Broken Social Scene's "Stay Happy" is one of five new songs that I'm loving and wrote about for NPR Music and World Cafe.

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Broken Social Scene's "Stay Happy" is one of five new songs that I'm loving and wrote about for NPR Music and World Cafe.
World Cafe Playlist for 07/12/2017
Paul Shaffer joins Talia Schlanger on World Cafe
Stream the complete show here
*The Police - âKing Of Painâ - Synchronicity
World Cafe Guest: Â Paul Shaffer Paul Shaffer - âHappy Streetâ - Paul Shaffer and the Worldâs Most Dangerous Band James Brown - âSex Machineâ - James Brown on Letterman Warren Zevon - âRoland The Headless Thompson Gunnerâ - The Late Show with David Letterman Paul Shaffer - âHollywood Swingingâ - Recorded Live For The World Cafe" - Paul Shaffer - âWhy Canât We Live Togetherâ - Paul Shaffer and The Worldâs Most Dangerous Band Paul Shaffer - âThis Is Spinal Tap (Artie Fufkin scene)â - Recorded Live For The World Cafe St. Vincent - âNew Yorkâ - single David Bowie - âLife On Mars?â - Hunky Dory Ryan Adams - âNew York New Yorkâ - Gold
Hour Two *Phish - âSimpleâ - A Live One Maggie Rogers - âAlaskaâ - Now That The Light Is Fading Blur - âThereâs No Other Wayâ - Leisure Grizzly Bear - âMourning Soundâ - Painted Ruins Vampire Weekend - âDiane Youngâ - Modern Vampires Of The City Lo Moon - âThis Is Itâ - single Death Cab For Cutie - âTitle And Registrationâ - Transatlanticism Valerie June - âShakedownâ - The Order of Time Ry Cooder - âGet Rhythmâ - Get Rhythm Johnny Cash - âRusty Cageâ - Unchained Belle & Sebastian - âI Want The World To Stopâ - Belle & Sebastian Write About Love The Cure - âFriday Iâm In Loveâ - Wish The War On Drugs - âHolding Onâ - A Deeper Understanding The Posies - âDream All Dayâ - Frosting On The Beater Folk Implosion - âNatural Oneâ - Kids (soundtrack)
*Optional Song
Paul Shaffer and the band on World Cafe. Dig in.
ALL RESPECT ALL CAPS
A Message From The City Of Brotherly Love
@worldcafeâs Talia Schlanger is one of the judges for this yearâs Tiny Desk Contest, and she has a special message for all the undiscovered musicians out there: Give it a shot.
Enter the Contest between Jan. 13 and 29 for your chance to play the Tiny Desk at NPR HQ and go on tour with NPR Music and Lagunitas. Taliaâs fellow judges include BANKS, Anthony Hamilton, Miguel, Ben Hopkins of PWR BTTM, Trey Anastasio of Phish, Bob Boilen & Robin Hilton of All Songs Considered, Rita Houston of WFUV and Stas THEE Boss of KEXP.
If youâre interested in entering the 2017 Tiny Desk Contest, check out the Official Rules and film your video! Weâre taking submissions from Jan. 13 until 11:59 p.m. ET on Jan. 29.
100 Albums I Hope You Listened To In 2016
Yes, I know, Iâm tardy for the party. Gonna be honest though, Iâm not a fan of reducing all the amazing music Iâve listened to over the course of a year to a top what-have-you list.Â
 Sure, itâs something Iâve always done for my jobs over the years, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, but itâs always felt like Iâm totally excluding a whole slew of other worthy records â and also failing to account for music from a given year year that I donât arrive at until much later, for one reason or another â and Iâd wager most fellow music obsessives are in the same school of thought as me.Â
 Definitive takes are a lie. Hierarchy is a tool of the patriarchy, and an increasingly irrelevant one. Thereâs got to be another way. So this year, for my own year-in-the-rearview recap, I gathered together a list of 100 unranked albums, presented alphabetically. Gonna be honest again â it was ridiculously difficult getting the list down to 100, even, so thereâs about 20 honorable mentions at the bottom, and if I didnât tell myself I had to stop at some point, thereâd be who knows how many more.Â
 A lot of these are probably on everybodyâs list (Beyonce). Many of these are probably on nobodyâs list (King Azaz, anyone?). If you want the quick takeaway, hereâs a playlist of as much of this as I could find on Spotify.Â
 I encourage you to listen, reflect, broaden your sights (uh, sounds?) and go into 2017 wanting to absorb as much new music as possible. Especially considering itâs a year thatâs poised to be rockier than the one weâre kicking out the door, itâs important that we listen to what people - especially voices from marginalized communities - are saying to us through art.Â
 Itâs all happening now, friends. Donât sleep.
