North Carolina writer Bill Kopp has one of those résumés you dream of as a music journalist. On March 1, he’ll be at the Sigal Music Museum in Greenville to talk about his career in a program called “Adventures in Music Journalism.”
Over a more than 20-year career, Kopp has written for seminal music magazines and websites including Spin, Grammy.com, Record Collector, Goldmine, Billboard, Shindig! and Trouser Press. He has also done extensive writing for the Grammy Awards website and maintains a thriving website (musoscribe.com) with hundreds of articles and interviews.
He has written three books: “Disturbing the Peace: 415 Records and the Rise of New Wave” (2021), “Reinventing Pink Floyd: From Syd Barrett to The Dark Side of the Moon” (2018) and “What’s the Big Idea? 30 Great Concept Albums” (2025). I consider “Reinventing Pink Floyd” to be the definitive account of Pink Floyd’s pre-“Dark Side” years.
At the Sigal Music Museum, he’ll discuss his interviews, interludes and awkward moments with artists such as David Gilmour of Pink Floyd, the Avett Brothers, Tony Bennett, Clint Black, Bootsy Collins and Shawn Colvin.
“I’m going to give people a bit of history and some anecdotes about some of the more unusual interviews that I’ve conducted,” Kopp told me. “I’ve done more than 1,300, so there have been a couple of wacky ones in there. And then there have been a lot of really good ones where I sit and think, ‘This is why I do this.’”
For Kopp, as it was for me, writing about the music he loved wasn’t a choice.
“I always knew from before I even started kindergarten what I wanted to do for a living,” he said. “I didn’t know exactly what a music journalist was, but I knew I wanted to be one. At a really young age, I started paying attention to the DJs on the radio who would tell us who the artist was. I made a note of those things. From that point forward, I was interested in knowing who was making this music and what their stories were. And obviously the older I got, the more nuanced those questions became and the more I wanted to find the answers.”
Kopp will also talk about becoming a better interviewer thanks to a captive audience: his wife, Audrey.
“She would hear me doing my interviews, and she would hear me interrupt,” he said with a laugh. “I would talk over my interviewees, and I don’t do that anymore because she said, ‘Stop doing that! Let them talk!’”
Want to go?
Who: Bill Kopp, “Adventures in Music Journalism”
When: March 1, 3 p.m.
Where: Sigal Music Museum, 516 Buncombe St., Greenville
Tickets and info: Free, but registration is required in advance at sigalmusicmuseum.org
