In this episode of Stuck on Sound, Joey Stuckey sits down with his dear friend and fellow Recording Academy Atlanta board member Diane Durrett. Diane is a singer, songwriter, producer, Georgia treasure, and, as Atlanta Magazine put it, a modern-day Renaissance woman. Joey and Diane have a warm, wide-ranging conversation about a life built on original music, community service, and a stubborn refusal to quit.

Diane traces her musical beginning to her mother, a choir director and soloist at Second Ponce de Leon Church on Peachtree Street in Atlanta, who put her in front of a choir before she was old enough to wonder whether she wanted to be there. From children's choir, she moved into the early wave of contemporary Christian music, forming a rock band with guitarist Doug Keys and eventually playing churches across Georgia, including one unforgettable night in Jonesboro where their Marshall-stack volume prompted a gracious host to observe that everyone praises the Lord in their own way. She studied at Mercer and Georgia State, played in cover bands, and finally found her footing when the cover band she had started fired her. She took it as a sign. From that moment on, Diane has made only original music: ten American Roots albums, including her 2025 release Sweet Georgia Blues, whose singles Chasing Sunsets and The Sweet Spot earned placement on Apple Music's Best New Blues Songs. Along the way, she has shared stages with Sting, Tina Turner, Faith Hill, and Gregg Allman, co-written with William Bell, Shawn Mullins, Oliver Wood of the Wood Brothers, and Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls, and co-produced her new EP American Quilt Sessions with multi-Grammy Award-winning producer Kabir Sehgal.

The conversation turns to Diane's decade of service to the Recording Academy's Atlanta chapter, including her current role as chapter president, and her partnership with Songwriter Hall of Famer Tricky Stewart as co-chair of the Songwriter and Composer wing. Joey shares how he, Diane, and Tricky all ended up in the same room at Tricky's Atlanta studio one day, writing with Ed Roland of Collective Soul, and what it means to find creative collaborators you trust completely. Diane also speaks candidly about her commitment to keeping her studio and sessions clean and focused, a professional standard born from watching the drug culture of the 1980s and 90s take its toll, and about pursuing music without needing the rock and roll mythology that surrounds it.

The episode closes on something deeply personal. Diane's song "All Is Well" was written about her mother, the first liver transplant patient in the state of Georgia, and her grandmother's steady mantra through that crisis found Joey at a moment when he needed it most. He was performing at the same event as Diane, horribly ill backstage from complications related to his brain tumor, and her performance of that song from the stage reached him in a way he had not anticipated or expected. It is a quiet, remarkable ending to an episode full of joy, humor, and craft, a reminder that the songs we make for one reason can do something entirely different for someone we love.

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In this episode of Stuck on Sound, Joey Stuckey welcomes Gary Gottlieb. Gary is an AES Past President and Fellow, longtime professor, textbook author, New York studio engineer, and a man whose forty-year career spans so many disciplines that Joey jokes he must be a thousand years old. Joey and Gary have a generous and wide-ranging conversation about how the audio world works, how it is changing, and what it means to give back after a lifetime of doing it all.

Gary's origin story runs through a drumming career he was self-aware enough to abandon early. His cousin, studio drummer Barry Lazarowicz, took a teenage Gary to see Billy Cobham perform. Somewhere between watching Cobham's four limbs seem to multiply, Gary decided his future was behind a different set of controls. His cousin also took him to sessions at New York studios like A&R, where Gary found himself ignoring the musicians entirely and watching the engineer: the slight turn of a knob, the way the vocal just got a little brighter. He eventually knocked on the doors of a hundred New York studios and landed a coffee-and-garbage job at Counterpoint. When owner Jerry Raggevoy installed a pair of brand-new SSL 6000E consoles, Gary did something no one else thought to do: he took the manuals home. He came back the only person in New York who knew how to run the SSL computer. Within months, he was being called into major mix sessions across the city, not because he was a great mixer, but because he could make the room's most powerful new tool do what everyone else needed it to do. The rest followed from there.