Keep reading
Watch Bon Iver Live In Concert, Filmed By NPR Music
On December 4th, Bon Iver played at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn. We filmed it.
Watch it now.
The Tiny Desk Contest Is Back!
Grab your desk, call your friends, and get ready for another Tiny Desk Contest! If you think you have what it takes to play @nprmusicâs Tiny Desk, then film a video of you or your band performing an original song behind a desk of your choosing and submit it to npr.org/tinydeskcontest. The winner will play a Tiny Desk and tour the United States of America with NPR Music and @lagunitasbeer.
Third timeâs the charm. Good luck everybody â stay tuned on this blog, our newsletter, All Songs Considered and the Tiny Desk Contest website for updates.
In Desk We Trust,
Bob, Ben, Rachel & Marissa
If youâre interested in entering the contest, check out the Official Rules and film your video! Weâre taking submissions from Jan. 13 until 11:59 p.m. ET on Jan. 29.
Kendrick Lamar at Panorama Festival 2016
Kendrick stood before a packed crowd with towering recaps of America behind himâfrom The 2004 NBA brawl to Bill O'Reillyâs viral teleprompter video. âWe gonâ celebrate life, we gonâ celebrate our life,â Lamar said just before dedicating the highly energized and powerful âAlright.â Truly an unforgettable way to end the second night of the festival. - Brandi
Photo: Brandi Fullwood/NPR
i'm not even gonna say rest in peace because itâs bigger than death. i never met the man (i was too nervous the one time i saw him) and i never saw him play live, regrettably. i only know the legends Iâve heard from folks and what iâve heard and seen from his deep catalog of propellant, fearless, virtuosic work. my assessment is that he learned early on how little value to assign to someone elseâs opinion of you.. an infectious sentiment that seemed soaked into his clothes, his hair, his walk, his guitar and his primal scream. he wrote my favorite song of all time, âwhen you were mineâ. itâs a simple song with a simple melody that makes you wish you thought of it first, even though you never would have - a flirtatious brand of genius that feels approachable.  he was a straight black man who played his first televised set in bikini bottoms and knee high heeled boots, epic. he made me feel more comfortable with how i identify sexually simply by his display of freedom from and irreverence for obviously archaic ideas like gender conformity etc. he moved me to be more daring and intuitive with my own work by his demonstration - his denial of the prevailing model...his fight for his intellectual property - âslaveâ written across the forehead, name changed to a symbol... an all out rebellion against exploitation. A vanguard and genius by every metric I know of who affected many in a way that will outrun oblivion for a long while. Iâm proud to be a Prince fan(stan) for life.
