2025 really gave John Popper the runaround. As he reveals in the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, a series of health mishaps nearly killed him this year, multiple times — but he’s made it through, and the harmonica virtuoso is convinced Blues Traveler is playing better than ever.
In his only interview of the year, Popper looked back at 30 years of the band’s breakthrough singles, “Run-Around” and “Hook,” which charted in 1995 (even though Four, the album the album that spawned them, dropped the year before). He also discussed his disdain for the harmonica playing of Bob Dylan and Alanis Morissette, and much more. A few highlights from the episode follow; to hear the whole episode, go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above.
Popper barely made it through 2025. During routine surgeries for carpal tunnel syndrome, doctors noticed he had a heart flutter. When Popper went back in for a procedure to fix that issue, a doctor managed to nick his femoral artery. “I lost about a liter and a half of blood in my leg,” Popper says. He managed to play a private gig two days later, then noticed he was bleeding again, and headed back to a different hospital for three more surgeries. Later, on his honeymoon in Italy, he slipped on his way out of the shower and bashed his head open: “For the second time this year, my wife got to call the ambulance, this time in a foreign language.”
Popper wanted to add some facts about his personal life into the public record, for Wikipedia’s sake. “I got remarried just over a year ago… to a wonderful woman I’ve known for 21 years,” he says. “When I go on Wikipedia, there’s no evidence that she exists. And that’s been driving both of us crazy for the better part of a year. And there’s no way that Wikipedia is going to defy Rolling Stone.” He adds that he first met his new wife, Sherri “Gidget” Popper, at a nudist colony in 2003.
Sobriety is helping Blues Traveler onstage. “Over the last few years, [guitarist] Chan [Kinchla] has gotten completely sober, which means I basically have to be sober because when he’s on, he’s a monster,” Popper says. “The band is essentially sober now. Through no fault of our own… it just kind of happened that way, I guess ’cause we’re getting old. But the result is I am singing really well and we’re playing really well. After 38 years, we are playing about as well as we ever have.”
Bob Dylan is, in Popper’s expert opinion, the worst harmonica player among rock legends. “You literally have to just breathe in and out,” Popper says of Dylan’s technique. “ Bruce [Springsteen’s] generation were all given permission by Bob Dylan to not have any profundity at that instrument. It was almost like, not a kazoo, but it was getting close.” But he reserves his strongest words for Alanis Morissette’s playing: “She managed to fit the entire thing in her mouth… It is terrible and she insists on still playing it.”
Popper developed a phobia around Timothée Chalamet after he watched Dune during a bout of Covid. ”I fell asleep to Dune and I kept having these fever dreams that Timothée Chalamet was a terminator coming to kill me,” he says. “And I would lshoot him a hundred times and he just kept coming back and he was unstoppable. And it gave me a fear of Timothée Chalamet until I saw A Complete Unknown.
Popper believes his weight helped audiences relate to the story of unrequited romance in “Run Around.” “My obesity made me somebody you root for,” he says. “The fact that he’s that fat guy who doesn’t get the girl makes people root for you.. A lot of people said when I lost weight, ‘I used to like you better when you were fat.’ And that’s because I was not threatening.”
Blues Traveler, Spin Doctors, and Gin Blossoms plan to tour together again in 2026. “People really love that,” Popper says of the package tour. “We’re gonna go everywhere we didn’t go. There’s a lot of places left that wanna see it. We sold really phenomenally compared to everybody else last year.”
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