From the New York studio floor, Gary built a career that expanded in every direction. Thirty years in education (including fifteen as a professor and department chair at Webster University), music criticism, broadcast work at WEQX (one of America's first alternative rock stations), sound design, and sound reinforcement. He has chaired the AES Historical, Conference, and Events Coordination Committees, served as Regional Vice President, and remained a central voice in AES leadership for more than twenty-five years. His two most recent books, both second editions released with Routledge Press, are Shaping Sound in the Studio and Beyond and How Does it Sound Now? Legendary Engineers and Vintage Gear — an interview collection with some of the defining figures of the past eight decades of recorded music. Joey lobbies him, cheerfully and at some length, to make the latter an audiobook.

The conversation closes on AI, a subject Gary approaches with a nuanced honesty that cuts through both the boosterism and the panic. He doesn't like it, he says plainly, and he is genuinely concerned about the dilution of artist royalties on streaming platforms awash in AI-generated content. But he tells his students to learn it, get out in front of it, and make it do the boring work so they can focus on the creative work, citing engineer David Bowles, who uses AI to mark edit points in live recordings rather than scanning hours of tape himself. Gary closes with news that he is, for the third time in his career, retired, now living in Mexico, heading to the AES show in Nashville in October and the Latin American AES convention in Lima, Peru shortly after. His friends, he admits, no longer believe the retirement will stick.

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In this episode of Stuck on Sound, Joey Stuckey sits down with his dear friend and mentor John Krivit. John is Past President of the Audio Engineering Society, an Emerson College faculty member, founder of the Hey Audio Student Facebook Group, and one of the audio world's most tireless advocates for education and international connection. Joey's conversation with John ranges from a Tascam 388 in a Boston apartment to a broken set of discs in a Colombian granddaughter's hands.

John traces his unlikely entry into audio from rock bands in a Michigan college dorm through a stint working for the notorious music industry figure Morris Levy at a Boston record store, a brief detour through advertising, and a fateful decision to buy a Tascam 388 and start recording anyone who would call. For ten years he built a demo studio, raised his rates a little each month, and eventually started teaching at a Boston college. He expected his career to end in exposure as a fraud when his department chair assigned him to run an AES student chapter. Instead, the job that terrified him became the foundation of everything that followed. By simply staying curious, including inviting a wax cylinder demonstrator, a special agent from the FBI, and producers who had worked with Sly Stone and Jaco Pastorius, John built a reputation and an educational ecosystem that carried him, fifteen years later, to the presidency of the worldwide AES.

The conversation centers on a story that connects acoustic physics to Colombian political history. At a 2019 AES conference in Lima, Peru, John met Professor Ricardo Esquillon of Javeriana University in Bogotá, who told him about Jorge Gaitán, the progressive mayor of Bogotá, champion of the working poor, and near-certain president of Colombia whose speeches were captured on direct-to-disc recordings until his assassination in April 1948 set off riots that left the city burning and the records smashed to pieces. In August 2024, John and Professor Esquillon brought those broken discs to the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Massachusetts and used the IRENE optical imaging system, one of only six in the world, to read sound from the fragments and restore the long-silenced voice of a man erased by violence. John also discusses the 2018 AES Conference on Audio Archiving, Preservation and Restoration at the Library of Congress, the wax cylinder recording demo that introduced this technology to many in the field, and the ongoing debates within the archiving community about how much restoration is too much.

The episode closes on John's vision of audio education as an act of bridge-building: the Pan-American Audio Educators Conference he founded at the World Trade Center in Mexico City, the Istanbul Audio Educators Conference on the horizon, the Hey Audio Student Facebook Group with its seventy-seven million views, and his simple belief that a professor from Macon, Georgia deserves to know a professor from Montevideo, and vice versa. He keeps a ukulele in his car at all times. The parallel is not accidental.

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In this episode of Stuck on Sound, Joey Stuckey welcomes Jennifer Roe, the Executive Director of Folk Alliance International and a former Capitol Hill staffer turned passionate advocate for independent music and the artists who make it. The conversation focuses on community, advocacy, and what it actually takes to run one of the most beloved annual gatherings in American roots music.

