Caropop

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 in…

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…

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 stin…

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 hit…

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 n…

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 exhibiti…

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 ban…

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 …

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 m…

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 release…

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-s…

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 co…

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 …

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 E…

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 du…

“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 dr…

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 …

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…

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 …