Caropop

Drummer Will Rigby provided the propulsion, grooves and furious fills for the dB’s, a North Carolina foursome who launched their collective career in New York City yet had their powerfully poppy first two albums released only overseas. Now the dB’s landmark 1981 debut, Stands for Decibels , finally has come out in the U.S. on vinyl and streaming services, with Repercussion to follow, and the class...

Vicki Peterson wrote, sang and played lead guitar on many of the Bangles’ best songs, even if they weren’t the ones that made the band famous. In a smart, revealing conversation, the down-to-earth Peterson reflects on the Bangles’ origins—and her desire to be in an all-female band, which soon would include her sister Debbi (a former Caropop guest) and singer/guitarist Susanna Hoffs—and the comprom...

Impex Records has been releasing stellar audiophile recordings since Abey Fonn founded the small label in 2009. Impex’s offerings have included 33 and 45 rpm LPs (including Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin and Paco De Lucía’s Friday Night in San Francisco and Saturday Night in San Francisco ) as well as deluxe 1Step releases such as Getz/Gilberto, Patricia Barber's Companion and, coming June 14, Sing...

After co-producing R.E.M.'s Murmur and Reckoning , Don Dixon got calls from other bands, often southern and jangly, seeking his services. He produced three albums by Guadalcanal Diary, another Georgia band, but it was his work with New Jersey's the Smithereens that took him to another level. It also prompted Nirvana to ask him about producing Nevermind. Dixon was pursuing his own career as well wh...

Don Dixon already had spent 13 years playing, singing and writing with the North Carolina indie band Arrogance when he joined Mitch Easter to co-produce R.E.M.’s trailblazing first two albums, Murmur and Reckoning . He went on to produce the first two crunchy-and-sweet Smithereens albums plus music from Guadalcanal Diary, Matthew Sweet, Marshall Crenshaw and Marti Jones, to whom he remains married...

William Bell is a soul legend who scored an early hit for Memphis’s Stax Records with 1961’s “You Don’t Miss Your Water” and wrote and sang such much-covered classics as “I Forgot To Be Your Lover,” “Everybody Loves a Winner” and “Every Day Will Be Like a Holiday.” He and Booker T. Jones co-wrote Albert King’s “Born Under a Bad Sign,” and Bell vividly recalls the story behind that one. He also rec...

We were devastated to hear of Steve Albini’s death at age 61 of a heart attack. He was a titanic figure in the music world and a mensch among musicians who were not well known yet were able to book time with one of the industry’s most supportive, talented engineer/producers. Albini spoke with us for back-to-back Caropop episodes posted in January 2022. The first took place in his Electrical Audio...

I spoke with Grant Achatz, one of the world's most talented, creative and thoughtful chefs, as his 50th birthday and his Chicago restaurant Alinea's 19th anniversary approached. He has received just about every possible accolade for a chef, including multiple James Beard awards, Alinea being named the country's best restaurant, and three Michelin stars being awarded to Alinea every year since 2011...

Madeleine Peyroux started her career busking on the streets of Paris and earned comparisons to such heroes as Billie Holliday and Bessie Smith as she broke through with the 2004 album Careless Love . Twenty years later, she is soon to release her ninth studio album, Let’s Walk , for which she, for the first time, co-wrote all of the songs. In this no-holding-back conversation, she reflects on her...

Bruce Botnick engineered the first five Doors studio albums and produced the last one that featured Jim Morrison, L.A. Woman. He also co-produced Forever Changes , the brilliant 1967 album from Doors’ L.A. contemporaries Love, and engineered some of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Botnick continues working on Doors releases, including Rhino’s new Record Store Day entry Live at Konserthuset, Stockholm,...

Many Caropop guests are looking back on amazing careers, but Niko Kapetan of Friko is on the cusp of one. His Chicago-based band’s debut album, Where we’ve been, Where we go from here , has been garnering raves and airplay while its live shows wow audiences with their intense energy and dynamism. Kapetan’s voice and songs—and the band, anchored by his Evanston high school classmate Bailey Minzenbe...

Bruce Sudano had co-written the Tommy James & the Shondells 1969 hit “Ball of Fire” and played keyboards in the bands Alive ‘N Kickin’ and Brooklyn Dreams by the time he met Donna Summer. The two of them clicked professionally and personally and soon were co-writing the smash title track and other songs for Summer’s blockbuster 1979 album, Bad Girls . They also co-wrote Dolly Parton’s #1 count...

Cicely Balston won the 2023 Music Producer’s Guild’s Mastering Engineer of the Year Award, and when you hear the music she has mastered—and the smart, easygoing way she discusses it—you understand why. Working out of AIR Studios in London, Balston has applied her talents to the doom-punk band Witch Fever and David Bowie’s back catalog, as well as some dynamite-sounding hip-hop reissues for the Vin...

