, riding motorcycles, and even a video shoot in what almost was Marrakech Morroco.

Shab has a wonderful creative side with her visuals and storytelling, and she even borrowed some of her crew from Lady GaGa..

Dare I say, she's got a heart as big as Texas,  SHAB is a passionate advocate for refugees and women’s rights. As an ambassador for the UK-based charity Choose Love (www.choose.love), SHAB is donating all of her profits from purchases of One Suitcase to support displaced people around the world.

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If you find a favorite sound, you want nothing more than an endless supply of that sound. I discovered Ashen Ringlets on youtube just grooving on Cocteau Twins, they did some covers, and I was hooked.

I have followed them for years, and talked to them intermittently about projects in the hopper. Having released an EP Of original material titled "Waltzing Days in Maidenhead" last year, and now a single "Waiting for the time" (complete with a B-side) they are well on their way of building a wonderful and respectable catalog.

Hailing from Oklahoma where there isn't a large community of 4AD type music followers, Joe and Ellen manage to really stand out, and have managed to write some powerful music, lyrically that just crushes you sometimes, and music that makes you feel like you are floating around, on a sea of cotton candy, stirred by a peppermint pig in Las Vegas.

With Joe on most guitars and synth and sequencers, Ellen on bass and vocals, Ashen Ringlets are just one of those bands to love the moment you first hear them.

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Imagine the dreamy vocals of the original Twin Peaks bar band with a harp as the main backing instrument. Yep, it is something I wouldn't have imagined without the music of Stephanie Babirak.

Stephanie Babirak is one of those strange musicians that you never knew you had a place for in your life until you heard her, and then can't imagine a universe without her music.

An unconventional harpist, classically trained, but she uses it with her vocals to evoke a lot of great feelings, good and bad, while telling stories that you can almost relate to.

Her album "Rotting Fruit" covers themes of an apocalypse, betrayal, failing friendships, and leaving all of the toxicity behind, and something about Cain and Abel, with another moral lesson to it that you probably weren't looking for.

We covered her exodus from a devout Christian upbringing to realizing she was queer when she had feelings for another girl at a Christian Summer Camp, being gaslit, and general awakenings into living your honest truth. We even talked about her song "Utah" and what she experienced not far from where I live.

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#stephaniebaribak #harpist #rottingfruit #queersingers