Broadway is filled with fantastic singers, and so is pop music… but there aren’t that many singers who are fantastic in both fields. Musical theatre singing, for instance, demands clear enunciation and technical precision, which can undo pop/rock/R&B performers who are more experienced at selling emotion than narrative. (There are obvious exceptions, of course, including Fantasia and Reba McEntire, but the rule is set by the pop stars who trundle through Chicago and who used to turn up in Disney’s Aida and Beauty and The Beast.)

Still, transitioning in the other direction seems to be even harder: When a performer is trained in musical theatre then tries to go pop, the result is almost always antiseptic. The singing is too crip, too polished, too straight-A-student to sound like bona fide Top 40 material. Just think about any song performed by Lea Michele on Glee. She almost always sounds fantastic, yes, but her “pronounce every g” phrasing and careful steps from key to key call her out as a stage performer. That’s not bad for a song like “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” which places power notes on important words and tells a story with a beginning, middle, and end. In this context, a gifted musical theatre performer is electrifying.

But a song like, say, “Take a Bow,” which Michele performed in Season 1, is designed to let a singer ad lib and riff and find emotional resonance around the words as well as on them. Musical theatre performers typically don’t have experience singing like that—making messy, passionate sounds that are outside the basic structure of the material—which tends to be why their pop material is so square and tidy. (Here’s Exhibit A. And B. And oh my god, C.)

Given all that, Sara Ramirez’s new EP is about five hundred times more impressive. It was released in conjunction with last week’s musical episode of Grey’s Anatomy, where she’s a series regular, but it deserves to be considered apart from that gimmick. More importantly, it deserves to be considered apart from Ramirez’s roots as a Tony Award-winning musical theatre performer. I don’t hear any musical theatre in these songs. Instead, I hear a kick-ass rock singer who can take me into the corner and rough me up with her blaring pipes of awesomeness.

Let’s start with the opening track, “Break My Heart.” The lyrics don’t make a lick of sense—Is she breaking up with someone? Already broken up? Just pissed off?—but her vocal is so exciting that it doesn’t matter. She could be singing about her toenail clippers, and the song would be stirring. I mean, just listen to what she does at 1:07, when she adds her sexy growl to Sara-Bareilles-style bounce of the music. And don’t even get me started on the bridge at 1:58, where my sister takes it right up to Jesus and I have to stop slicing onions for my breakfast omelette so I can raise one hand and holler “Fuck YES, Mama! Tell me the NEWS!”

Then there’s her take on “The Story,” a song made semi-famous by Brandi Carlisle. Ramirez serves Melissa Etheridge with a hint of Sheryl Crowe, and I say, “Yes, please!”

To think that Ramirez can do all that and sell a musical theatre number like this (she starts at 2:20). I mean… damn. Do it, Mama. Do it all damn night.