Caropop Mark Caro

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. Early in this spectacular run, he successfully fought stage 4 cancer of the tongue through innovative treatments at the University of Chicago. Yet despite all he has accomplished and been through, including the pandemic-time transition of Alinea to a carryout restaurant, he keeps restlessly pushing forward. What might the next culinary revolution look like, and how can he be at its forefront? Why does he wish Alinea were more like a rock band?

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 beginnings (the 1939 movie musical Gulliver’s Travels plays a role), her creative growth and her struggles to process the current state of our world artistically and otherwise. How does she feel about the only job she's ever had? Is she cool with turning 50 this month? How does she co-write? Does she feel compelled to communicate empathy now? Is she part of the problem or solution?

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, September 20, 1968. He tells of how these performances, which feature the Doors at peak power, were recorded and recently discovered. He also reflects on the band’s dynamic, the reason the album version of "Light My Fire" is slow and flat, what prompted producer Paul Rothchild to leave the L.A. Woman sessions and the contrasting approach that Botnick took on the project. What was it like working with such unpredictable geniuses as Morrison, Arthur Lee (Love) and Brian Wilson?

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 Minzenberger on drums—cover a broad musical and emotional range: delicate and fragile one moment, fierce and roaring the next. Having returned from a whirlwind South by Southwest trip (with Lollapalooza to follow this summer), Kapetan recalls how he started learning instruments, forming bands and developing his unique approach to songwriting before a major indie label, ATO, liked what it heard and signed Friko. He's got a lot going on. Where do they go from here?

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 country hit “Starting Over Again,” based on his parents, and continued collaborating throughout a marriage that lasted until her 2012 death from lung cancer. Since then, he has rebooted his own career, recording several albums, including the new Talkin’ Ugly Truth, Tellin’ Pretty Lies. Sudano takes us from his mentorship with Tommy James through his life with arguably the disco era’s greatest artist, for whom he and his daughters recently accepted a Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award. Toot-toot! Beep-beep! (Photo by Amy Waters)

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 Vinyl Me, Please record club, including Eric B. & Rakim’s Don’t Sweat the Technique, Gravediggaz’s 6 Feet Deep, and Madlib’s Shades of Blue. How did this young British woman become an ace hip-hop masterer, and do those albums require a specific skill set? Are people too fixated on analog vs. digital? How did she become a mastering engineer anyway, and what's the most commonly misunderstood aspect of what she does? (Photo by Silvia Gin.)