Interviews

David Rawlings had a clear mission ahead of him. His dream was to release Gillian Welch’s acclaimed June 2011 alt-rural album The Harrow & The Harvest on reel-to-reel tape — but just how would he go about doing it? One word: DIY. During a recent phone interview with AP editor Mike Mettler, Rawlings discusses how The Harrow & The Harvest made its transition to tape, why making tape duplicates is a challenging process, why he also still loves cutting lacquers, and which Welch album might just make its reel-to-reel debut next. . .

Is it any wonder why something called Vinyl Obsession instantly became our favorite TV show? Airing on Sunday nights at 8:30 p.m. EST on AXS TV, this half-hour LP-centric show follows a pair of musicians and/or rock-adjacent celebs shopping for their five favorite albums at Grimey’s in Nashville. Naturally, we had to find out how Vinyl Obsession came to be, so AP editor Mike Mettler got on Zoom with executive producer and AXS TV VP of programming Katie Daryl to get all the LP-obsessive details. Read on to see what Daryl had to say about how the idea for Vinyl Obsession moved from brainstorm into reality, who her main dream guest would be for Season 2, and what her own personal top LP choices are. . .

BP: I didn't pull out all the live recordings I've done. This is Homer and Jethro from 1962. Now at all the live recordings at RCA, Victor went to extreme lengths to modify the tape machines to increase the signal-to- noise ratio. And I copied some of those same principles in the studio back in Nashville. And primarily, it's putting in low noise resistors-everything is tube amplified, of course-in the front end and changing to a high-quality capacitor. So they usually were able to get the S/N ratio about 10dB better. You were telling me a while ago that you couldn't hear any hiss on my recordings. That's one of the reasons. And also you're not hearing third and fourth generations on my recordings. I didn't let them out the door that way.

When I first interviewed humble reissue genius Bob Irwin back in 1997, he told me that working as a freelance producer for Sony/Columbia/Legacy and other major labels, and having his own label, the much-respected Coxsackie, New York based Sundazed Records, has given him “the best of both worlds.”

Blood, Sweat & Tears were on top of the world — and then, suddenly, they weren’t. A new documentary titled What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears? seeks to set the record straight. Read on to see what BS&T co-founding drummer Bobby Colomby and AP editor Mike Mettler discussed when they got on Zoom together earlier this week to talk about the impetus for the documentary, the secrets contained within the runout grooves of certain records he produced, and his view of what the best-sounding Blood, Sweat & Tears track on vinyl is, and why. . .

WO: Yes. I mean even in Nashville when Mark and I did tours of studios for this new record thinking where we were going to record, the studios were dead because everybody has their home studios now.