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, Govt. 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. I had heard the song thousands of times, but the recording felt like it had a new lease on life, like had just sprinkled magic all over it.” “I felt like I was stoned listening to it.
“We had a record player in the studio, so we put the vinyl on after it had been mastered, and Adam and I, we were just so stoked,” says Everett. When Everett first heard Calbi’s completed master of “Thinking of a Place,” he was with the band’s leader, Adam Granduciel, at Electric Lady Studios. “I was talking about color and shapes and all these things that some people would just completely ignore,” says Everett. Everett felt the song was still missing something, even if he could barely articulate what that something was. To describe what he envisioned for the single, a dreamy, meandering 11-minute rocker, Everett called Calbi, a veteran mastering engineer who’s worked on records by everyone from Muddy Waters to Taylor Swift.