Hereâs The Thing About Audio And News And NPR One, To The Degree That I Know Anything
Weâre doing a neat thing with Pop Culture Happy Hour (the podcast I host) for the month of April, where itâs being made available a day early on NPR One, which is NPRâs app that they call âlike Pandora for public radioâ because thatâs as close as you can get without acknowledging or claiming the not-that-humble truth, which is that it is and has the potential to be something that has never really existed, at least in this way. Now: What I am currently writing, nobody asked me to write, nobody at work knows Iâm writing, nobody at work talked to me about. I didnât ask for permission to write it, let alone get an instruction to write it. But as you know if you follow radio/audio world at all, it has been a ⌠tumultuous? ⌠month for public chatter about NPR and the future and digital and radio and blah blah blah, so weâre going to jam some of that in here, too.Â
First, the background: When you fire up NPR One, you get a combination of: (1) newscasts (the top-of-the-hour and other-times-of-the-hour roundups of current news that exist both nationally â they make them downstairs from my desk â and locally on member stations; (2) stories from NPR news magazines like All Things Considered and Morning Edition; (3) local news stories like, in my case, the stories that come out of WAMU (yours would vary); (4) local projects I would classify as âother cool thingsâ â more on that in a sec; (5) NPR podcasts like mine or Wait Wait Donât Tell Me or All Songs Considered; (6) other peopleâs podcasts, like ones created at stations but also some created in other podcast networks â you can get Another Round from Buzzfeed or The Allusionist from Radiotopia or Judge John Hodgman from Maximum Fun or whatever. (NPR One is actually where I first heard The Allusionist.) It has a skip button, and you can skip as much as you want. It knows which member station is yours (it guesses based on your location, but you can change it if youâre nostalgic for your hometown or whatever, or if thereâs another member station you prefer for news or other reasons).Â
Like Pandora or other similar apps, it gradually learns what youâre interested in from what you skip and what you mark âinteresting,â and it shifts what it serves you, although the algorithm is built so that you donât stop getting world news (or whatever) entirely just because you sometimes arenât in the mood. It has a share function so you can tweet or otherwise nudge other people to a story if you like it. It also gives you the opportunity to donate to your station â it actually puts a button on the screen that will take you right there. There are sometimes promos (I know because I record them for our show) where as the promo is running, the screen has a button you can hit to hear the show. Itâs pretty cool.
I personally have sort of dabbled off and on with NPR One, to be perfectly candid. Iâve liked it but not gotten fully into the habit, and I havenât listened to it a lot recently, though I knew theyâd been really ramping up the content and particularly trying to make more robust the local/national mix. Because weâre doing this experiment, I really felt like I should sit with it for a while, and because I was on a four-hour road trip one day, I decided to put it on in the car and let it run for a while and see what the current state of things is.Â
Even as somebody whoâs a pretty big booster of cool-ass audio projects, I have to admit was surprised by how great it was. That is not a company-person opinion; that is my real opinion. I basically let it run with little if any skipping for four hours, and nobody was watching. I wouldnât have done it if I hadnât been happy.Â
Some of what I heard: Ask Me Another with Wyatt Cenac, Ari Shapiro talking to an expert on health trends, Audie Cornish doing a really interesting interview with a singer out of South By Southwest, a delightful and interesting episode of the NPR Politics Podcast with NPRâs politics reporters updating me on campaign news, an interview about the Egypt Air hijacking putting it in the context of the âskyjackingâ period of the â60s and early â70s; a Planet Money about tipping; an arts story from Neda Ulaby about YA novels dealing with consent in the context of sex between characters, a segment related to a project out of WAMU in Washington called Anacostia Unmapped thatâs part of a larger project called Localore (one of my favorite pieces of radio Iâve heard in a while), local news about minimum wage legislation in Maryland and D.C., local news about the construction of the Purple Line between Bethesda and New Carrollton, and a couple of newscasts. It was a really fun, really diverting listen, but I also felt like I got my news, my local stuff, my thoughtful reflections, my culture. I got on-demand listening and storytelling and podcasts without giving up news and local content. It was more my speed than I would have gotten from a single radio station, I think, but it was also more my speed than what I would have gotten from just a series of podcasts.Â
