It’s impossible to come up with exact figures, but Calbi, 72, estimates that he’s mastered roughly 8,000 records during his career. “It’s fucking hot, and getting anywhere near the Staples Center is a nightmare.” “It’s such a pain in the ass,” he says of the show. It’s also the cause for the most high-profile exposure in the career of one of music’s most firmly behind-the-scenes wizards: Calbi had never met or even spoken with Musgraves when, in February 2019, he suddenly found himself standing several feet to her left onstage as Musgraves accepted the Grammy for Album of the Year.Ĭalbi, a Queens native and longtime New Jersey resident, was honored to receive the award, but broadly speaking has little patience for the pageantry of awards shows like the Grammys. The latter LP in particular has been Calbi’s most high-profile achievement of late, and is partially responsible for the influx of work he’s seen in the last few years. He’ll right on the spot.”ĭuring a recent interview at Sterling Sound’s New Jersey studio, Calbi interspersed conversation about gear and tech specs with with references to working on landmark albums, from Graceland to Golden Hour. “And he’ll put his headphones on and start tweaking in the box, then put it in a thumb drive, and then I put it in and start working with that version. “Kevin always comes in for mastering, and if I make a comment, he’ll go, ‘Hold on a minute, let me give you another one,’ ” Calbi explains. Though he’s reticent to rehash stories of the most famous classic Seventies and Eighties albums he’s worked on, he does mention offhand the method in which John Lennon preferred to listen to his final mixes (on a copy of an acetate he’d play at home), how Julian Casablancas fell asleep in the studio during the mastering of Is This It, how friendly Emmylou Harris is when she’s smoking cigarettes throughout the mastering process, how he’s never even spoken with Bob Dylan despite having mastered 20 or so of his records, or how working with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker works. Speaking with Calbi can feel like taking a survey course in rock and pop history.
“He does the right thing, and if something doesn’t need a push he doesn’t do it just to do it.”
“Greg has always had the ears I trust,” says Norah Jones, who’s worked with Calbi on seven albums. (Calbi, who, earlier this year began sharing credit with fellow Sterling engineer Steve Fallone on all his projects, just earned four Grammy nominations for his work on the Swift and Gaga/Bennett albums.) Mule, Julien Baker, Dinosaur Jr., the Staves, Switchfoot, Chris Thile, Steve Gunn, Aaron Lee Tasjan, Damien Jurado, the Lumineers, Wanda Jackson, Drive-By Truckers, Laura Stevenson, and the War on Drugs. In 2021 alone, Calbi has worked on records by Musgraves, Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga, Adia Victoria, Valerie June, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Gov’t. Landing in the credits of those landmark LP’s earned him a job in 1976 at the mastering studio Sterling Sound, where Calbi is still busy at work to this day. His work began at the Record Plant in Manhattan in the early-to-mid–Seventies where a twentysomething Calbi stumbled into working on classics like Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run and David Bowie’s Young Americans. In his nearly 50 years as a mastering engineer, Greg Calbi has been sprinkling his magic over thousands of records.