Caropop

I first noticed Marc Ribot’s slinky, spiky guitar playing as “Jockey Full of Bourbon,” from Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs, slithered over the opening of Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law. Rain Dogs was a breakthrough for Ribot, who previously had played in Brother Jack McDuff’s soul-jazz band, backed Wilson Pickett and Solomon Burke, and been a member of the Lounge Lizards. More Waits collaborations followed, as did work with Elvis Costello, Sam Phillips, McCoy Tyner, Yoko Ono, Robert Plant and Allison Krauss, Elton John and Leon Russell, and many others. Here Ribot reflects on his robust studio-musician and solo career; his love of Latin American music; the creative leeway that Waits, Costello and others gave him; the impact of producers such as T Bone Burnett and Hal Willner; his decision to sing lead for the first time on his long-gestating 2025 album, Map of a Blue City; and his fight for indie musicians’ rights with the Music Workers Alliance. (Photo by Eric van den Brulle.)

In our annual check-in with renowned mastering engineer Kevin Gray, he reflects on a very busy 2025 that included his Rhino High Fidelity versions of Fleetwood Mac and Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks’ long-out-of-print Buckingham Nicks. How did Gray and fellow mastering engineer Chris Bellman feel about Rhino releasing separate versions of Buckingham Nicks mastered by each of them? Gray also discusses the Rhino High Fidelity John Coltrane: 1960-1964 Mono box, for which he revisited some albums he’d previously mastered in stereo. Gray's RHF version of T. Rex’s Electric Warrior followed the label’s reel-to-reel tape release of that album—which should sound better? Of course, we had to address the hullabaloo sparked by Gray’s comments on Caropop a year ago criticizing the One Step pressing process. Was he surprised? Does he feel vindicated? Other topics covered: Gray’s Blue Note Tone Poet work with producer Joe Harley; the jazz albums Gray is recording and releasing on his Cohearent Records label. What’s in store for 2026?

Mitch Easter and Don Dixon, accomplished producers and performers on their own, came together to produce one of rock’s greatest debut albums, R.E.M.’s Murmur. That 1983 classic plus the preceding, Easter-produced EP, Chronic Town, have gotten the all-analog, One Step treatment in a numbered, limited-edition vinyl release from Interscope-Capitol’s Definitive Sound Series. We reunited Easter and Dixon to discuss the making of Murmur plus the follow-up they produced, Reckoning. What did they each bring to the process? Why does one of them consider Murmur to be the Dark Side of the Moon of the New Wave era? What had changed by the time they recorded Reckoning? Easter also talks about working again with R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck and bassist Mike Mills on the latest Baseball Project album, and Easter and Dixon offer details about Murmur that even this longtime R.E.M. fanatic found revelatory. (You’ll never hear “Radio Free Europe” or “Perfect Circle” in the same way.)

Robyn Hitchcock turned 14 in 1967, the year that blew his musical mind open. This English boarding school student and future singer-songwriter-musician already looked to Bob Dylan for the meaning of life when along came the psychedelic train powered by the Beatles, the Syd Barrett-led Pink Floyd, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Kinks, the Incredible String Band and much more. Hitchcock reflects on his awakening with a vivid memoir, 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left, and a mostly acoustic, mostly covers album, 1967: Vacations in the Past. Here we bat around perhaps the most creatively explosive year in the rock era, and he applies his whirligig mind to such questions as whether the music of 1967 would have had such an outsized impact on his own music if not for where, how and at what age he experienced it. He also discusses the newly remixed, remastered version of his 1988 album Globe of Frogs.

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