Jennifer traces a career path that was anything but straight. She arrived in Washington, D.C. as a 21-year-old political science major, landing an internship in the office of Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, one of the authors of the Americans with Disabilities Act,  before working on his presidential campaign and later at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. When she returned to Kansas City, she shifted into work with individuals with disabilities, eventually building an administrative services business whose clients included Folk Alliance International. What began as a professional relationship became a calling: Jennifer joined FAI full time in 2013 and has since grown its global membership to more than three thousand artists, record companies, publishers, managers, agents, and arts administrators.

At the heart of the conversation is Joey's firsthand enthusiasm for the FAI annual conference, which drew nearly 2,700 attendees in New Orleans, and Jennifer's explanation of what makes it unlike any other music industry gathering. Alongside 160 official showcase slots, hundreds of artists perform in private showcases: late-night, acoustic, intimate sets staged in hotel rooms where the beds have been moved aside to make room for an audience of devoted listeners. Jennifer walks through FAI's work on cultural equity, including the reconvening of its Cultural Equity Council to develop toolkits for members navigating issues of safety, representation, and access, and the organization's ongoing advocacy work, which has taken her back to Capitol Hill to make the economic case for arts funding in rooms where the language of cultural value alone rarely lands. The federal arts landscape is, as both she and Joey acknowledge, at a particularly fraught moment.

The episode closes with Joey's personal account of attending the FAI conference as a blind man navigating a large convention, and his genuine gratitude for how accessible and thoughtfully organized it was, a compliment Jennifer receives with characteristic warmth and a quick request for any improvement ideas listeners might have. She signs off with a reminder that folk.org is where to find showcase applications, membership information, and everything else FAI has to offer, and that the community it represents is worth showing up for.

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In this episode of Stuck on Sound, Joey Stuckey welcomes his friend and colleague Grant Maloy Smith. Grant is a Billboard Top 10 Americana recording artist, MusicRow charting songwriter, Carnegie Hall performer, and one of the most thoughtful musical storytellers working in roots music today. The conversation covers history, craft, independence, and the unlikely intersection of visual art and song.

Grant traces his beginnings to a childhood shaped by his Kentucky grandmother's mountain music (Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers), a peculiar and beloved record collection that included both the Beatles and Captain Kangaroo, and a primary identity as a visual artist, a painter and drawer who seemed destined for art school until, one month before graduating high school, he watched the shyest kid in his class hold a ring of classmates spellbound with a guitar and a song. Grant immediately went home and got himself a guitar. The rest, as he puts it, is history, though making that history took decades of serious work, self-taught music theory, a band that opened for the Guess Who and Steppenwolf, and an eventual commitment to the kind of research-driven Americana storytelling that has defined his most celebrated work.

The conversation digs into Grant's acclaimed American Stories trilogy: Dust Bowl, Appalachia, and Mississippi, each a thematically unified album accompanied by carefully researched liner notes and, in later editions, full hardcover books exploring the history behind every song. Grant explains how each project demands two to three years of deep archival research and writing, and how the series has grown with each installment, from a twelve-song debut with a pamphlet to a sixteen-song Mississippi accompanied by a substantial book. He also previews Wild West: American Stories, an ambitious two-LP vinyl box set with a nearly hundred-page hardcover book releasing on September 18, already available to order on his website at grant-maloy-smith.com, covering the full sweep of the American frontier from the Louisiana Purchase through Lewis and Clark, Sacagawea, and beyond.

Joey and Grant close with a frank and affectionate exchange about the realities of the independent artist's life: the cost of touring, the challenge of original music venues, the joy of performing solo, and the deep satisfaction of continuing to make records that matter to the people who find them. Grant still designs his own album covers, still believes in the 180-gram vinyl record, and still makes music for the same reason he always has: because the story demands to be told.

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In this episode of Stuck on Sound, Joey Stuckey sits down with Larry Villella, lifelong musician, Columbia University alumnus, and founder of ADK Microphones for a conversation that moves effortlessly between Boston recording studios, legendary jazz sessions, the obsessive craft of microphone design, and the pleasures of a life lived in a 500-year-old home in Lecce, Italy.

