© 2024 | Jefferson Public Radio
Southern Oregon University
1250 Siskiyou Blvd.
Ashland, OR 97520
541.552.6301 | 800.782.6191
Listen | Discover | Engage a service of Southern Oregon University
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

How 'Roxanne' changed Sting's life and more stories from his back catalog

In every musician's career, there are the songs that stand out among the rest. Perhaps it's a song that changed everything for them, the song they grew to love, or the song that was the hardest to write.

Those are the songs we want to learn more about on a new World Cafe feature called Backtracking. The premise is simple: We'll give artists a long list of prompts they can choose from. Then, they'll look back through their catalog and pick the song that fits best. They'll tell us the stories behind them and perform them live.

In our latest installment, Sting joins us to talk about the song that he still loves performing and how he performs it when he's played it a million times.

"My job is to perform a song that I may have written 40 years ago with the same energy, same curiosity, same passion, as if I had just written it this afternoon," he says.

Sting also talks about the song that changed his life, which happens to be the same song that earned him a pretty impressive distinction:

"I am probably the world's most successful butt pianist," he says.

Find out what song Sting plays butt piano in on this all new episode of Backtracking.

This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Miguel Perez. Our senior producer is Kimberly Junod and our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.

Copyright 2024 XPN

Raina Douris
Raina Douris, an award-winning radio personality from Toronto, Ontario, comes to World Cafe from the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), where she was host and writer for the daily live, national morning program Mornings on CBC Music. She is also involved with Canada's highest music honors: Since 2017, she has hosted the Polaris Music Prize Gala, for which she is also a jury member, and she has also been a jury member for the Juno Awards. Douris has also served as guest host and interviewer for various CBC Music and CBC Radio programs, and red carpet host and interviewer for the Juno Awards and Canadian Country Music Association Awards, as well as a panelist for such renowned CBC programs as Metro Morning, q and CBC News.
Kimberly Junod
World Cafe senior producer Kimberly Junod has been a part of the World Cafe team since 2001, when she started as the show's first line producer. In 2011 Kimberly launched (and continues to helm) World Cafe's Sense of Place series that includes social media, broadcast and video elements to take listeners across the U.S. and abroad with an intimate look at local music scenes. She was thrilled to be part of the team that received the 2006 ASCAP Deems Taylor Radio Broadcast Award for excellence in music programming. In the time she has spent at World Cafe, Kimberly has produced and edited thousands of interviews and recorded several hundred bands for the program, as well as supervised the show's production staff. She has also taught sound to young women (at Girl's Rock Philly) and adults (as an "Ask an Engineer" at WYNC's Werk It! Women's Podcast Festival).