A long-form conversation with Jason Verlinde is now available.
We talk about Leo Kottke/6- and 12-String Guitar: A Companion—how it came to be, why we approached the 1969 album as an important cultural document, and what it takes to preserve music with real fidelity (not just the notes, but the context that helps the music remain alive).
We also get into the large question that has guided most of my work: how do you document music so that a player isn’t merely adjacent to it, but can actually understand it? That question leads naturally to archives, to how and why I began filming artists in the early 1980s, and to what we hope the archives can become over the long term.