So a thing thatâs weird about radio and podcasting is that people who basically agree with each other â in my opinion â spend a lot of time arguing about radio versus podcasts, as if itâs a superhero movie that will have one winner. Quite honestly, if youâre talking strictly about literal delivery mechanisms, Iâm pretty agnostic about whether or not thatâs true. On the one hand, are some people replacing some or all of their radio listening with digital listening? Of course, obviously. On the other hand, particularly if you have any sensitivity at all to digital divides, the continuing existence of people who were raised with radio and arenât looking to become smartphone users (or whatever), or other considerations we might call Not Everybody In The World Is You And Your Friends, you know that just as a ton of people still watch television on television and only dopes say nobody watches television on a television anymore, a ton of people still listen to the radio, and at the very least, they will be doing that for a while. If youâre arguing that delivery-wise, digital fully has replaced radio, youâre at the very least super early unless youâre talking about very particular slices of the population. At the same time, would I stake my entire future on where terrestrial radio will be in 20 years? I would not.Â
But I donât actually think these are delivery-mechanism arguments; thatâs not whatâs so emotional about them. I will tell you: I love podcasts, but I almost went up on stage and took the head off of a podcast network guy I once heard smugly asserting that podcasting was fully prepared to fully replace what public radio had been doing for so long. That is not true, at least right now, at all, unless by âwhat public radio had been doingâ you mean âputting things in your ears that are worth listening toâ â in which case you could say the same thing about audiobooks, honestly. Â
In its current form, podcasting â at least what most people mean when they talk about podcasting, which is projects that have reasonably big audiences â is brilliant and fascinating and fun and wise and informative and mind-opening and weird and smart and funny and innovative, but itâs still very limited in two of the most important areas that public radio exists to cover: one is local stuff, and the other is ⌠you know, the news.Â
So right now, when longtime radio people hear âradio doesnât matter anymore,â I think they sometimes hear ânews doesnât matter.â And when they hear âI donât need my local terrestrial radio station,â they hear âI donât need to know whatâs happening in my city.â Because if you actually implemented your shift in listening in entirely that way â if you replaced public radio listening with popular and highly regarded podcasts as they stand right now â you would gain lots of interesting content. And you would, candidly, make gains in coverage of some kinds of issues and, if you chose correctly, in the availability of a variety of voices. There would be an upside. But as it stands right now, you would probably not get a lot of news from your city (unless your city is New York, LA, Chicago or Boston), and you would not get a lot of news in general.Â
What you would get is a lot of what Iâm going to call âfeatures.â And this is where this entire conversation collides with another old argument, which is snobbery about features as compared to other kinds of stories. But what listening to public radio has always done is mix lots of different kinds of stories, right? You do get the bullet-point updates on the news of the day, and you do get stuff thatâs driven by that news of the day, but then you also get other stories that pause and explore things in somewhat more detail.Â
This is very tricky, because thereâs a tendency to treat the idea of features like youâre saying the work is ⌠soft, or less âimportant.â I donât happen to think that at all, not only because that can mean longform stuff like the Harper High episodes of This American Life, but because even with less heavy content, you still get knowledge and background and things that are meaningful to your life and that educate you â I think of a recent Reply All that was about Verizon FIOS installations, which sounded like almost literally the most boring topic for a podcast thatâs ever been conceived, but actually turned out to be a totally riveting examination of a bunch of things about how large companies work that are really important to consumers. âFeatureâ and âfluffâ are not the same thing at all; there are wonderful, crucial pieces of longer-form, higher-touch, longer-prep-time journalism that are just as important to your development as a functioning human and citizen as what youâre going to get from day-of reporting. (And thereâs plenty to address about day-of reporting, though thatâs not my area of expertise.)
