Caropop

Peter Guralnick, an author I've long admired, wrote the definitive Elvis Presley biographies Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love and has returned with The Colonel and the King. Drawing on fresh research and volumes of previously unseen letters, the author casts new light on Colonel Tom Parker, an identity-changing Dutch immigrant who became Presley’s manager for life. Guranick’s complex portra...

I’ve been a Peter Orner fan for a long time, appreciating how—whether he’s writing short stories, novels or essays—he makes every word count. Stories and chapters are short, sentences lean, zero fat. His justly acclaimed new novel, The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter , springs from the apparent 1963 murder of Karyn “Cookie” Kupcinet, the real-life daughter of Chicago Sun-Times columnist and TV persona...

Emma Swift is a sublime singer of her own songs as well as those of Bob Dylan, as she demonstrates on her new album, The Resurrection Game, and the previous Blonde on the Tracks . She says The Resurrection Game is about “how art can get us through quite brutal experiences by making them beautiful”—i.e. what a lot of us need right now. Swift tells of her Australian upbringing and influences, how sh...

Scott McCaughey returns to Caropop as busy as ever. He’s currently on the Baseball Project/Minus 5 September Doubleheader tour, with each band consisting of Steve Wynn, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, Linda Pitmon and McCaughey. This comes after a three-week jaunt in England with Luke Haines and Buck and another Minus 5 variant. He also has recorded an upcoming Young Fresh Fellows album on the heels of th...

Robbie Fulks released his debut album back in 1996, and here we are in 2025 with him, at age 62, still on the rise. His awesome guitar-picking skills and singing drew the attention of Steve Martin, who added him to his bluegrass band for performances on Jimmy Kimmel Live! , at the Hollywood Bowl and beyond. Fulks also has a brilliant new album, Now Then , that covers much stylistic ground while di...

Squeeze’s Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook are one of rock’s greatest songwriting tandems, with Tilbrook crafting indelible melodies around Difford’s emotionally detailed lyrics. Here Difford digs into the evolution of his and Tilbrook’s partnership. When Difford hands over his lyrics, does he suggest a musical direction to Tilbrook? Did Difford know that “Pulling Mussels (from the Shell)” would b...

We're going on summer recess--for a good reason: Caropop is getting a long-awaited tune-up. We’ll be tweaking the presentation and improving the way we let you all know about episodes. In addition to keeping them on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the RSS platform and caropop.com, we’ll also be posting them on a new Caropop YouTube channel. Stay tuned for more details, and please subscribe to all of the...

No surprise, talking music with Craig Finn is stimulating and a lot of fun. The Hold Steady’s frontman/lyricist recently released his sixth solo album, the character-driven song cycle Always Been . He also hosts the podcast “That’s How I Remember It,” which explores the relationship between memory and creativity, and writes the Substack “Versions of Security.” Finn has thoughts on the power of his...

Bassist Gina Birch is a founding member of the legendary British post-punk band the Raincoats, whose self-titled 1977 debut album is an off-kilter classic. More Raincoats albums followed, as did stints with Dorothy and the Hangovers, but it wasn’t until 2023 that Birch released her first solo album, the acclaimed I Play My Bass Loud . Now she’s made Trouble , which again draws on dub, reggae and e...

Bassist Dennis Dunaway was—and is—one of the key figures in the 1970s rock band, Alice Cooper. That’s right, the band Alice Cooper, which recorded seven albums between 1969 and 1973 (and had such hits as "I'm Eighteen" and "School's Out") before the singer Alice Cooper (nee Vince Furnier) went on to a successful solo career. Now the surviving members of the Alice Cooper band, which was inducted in...

When I spoke with Chris Stamey way back for Caropop Ep. 30, he shared a sheet music collection called Marvelous Melodies Songbook, New Songs Vol. III. Several of those songs appear on his wonderful new album, Anything Is Possible (out July 11), as do the Brian Wilson-evoking “I’d Be Lost Without You,” the Wilson-covering “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)” and the optimistic, guitar-driven...

May Pang was John Lennon’s companion for the late-1973-to-early-1975 period that has become known as Lennon’s “lost weekend.” Although Pang has used that phrase for her documentary and photo exhibition, she doesn’t see this time as “lost” for Lennon. Not only did he record two albums ( Walls and Bridges and Rock ‘n’ Roll ) and produce another (Harry Nilsson’s Pussy Cats ), but Pang reunited him wi...

Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab has been a top audiophile label since its 1977 founding and 2001 reboot after Jim Davis, president of the high-end audio equipment company Music Direct, bought it out of bankruptcy. But the label was hit with controversy almost three years ago with the revelation that it included a digital step in the production chain of albums sourced from original master tapes. Davis is...

John Hall has been CEO of the family-run Rickenbacker guitar company since 1984, right around when R.E.M.'s Peter Buck was inspiring a generation of jangly bands with his Rick riffs. The Beatles had led a Rickenbacker surge 20 years earlier as John Lennon and George Harrison played Ricks in A Hard Day’s Night and prompted the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn to get a 12-string Rickenbacker and basically to in...

David Lowery is looking back while pushing forward. The brainy, witty Camper Van Beethoven/Cracker frontman just released a two-CD, three-LP solo album, Fathers, Sons and Brothers , that’s a sort of musical memoir. Here he tells stories about those stories, reflecting on the recent Camper shows to mark the debut album’s 40th anniversary and speculating on whether the band would have had its career...

Zev Feldman, a.k.a. the “Jazz Detective,” has turned his crate-digging passion into a career: He tracks down previously unreleased recordings and jumps through the necessary hoops to get them released, often in lavish packages for his label, Resonance Records. This past Record Store Day featured such Feldman finds as live albums from Bill Evans, Freddie Hubbard, Kenny Dorham and Charles Mingus plu...

Vicki Peterson and John Cowsill, who are married to each other, have been making music for many years but recently released their first album together, Long After the Fire. Peterson has been singer-songwriter-guitarist for the Bangles and Continental Drifters. John Cowsill began drumming for the Cowsills at a young age, more recently was the Beach Boys’ drummer and now fills in as lead singer for...

Called "the Wizard of Vinyl" by the New York Times, Chad Kassem has devoted his professional life to the cause of great-sounding records. In addition to running Acoustic Sounds, a go-to mail-order company for audiophile albums and equipment, the outspoken Kassem oversees the specialty label Analogue Productions, the Mastering Lab, Quality Record Pressings (QRP) and other related businesses, all ba...

With mid-‘60s hits such as “Jenny Take a Ride!” and “Devil with a Blue Dress On,” Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels all but created the rock ‘n’ soul rave-up, and he became the musical godfather of the so-called blue-collar rockers including Bob Seger, Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp. In this career-spanning conversation conducted from his Michigan home, the 80-year-old Ryder reflects on th...

How does a label execute ambitious rerelease campaigns for its key artists, in this case Yes and Talking Heads? We talk with Rhino A&R directors Jason Jones and Steve Woolard about the Super Deluxe Editions, Record Store Day releases and other archival packages they have been assembling for these two bands. Woolard also oversaw Yes rereleases more than 20 years ago—how have the band’s audience...

As this episode kicks off, Kevin Godley and his longtime songwriting and creative partner, Lol Creme, have just left 10cc, so instead of being part of hits such as “The Things We Do for Love,” the duo continues pushing their artistic boundaries as Godley & Creme. Godley describes how he and Creme collaborated on music and, eventually, videos—for themselves and, among others, Herbie Hancock (“R...

“If we did something that was too drab, too normal, too obvious, we'd say, ‘Nah, let's give it a kick in the ass.’” That’s how Kevin Godley describes the approach of his former band, 10cc, and his drive for creativity and art has not abated. Godley was 10cc’s angelic-voiced drummer who would go on to make inventive music and groundbreaking videos with Godley & Creme. In Pt. 1 of this illuminat...

Omnivore Recordings co-founder and four-time Gramny-winning producer Cheryl Pawelski has figured out how to do what she loves for a living. She went from obsessing about music in Milwaukee to having great adventures in the "floater pool" at Capitol Records in Los Angeles. With stints at Rhino and Concord as well, she oversaw ambitious reissues by, among others, the Band, Big Star, the Smithereens,...

Rhino Records has 47—yes, 47—releases coming out on Record Store Day (April 12), but that’s not all that’s been keeping Rhino Senior A&R Director Patrick Milligan busy. The Rhino High Fidelity series, which he oversees, has taken off, with recent Doors and Black Sabbath releases selling out quickly. He also launched the less expensive, still-all-analog Rhino Reserve series with albums from All...

Over the past year, Peter Holsapple has toured with the reunited dB’s and enjoyed the overdue U.S. vinyl releases of their classic first two albums; seen the release of a book, compilation album and tribute album dedicated to his other band, the Continental Drifters; and, most important, recorded a terrific new solo album. The Face of 68 offers an abundance of Holsapple’s smart, melodic pop-rock s...