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If your New Year’s resolution died a quiet death months ago, but you still want to make your mark in 2012 – make a musical summer resolution with Soundcheck! 

With her new solo album “Instersteller,” indie veteran Frankie Rose (of Vivian Girls and Crystal Stilts fame) breaks out of her lo-fi cocoon and takes flight as a shimmering synth-pop butterfly. Frankie joins us to play songs off the record and tell us about life in the trenches of the Brooklyn music scene.

Long before rap, there was “the dozens” – the African-American street rhyming tradition that author Elijah Wald defines as “halfway between ‘yo mama’ jokes and rap freestyle battling.” He joins us to share the surprising musical history of the R-rated comedic insults.

On this edition of New Sounds, hear some chamber music by composer Marc Mellits with a populist bent.  We’ll sample his work, “Tight Sweater," which contains traces of funk, echoes of rock, and minimalism's rapidly shifting patterns of notes and interlocking rhythms.  With the provocative and whimsical titles, ("Exposed Zipper," “Pickle Trousers” and “Mechanically Separated Chicken Parts”) the movements are compact and alarmingly catchy.

Hoboken, NJ is less than 5 miles from Manhattan -- but its main street couldn’t be more different from Wall Street. This quiet town with a population of 50,000 or so has served as the birthplace of baseball, the small-but-hardy rock venue Maxwell’s, and a long-running indie band called Yo La Tengo. We hear more when music writer Jesse Jarnow joins us with his new book, "Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock."

The New York band called Outernational puts politics back in rock with their album "Todos Somos Ilegales: We Are All Illegals."  It’s a bouncy, bi-lingual, almost cinematic look at America’s southern border, and Outernational will play songs from it live in our studio.

Join the Archives department in celebrating the life of Doc Watson with this rare interview and performance at the Philadelphia Folk Festival. 

Just like a band on tour pulls off the road and heads into the recording studio, Soundcheck will spend the summer off the air creating something new. Online, the show will be more active than ever. Find out more.

Jazz trombonist John Yao and his trio perform at the Brooklyn Lyceum on Wednesday night. Download the title song from his new album, "In The Now."

Doc Watson, the Grammy-award winning folk musician whose lightning-fast style of flatpicking influenced guitarists around the world for more than a half-century, died Tuesday at a hospital in Winston-Salem, according to a hospital spokeswoman and his manager. He was 89.

With a new album out today called “What We Saw From the Cheap Seats,” singer and pianist Regina Spektor returns to our studio to play some new songs. The best seats in the house will be right in front of your speakers.

Every year since 2002, the Library of Congress has unveiled a new list of additions to its National Recording Registry. 2011’s twenty-five selections include the earliest-known commercial sound recording… the psychedelic-rock of the late Arthur Lee and his band Love... and the pioneering hip hop of the Sugarhill Gang. Matthew Barton, the curator of Recorded Sound at the Library, tells us more.

Bang On a Can All-Stars pianist Vicki Chow performs a "mixtape" of her favorite pieces for piano at The Stone on Tuesday night. Download one of its songs, "Digital Sustain."

Singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten last joined us amid the zeitgeist for Epic, her 2010 album that inspired praise from critics – and cover songs from Bon Iver and The National. The Brooklyn-based musician and her band perform songs from her latest record, Tramp.

Four-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald is currently starring on Broadway in “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess”– a newly reworked version of the 1935 American opera. In this special edition of Soundcheck, McDonald joins us in the Greene Space with co-star Norm Lewis to talk about updating an American classic - and to perform songs from the Broadway show.

The jazz nine-piece plays each Monday night at The Stone through the end of June. Download the ensemble's song "Sly Notions."

Two degrees from Stanford aren't your usual recipe for hip-hop credibility, but Korean rapper Tablo found success at the top of the charts. That was, until a single rumor set websites ablaze with pop-culture paranoia and conspiracy.