Interviews

Sort By:  Post Date TitlePublish Date
InterviewsMusic and Recording Features
Rachael and Vilray: Carrying a Torch
Tony Scherman  |  Mar 08, 2023  |  6 comments
As Vilray Bolles marched down Manhattan's Second Avenue on a rainy afternoon late in 2014, participating in a demonstration against police brutality, he slipped on the wet pavement, fell hard on his right hand, and broke his pinky. For a guitarist, a broken finger can be a major, if not catastrophic, setback. But the gods were smiling on Bolles. He was, in fact, a lapsed guitarist, having all but abandoned hopes of a musical career, and the universe was giving him a nudge, not just back into music but into a collaboration with Rachael Price, one of contemporary pop's great vocalists, who, when she isn't singing cabaret jazz with Bolles, fronts the headlining rock band Lake Street Dive.
Continue Reading »
InterviewsMusic and Recording Features
Dave Alvin
Mike Mettler  |  Feb 08, 2023  |  2 comments
Dave Alvin is a fighter. In the 1980s, when Dave and his older brother, Phil Alvin, shared studio and stage as co-founders of Los Angeles punkabilly band The Blasters, they frequently fought each other. They also fought musically, tussling over every note as the four-man band wrangled many great tunes. In that respect, their working relationship may have been similar to the sibling push-pull output of Ray and Dave Davies in the Kinks and Liam and Noel Gallagher in Oasis. Consider "American Music," "Marie Marie," and "Border Radio," all from the band's 1981 sophomore album The Blasters, as examples of how internal conflict can lead to successful collaboration.
Continue Reading »
InterviewsMusic and Recording Features
Melissa Aldana
Ken Micallef  |  Jan 11, 2023  |  5 comments
Bassist Ron Carter, world-renowned musician and most-recorded jazz bassist of all time, said in an interview for Stereophile's Musicians as Audiophiles that he sees himself not just as a bassist but also as a scientist, forever striving to understand and perfect the sound of his recordings. Chile-born saxophonist Melissa Aldana, a stunningly expressive jazz musician, shows similar dedication to her art, studiously investigating the century-long history of the genre.
Continue Reading »
Analog CornerInterviews
Analog Corner #261: Brahms Symphonies Direct to Disc from the Berlin Philharmonic
Michael Fremer  |  Jan 10, 2023  |  First Published: May 01, 2017  |  0 comments
In November 2016, the Berlin Philharmonic made a stunning record-release announcement: a boxed set of all four Brahms symphonies, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle, on six LPs, recorded and mastered direct to disc in September 2014. The release would be limited to 1833 sets—a quantity chosen in honor of the year of the composer's birth—at a price of €499 per set.
Continue Reading »
InterviewsMusic and Recording Features
Jeff Tweedy: Wilco's Midwestern Yankee Embraces a Country Court
Mike Mettler  |  Dec 15, 2022  |  1 comments
Jeff Tweedy is an artist who transcends time. Wait—let me clarify that. Tweedy, the multi-hyphenate singer, songwriter, guitarist, and co-producer for the midwestern-bred alt-rocking Americana band Wilco, has spent the bulk of his career creating music that crosses the divides between past, present, and future.
Continue Reading »
InterviewsMusic and Recording Features
Steve Earle: A hardcore troubadour celebrates Jerry Jeff Walker
Mike Mettler  |  Sep 09, 2022  |  1 comments
Steve Earle was born in 1967. Well, that's not exactly true. Earle was in fact born on January 17, 1955, in Fort Monroe, Virginia, but the singer, songwriter, and master interpreter's musical awakening came in 1967, when he was 12 years old, growing up in his acknowledged hometown of San Antonio, Texas.
Continue Reading »
InterviewsMusic and Recording Features
Lyle Lovett: Music among great players can be a conversation
Rogier van Bakel  |  Jul 06, 2022  |  3 comments
2022 is turning out to be a good year for Lyle Lovett, not least because he is, to use a cowboy metaphor, back in the saddle.