Larry's origin story begins with a piano at age five and a guitar at ten, and runs through church choirs, barbershop quartets, madrigal groups, and four vocal ensembles in high school before he landed at Columbia University with seventy-five dollars in his pocket and a guitar in one hand. A pivot to Boston — and to a makeshift recording school built around Renaissance Studios, funded by the great-grandson of Eli Lilly — set the course for everything that followed. The school's defining moment came when an instructor arrived one day and announced they would spend a week recording a new artist nobody had heard of. His name was Chick Corea. Larry and his colleagues documented the Circle group, Corea on piano, playing with drumsticks; Anthony Braxton on everything from sopranino saxophone to contrabass clarinet; Dave Holland; and Barry Altschul, an avant-garde experience that threw Larry into the deep end of professional recording and never let him go.

From those early sessions, Larry traces the path that led him to found ADK in 1998 with a clear and contrarian mission: not to clone vintage microphones, but to improve on them. Rather than treating classic tube mics of the late 1940s through early 1960s as the destination, ADK used them as a launchpad, refining capsule design, pursuing transformer combinations through years of testing, and building relationships with golden-eared beta testers like Chuck Ainley and Ronnie Brookshire to get the sound exactly right. The results speak for themselves: ADK microphones have found their way into the hands of Stevie Wonder, Sting, Ray Charles, the Manhattan Transfer, Amy Grant, and sixteen years of Jazz at Lincoln Center, among many others.

The episode closes with Larry describing his current life in Italy practicing Pilates, walking five million steps a year, playing jazz in search of a new band, and working remotely with the ADK team he handed to Miles Fulwider in 2023. He also shares plans for an upcoming live recording session at the legendary Les Paul Studio at United in Los Angeles — no click track, no isolation, just a room full of people making music together and letting it breathe.

Correction: Larry realized it was Chuck Ange, not George Lilly, who was the team leader and principal recordist on the 1971 Chick Corea sessions. He regrets his error.

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In this episode of Stuck on Sound, Joey Stuckey welcomes multi-Grammy Award-winning producer, composer, and performer Lonnie Park for a candid and inspiring conversation about a career built on eclecticism, faith, hard work, and a refusal to be boxed in by genre or geography.

Lonnie's origin story is one of the most memorable in the podcast's run. He grew up in a deeply conservative Baptist home where rock and roll, in fact, virtually any contemporary music with a drumbeat, was forbidden. His first real encounter with rock music came when a friend handed him a copy of the Police's Synchronicity and dared him to explain what was so evil about it. Lonnie dutifully filled a notebook with objections. He was wrong about all of them. Years later, his path would come full circle in the most unexpected way: he ended up producing an album with Stewart Copeland of the Police, which went on to win a Grammy. He told Copeland the story. Copeland laughed his ass off.

Based in Freeville, New York, a one-square town in the middle of nowhere, Lonnie built a career by taking every client in every genre who came through the door, accumulating expertise across jazz, gospel, new age, children's music, world, country, folk, and progressive metal. He holds three Grammy Awards and eight Grammy nominations, as well as a United Nations Action Award, and his work has repeatedly placed him on the Billboard charts. The conversation explores what it means to produce with genuine personal investment. Lonnie describes getting so immersed in a project that he sometimes has to remind himself that the music is not his, and that it is the level of care that separates a good record from a great one.

Joey and Lonnie close with an honest exchange about the economics and mental health realities of life as an independent artist and producer, the promises and perils of AI in creative work, and the advice Lonnie gives anyone who asks how to make it: forget about making it, and remember why you started. Almost every meaningful break in his career, he notes, came not from strategy but from showing up fully and letting the work speak.

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In Episode 16 of Stuck on Sound, Joey Stuckey reconnects with Tim Duffy, co-founder of the Music Maker Foundation, for a soulful conversation about roots music, cultural preservation, dignity, and the artists whose voices deserve to be heard.

Tim reflects on meeting Joey years ago at Adam’s Lounge in Georgia, one of those real musical places where history, community, and raw talent all collide. From there, he shares the mission behind Music Maker: supporting traditional American musicians not only by recording and presenting their work, but by helping meet real day-to-day needs so they can continue creating.