If you love music, you have loved recordings mastered by Greg Calbi. Ever hear that Bruce Springsteen album Born To Run ? He mastered that and has thoughts about how it turned out. He also tells of working with, among others, John Lennon, David Bowie, Harry Nilsson and Todd Rundgren. This legendary engineer has mastered classic albums by Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Talking Heads, S...

Slim Jim Phantom is the Stray Cats’ drummer, host of “Slim Jim’s Rockabilly Raveup” on Little Steven’s Underground Garage and a cool-cat storyteller. He takes us through the Stray Cats’ formation, with bassist and elementary school classmate Lee Rocker and singer-guitarist Brian Setzer, and their early days as a “rockabilly bar band” playing New York clubs like CBGB before they relocated to London...

That tap-tap, tap-tap at the beginning of “Blister in the Sun” may be one of rock’s most air-drummed fills, and former Violent Femmes drummer Victor DeLorenzo explains how the song's indelible intro came to be. He shares many more stories about this Milwaukee band, including the name’s origin, the invention of his tranceaphone and the jaw-dropping tale of how the Pretenders discovered Violent Femm...

As Rhino Records’ senior director for A&R, Patrick Milligan oversees ambitious packages such as the Joni Mitchell archival series; deluxe releases from Warner Music Group artists such as the Ramones, the Doors and Crosby, Stills & Nash; and the recently launched, limited-edition High Fidelity vinyl series. That last one, which features audiophile pressings mastered by recurrent Caropop gue...

If you ranked rock's great two-guitar tandems, Television's Richard Lloyd and Tom Verlaine would be at or near the top. Verlaine was the poetic songwriter, idiosyncratic singer and improvisatory guitarist, but Television would not have been Television without Lloyd’s dazzling counterpunches and composed solos that take melodic leaps no one could anticipate. Television launched the mid-1970s art-pu...

Cheers ended its 11-year TV run in 1993, yet on the Emmy Awards in January, George Wendt showed up as his old character, Norm, and drew laughs and, yes, cheers. Even 31 years later, everybody knows his name. Wendt discusses his beginnings at Chicago’s Second City, including his firing and rehiring there. How did that ensemble work prepare him for Cheers ? How did the series’ energy change when Kir...

Brendan Canty’s work in Fugazi established him as one of rock’s great drummers, but this thoughtful, multitalented artist has done much more than that. Rooted in Washington, D.C., Canty played with the hardcore bands Deadline, Rites of Spring, Happy Go Licky and One Last Wish before Fugazi, Deathfix afterward, and he currently is stretching out his jazz-punk chops in the instrumental trio Messthet...

Our Colin Moulding conversation picks up with XTC working in Woodstock, N.Y., on what would become one of their most beloved albums, Skylarking . Moulding appreciated that producer Todd Rundgren chose to include five of his songs, though the recording experience was a bit of a minefield. XTC built on its newfound momentum with Oranges & Lemons , a bright, lively album that features Moulding’s...

Bassist Colin Moulding wrote, played on and sang some of the XTC’s greatest songs, including the breakthrough singles “Life Begins at the Hop” and “Making Plans for Nigel” plus “Ten Feet Tall,” “Generals and Majors,” “Runaways,” “Ball and Chain,” “Wonderland” … and those are just in the period covered in Pt. 1 of this fun, insightful conversation. Speaking from his home outside Swindon, England, M...

It's time for our third early-year check-in with renowned mastering engineer Kevin Gray. In 2023 he was more in demand than ever; your jaw may drop when he reveals how many albums he mastered. Plus, he launched his own label, Cohearent Records, with an album he recorded in his home studio: saxophonist Kirsten Edkins’ Shapes & Sound . With Cohearent’s second release, jazz guitarist Anthony Wils...

Janet Beveridge Bean drums, sings and writes in the great, muscular Chicago guitar band Eleventh Dream Day, which celebrated its 40th anniversary last year. She also sings, writes and plays guitar in the off-kilter-beautiful Freakwater, her country-folk group with singer Catherine Irwin that released its debut album in 1989. Those bands have 25 albums between them, yet Beveridge Bean, who calls he...

Joe Bonamassa, who opened for B.B. King at age 12, was a cocky 26-year-old blues-rock guitar virtuoso when he made his breakthrough third album, Blues Deluxe, in 2003—and an established 46-year-old when he released Blues Deluxe Vol. 2 in the fall. In a thoughtful conversation, Bonamassa reflects on all that has happened in between, how he has grown as a musician, taken control of the business side...