I also kind of need to know from day to day whatâs happening in the world; that still matters to me. I think it makes people more interesting, if nothing else, and more able to engage about and be smart about more things. And right now, podcasting isnât great at that, and public radio can be. Itâs very common for podcast stories to take weeks at the least to be made; thatâs part of why theyâre so awesome. Itâs also common for them to be esoteric in wonderful, extraordinary, unexpected ways.Â
I ⌠I still also need, despite how much I adore panel shows and comedy shows and storytelling shows, somebody to tell me what happened today and this week. I think thatâs an objective good. I think not having that in your life at all would be ⌠not good. And sure, there are other places to get news besides audio world, but there are other places to get features besides audio world, too. If we posit that we care about good audio and we ever cared about public radio (and if I didnât, I wouldnât be here/still be here), then letting news and local stuff drop out as a side effect of changes in the delivery mechanism is a problem the lamenting of which has nothing â NOTHING â to do with Luddites or fear of change. Thatâs not to say there arenât also Luddites and fear of change, but sometimes the person youâre assuming is weirdly attached to terrestrial radio is in fact not-at-all-weirdly attached to news and telling you about your local government, and theyâd be perfectly happy if you listened to that on the internet instead of on the radio, but theyâre not thrilled about people not listening to it at all, or about people assuming everything has to be, for lack of a better word, fun. As a friend who works in news and is fun (believe me) once told me (I am paraphrasing only a little), âItâs ⌠the news; I canât promise itâs always going to be entertaining with tons of personality.âÂ
Whatâs exciting about the promise of NPR One to me is that for those people whose listening is moving to digital, it helps decouple this issue of whether you listen to news from this issue of whether you listen to the radio. Thatâs not to say itâs the only thing that ever could and I donât think itâs the only thing that ever will, but itâs ⌠a really, really nice effort, I think, and I say that as much as a consumer as anything else.Â
This, of course, is totally separate from the work that public radio still has to do in the areas of coverage and voices and tone and whatever else. Those are completely different issues, theyâre totally valid, and itâs on everybody in the system to earn the loyalty and the trust of the audience, no matter how they want to get stuff. But itâs an important step, to me, to start to find ways you can have podcasts and you can have on-demand audio and you can have fun and you can have John Hodgman and chat shows and game shows AND you can have the stories of your own cityâs neighborhoods AND you can have what happened today in a straight-newscast format and what happened today in a magazine-show format, and you donât have to go in every case to a different app to make that happen. This is one button, like the radio. It gives a mix, like the radio, and you trust some editorial judgment in creating that mix, like the radio.Â
Whatâs more, whatâs in that mix is being tweaked to a degree to meet your interests in something like the middle where you are still nudged to listen to a variety of things no matter what you skip or mark, but you donât have to wait through every single thing thatâs not your speed or every single thing you just donât feel like in that moment. (There are days I cannot listen to stories about war, and LOTS of days I cannot listen to stories about the campaign, and there are times when I have already heard three or four things about a book or a movie and I canât listen to more.)
It is increasingly my position that people who care about this stuff just do not have time or energy to spare to argue about things that arenât hard, because too many things are hard. Content is hard, persuading people to pay for quality is hard, hearing enough voices is hard, changing habits that arenât productive is hard, earning trust is hard, challenging assumptions is hard, adapting is hard, being brave about change is hard, protecting your standards is hard. Deciding between news and storytelling, deciding between making radio and making digital audio, and deciding between national and local are things that, I think, do not have to be hard.Â
Miley #fuckedup (at Electric Factory)
#xpnsoul @wxpnfm is playing every #1 soul hit from the 70s this weekend.
Words to live by.