The episode explores Tim’s decades of field recording, artist relationships, juke joints, gospel traditions, blues culture, and the hidden musical depth of places like Georgia, North Carolina, and the rural South. He discusses Music Maker’s work with hundreds of artists, thousands of performances, museum exhibitions, international tours, and a catalog built around preserving voices that might otherwise never reach the wider world.

Joey and Tim also dig into the modern challenges facing musicians, from the collapse of old record-business models to social media pressure, AI music, sync disruption, and the difficulty of building sustainable careers in an attention economy. But the heart of the conversation is hope: music as healing, purpose, rehabilitation, and a way of restoring dignity.

The result is a moving episode about friendship, service, preservation, and the belief that America’s deepest musical treasures are often found far from the spotlight.

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In this episode of Stuck on Sound, Joey Stuckey welcomes Jonathan Wyner, mastering engineer, Berklee professor, past president of the Audio Engineering Society, chief engineer at M Works Studios, and head of artistic technology initiatives at Berklee's Emerging Artistic Technology Lab (BEATL), for a deeply thoughtful conversation about what it means to spend a life in service of other people's music and ideas.

Jonathan traces his path from a childhood home full of music and technology, where a substitute teacher running an ARP 2600 through a microphone drilled into a trombone mouthpiece ignited a lifelong obsession, through a French horn performance degree, a six-week recording workshop in Ohio, and eventually a career that has taken him into sessions with James Taylor, David Bowie, Aerosmith, Miles Davis, Nirvana, Pink Floyd, Bruce Springsteen, and dozens more over the course of more than five thousand recordings. He talks candidly about what drew him to the engineer's chair rather than the microphone, a combination of musical passion, shyness, and the realization that working with great artists could be just as fulfilling as being one.

The conversation digs into the practical realities of getting started in recording, what gear actually matters at the beginning, why headphones can be a legitimate starting point, and how training your ears on honest monitoring shapes every decision you will ever make in the studio. Jonathan offers clear, grounded advice for anyone working with limited resources, grounded in decades of teaching at Berklee and Berklee Online.

Joey and Jonathan also explore the central question of Jonathan's current work at BEATL: how artists, educators, and the music industry at large should engage with AI and emerging technology in ways that are honest, musically grounded, and attentive to questions of authorship and identity. Jonathan brings a nuanced perspective; he is neither a pure skeptic nor an uncritical enthusiast, and his sense of responsibility to represent working musicians in conversations with developers and policymakers gives the discussion real weight. The episode is a masterclass in how to think carefully about the tools we use and why.

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In Episode 14 of Stuck on Sound, Joey Stuckey sits down with acclaimed producer, musician, author, and creative strategist Michael Beinhorn for a wide-ranging conversation about records, risk, taste, technology, and what a producer is really there to do.

Michael reflects on his early years co-founding the New York musical collective Material with Bill Laswell, his work on Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit,” and the path that led him into producing era-defining records for artists including Red Hot Chili Peppers, Soundgarden, Hole, Marilyn Manson, Soul Asylum, Korn, and others. Joey opens with a personal story about discovering, after meeting Michael, that he had produced one of Joey’s favorite albums of all time: Soundgarden’s Superunknown.

From there, the conversation explores the deeper craft of record-making: how to recognize the emotional center of a song, why great records often require discomfort, and how a producer must sometimes serve as captain, translator, psychologist, and truth-teller. Michael talks candidly about band dynamics, the pressure of high-stakes sessions, the danger of mediocrity, and the importance of helping artists push beyond their first or easiest ideas.

Joey and Michael also discuss the evolution of recording from live band performance to modern editing, the creative value of limitations, and the difference between using technology as a tool versus allowing it to flatten human expression. Michael offers a nuanced take on AI, arguing that the real issue is not simply the tool itself, but the way it is being marketed, deployed, and used to replace rather than deepen human creativity.

The episode closes with Michael’s current work in remote production and artist development, showing that the producer’s core job has not changed: listen deeply, respond honestly, and help artists make the strongest work they are capable of making.

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