"I've been out of work for two years," he says archly. Normally, Lovett performs more than 100 concerts a year, regardless of whether he's released new work. But the pandemic pinned him down at home in Houston, with his wife and their now–four-year-old twins, in the house his grandfather built in 1911. Domesticity suits Lovett. "There was plenty to do every minute of every day. Absolutely no boredom!" He sounds like he means it; unselfconscious mentions of paternal tenderness bubbled up in our conversation from time to time.

Continue Reading »
InterviewsMusic and Recording Features
Bonnie Raitt, Blues Sister: Her Life And Times In Eight Songs
Tony Scherman  |  Jun 07, 2022  |  7 comments
When an icon drops her first album in six years, you sit up and take notice. Bonnie Raitt made her earliest record a half-century and more ago, in August 1971. She was 21 and could easily have been carded; the face on the cover of Bonnie Raitt—that first album—has yet to shed all its baby fat.
Continue Reading »
InterviewsNews
John Atkinson to Receive the LAOCAS Founder's Award
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Jun 02, 2022  |  18 comments
The Los Angeles and Orange County Audio Society (LAOCAS) has chosen John Atkinson, former editor-in-chief and now technical editor of Stereophile, as the winner of its 29th annual Founder's Award.
Continue Reading »
FeaturesInterviews
Kevin Gray: Vinyl-Mastering Master
Sasha Matson  |  May 06, 2022  |  9 comments
When I need information about recordings, I go to Discogs. At Discogs, Kevin Gray has more than 2500 entries. That's as good an indicator as any of the amount of ground he has covered in his career so far as a creative participant in the recorded-music art known as mastering. Since starting out in the early 1970s, in Los Angeles, he has worked for all the major music labels and many independents, in all music genres.
Continue Reading »
InterviewsMusic and Recording Features
Jay Jay French: Twisted Business: Lessons from My Life in Rock'n'Roll
Jim Austin  |  Jan 06, 2022  |  6 comments
Jay Jay French has a book out, but it's not what you might think, or not exactly.

French earned fame in the 1980s as the lead guitarist for transvestite metal band Twisted Sister, which produced some of the most recognizable—and widely licensed—rock music in history: "We're Not Gonna Take It." "I Wanna Rock."

Continue Reading »
InterviewsMusic and Recording Features
Tom Fine: Finding The Way Home
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Dec 10, 2021  |  7 comments
Rabbits figure frequently in chats with Tom Fine—not the little creatures per se but the holes they burrow into. Because when you question Fine about matters present and past, his encyclopedic memory and fascination with all things great and small take you down what he calls "rabbit holes."
Continue Reading »
InterviewsMusic and Recording Features
Pat Metheny: From His Place
Ken Micallef  |  Jun 25, 2021  |  10 comments
When Pat Metheny was growing up in the small Missouri town of Lee's Summit, his family's home stood within can't-even-hear-yourself-shouting distance of the Missouri Pacific railroad. trains, tornadoes, freezing winters, hot summers, small-town isolation—all fed an imagination that (combined with plenty of practice) fed a legendary music career.
Continue Reading »
InterviewsMusic and Recording Features
Mary Halvorson: Melt the Frame
Ken Micallef  |  May 05, 2021  |  4 comments
In her reworking of the Beatles' "With a Little Help from my Friends," on the 2018 tribute album, A Day In The Life: Impressions Of Pepper (impulse records), Brooklyn guitarist and composer Mary Halvorson reinvents both her instrument and the song.

Most baby boomers can hum the tune of the Beatles' classic, from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, in a handful of notes. It might take longer to recognize Halvorson's joyous, angular version. A master of jazz phrasing, guitar technique, avant-garde discourse, and effects pedals, Halvorson bends the Beatles song to her 21st century will.

Continue Reading »
Interviews
"Listening": a Video Tribute to Art Dudley
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Mar 14, 2021  |  10 comments
Listening, an extraordinary video tribute to the late writer Art Dudley's taste, vision, and devotion to music, premiers this month on Stereophile's YouTube channel. The video follows the unusual path of Art's beloved Altec Lansing Flamenco loudspeakers from their home in Upstate New York to their current residence, the listening room of deaf audiophile Bob Lichtenberg in Port Orchard, Washington.
Continue Reading »

Pages

X