'Welcome To Toytown' by Ken Sharp

GUEST POST: Jordan Oakes (Yellow Pills Magazine)

Jul 16, 2024

For several years, Martin Mull took a break from show business. He didn’t think people could take him seriously as a performer and a painter at the same time.

Ken Sharp has endured his own version of the same dilemma. For years, he’s been a successful author of music-related books—among his subjects are Kiss and Cheap Trick—but he defines himself first and foremost as a musician and songwriter.

Still, it can be difficult for people not to think of him, considering his journalistic accomplishments, as mainly a professional rock writer—one who happens to toy with recording.

But behind the shadow of his typewriter (which seems to follow him around), Sharp works with a different set of keys—the musical kind. Through the years, he’s released a steady flow of singles and albums, with influences that range from bubblegum and blue-eyed soul to David Bowie and Brian Wilson.

Like his previous release, Miniatures, Ken’s new album Welcome to Toytown is a series of inter-linked baroque vignettes.

It’s a one-man show, Roy Wood-style, with Sharp playing each instrument; singing every note. That includes the harmonies, handclaps, vibraphone, mellotron, and toolbox of nuanced effects that adorn and embellish. Titles like “Beach Boys on My Stereo” may leave little doubt as to where Ken gets his inspiration, but summer aside, there is something oddly autumnal, and, by the end, rather wintery in the air.

Ivories are tickled—the songs are largely piano-based—but Ken manages to pull a few strings, too. “To Lose a Heart” finds poignance in a guitar phrase; “Great Big Beautiful World” spins a Small Faces riff into something quaint and sunshine-y; “To Praise Your Love” has a low-wattage The Band undercurrent; “Mr. Conductor” bounces on a bossa nova featherbed.

The album’s centerpiece, “Toytown Suite,” starts with a Van Dyke Parks-style repurposing of “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire.” Then the nearly ten-minute track—its mini-parts linked like a train set—becomes a Christmas tale that thinks outside the toy box. Along the way is a Dickensian narrative about falling on hard times, a euphoric depiction of present-opening, and a sense—both nostalgic and haunting—of longing for a past innocence, the days before life became unwrapped.

Welcome to Toytown calls to mind great storytelling-concept records like The Beach Boys’ Mount Vernon and Fairway, the Family Tree’s Miss Butters—even the Rollers’ autobiographical song-cycle Elevator.

There’s a mercurial nod to Queen, more than a dash of Pet Sounds, a spritz of lounge rock, and a melodic tip of the hat to Ken’s Philly homeboy Jim Croce.

From the fake scratchy-record sound that crackles at the beginning to the majestic Judee Sill-ish closing track, “Requiem,” the album is nothing less than a monumental achievement. I haven’t even mentioned the trading cards that come with the CD (available directly from Ken Sharp—sharpk@aol.com).

There’s a lot to take in, so you might want to start by mulling it over—but it’s best heard with both ears and an hour to spare. Either way, the elfin pop symphonies of Welcome to Toytown will slay you.

Jordan Oakes founded, published, and edited the Yellow Pills power pop magazine beginning in 1991, and compiled five Yellow Pills CD compilations beginning in 1993. His journalism has also appeared in Sound Choice, Speak, The Riverfront Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Rolling Stone’s ‘Alt-Rock-a-Rama’ book, and elsewhere. He’s a published poet and occasional standup comedian. He loves dogs and dog-eared magazines.