Best of 2015. The magnificent 7 1 â Kamasi Washington, The Epic 2 â Kendrick Lamar, To Pimp A Butterfly 3 - Alabama Shakes, Sound & Color 4 â Drake, If Youâre Reading This Its Too Late 5 â Sufjan Stevens, Carrie & Lowell 6 â Tame Impala, Currents 7 â Leon Bridges, Coming Home The rest (albums) Adele â 25 A$AP Rocky â At.Long.Last.A$AP Ata Kak â Obaa Sima Compton â Dr. Dre Courtney Barnett â Sometimes I Sit and Think and Sometimes I Just Sit Dawes â All Your Favorite Bands Deerhunter â Fading Frontier Erykah Badu â But You Cainât Use My Phone Father John Misty â I Love You, Honeybear Foals â What Went Down Future â DS2 Grimes â Art Angels Hiatus Kaiyote â Choose Your Weapon Hop Along â Painted Shut Jamie XX â In Colour Jason Isbell â Something More Than Free Jeff Lynneâs ELO â Alone In The Universe Josh Ritter â Sermon On The Rocks Julien Baker â Sprained Ankle Kacey Musgraves â Pagaent Material Lianne La Havas - Blood Mbongwana Star â From Kinshasa My Morning Jacket â The Waterfall Natalie Prass â Natalie Prass Ryan Adams â 1989 The Weather Station - Loyalty Tobias Jesso Jr. â Goon Travis Scott - Rodeo Vince Staples â Summertime â06 Waxahatchee â Ivy Tripp Singular moments of 2015 Cant Feel My Face â The Weeknd Hotline Bling â Drake Pedestrian at Best â Courtney Barnett White Iverson â Post Malone Them Changes â Thundercat Opus â Eric Prydz What About The Rest Of Us â Action Bronson, Joey Bada$$ Shutdown â Skepta Go â Chemical Brothers Coffee â Miguel Blackstar â David Bowie SOB â Nathaniel Ratefliff & The Night Sweats Dream Lover â Destroyer Should Have Known Better â Sufjan Stevens Let It Happen â Tame Impala One Time â Marian Hill How Deep Is Your Love â Calvin Harris & Disciples I Can Never Be Myself When Youâre Around â Chromatics Loud Places â Jamie XX Call It Off â Shamir Trap Queen â Fetty Wap What Do You Mean? â Justin Bieber Admiration â The Frightnrs
XPN Songs
Listening to WXPN (public radio out of Philadelphia, PA) is a family tradition. In the fall of 2005, my dad had been living out his west coast dream for about a year, while I was freshly on my own in Harrisburg and making music without the distraction of college to hold me back. And sometime that fall, in our weekly phone calls, dad began to talk about XPN. He would reference all the new music he was streaming via the station website, and how it was his way of keeping a bit of Pennsylvania with him from 3,000 miles away. And even though I was the musician in the family, heâd be the one to tell me first about upcoming albums from Death Cab For Cutie, or Kanye West, or Citizen Cope.Â
So I started listening too, and happened to tune in just in time to hear my very first XPN 885 countdown. I came in somewhere during the middle of the 885 Greatest Albums of All Time, and have the most vivid memory of hearing Tom Waits for the very first time in my life, singing Tom Traubertâs Blues (or Waltzing Matilda, as I assumed was the title at the time). The vibe of the music played on XPN, as varied and diverse as it was, became something uniquely identifiable to me. I would hear a song somewhere out in the world and think of it as âXPN music.â Friends and family would begin telling me at shows or after hearing a new song, âYou should really send your stuff to XPN.â I think a few of them even sent cds to the station on my behalf.Â
And eventually, while writing the dark songs of Alleys in summer of 2006, I even wrote and recorded a tune called âXPN Song.â It was never really meant for Alleys, but it told part of the same story, and reflected my helplessness and hopelessness about love, life, and music at the time. Truthfully, that song was the first moment I began to really wonder, âWill I ever see my dream come true?â It predicted my future, in many ways.Â
As far as my dadâs then-future goes, although he never lived in Central PA again, he continued to stream XPN online for the rest of his life. He continued to hunger for the discovery of new (and new old) music, and in his Chardon, OH days (2007-2010) he made a series of car mixes that are now among my most prized possessions (Iâve included a scan of a few of them below). Exploring themes like âRoad Songsâ and âNew Classics,â he really carried the torch for a dying trend in perfecting the art of the perfect mix cd. Everytime I make a mix now, I think of him. And everytime I tune in to XPN online, or on glorious car radio when Iâm in the area, I remember those phone calls and long for the days when my dad knew what was coming on the airwaves long before I did. And I hear him speak, so vividly: âMaybe Iâll tune in and hear your XPN Song playing someday.âÂ
If youâd like to become an XPN member or make a pledge of support, today (Giving Tuesday) is a great time to do it! When they hit the â200 new membersâ mark today, theyâll be receiving a $10,000 Challenge Grant from The Grateful Foundation. I hope youâll go explore the site, stream some music, taste the vibe, and help this favorite radio station of mine continue carrying the torch for lovers of great music everywhere.Â
love letter to @wxpnfm
Kobe #lowermerionaces