World Cafe Encore Week: Revisiting The Past Year Of Studio Sessions

As the saying goes, "You catch more flies with honey than vinegar." So it is for Natalie Prass on her new album, The Future and the Past.

A few years ago, the singer and songwriter had an entire album of material ready to record. But after the 2016 election left her "devastated," in her words, she scrapped what she had been working on to write new songs that reflected the world around her. Those new songs aren't embittered or in-your-face or even downtempo. Rather than taking on an acid tongue, she digs into the sweeter possibilities — that tough times can make people stick together, stand up and be counted and even dance. (Read More)

William Patrick Corgan is the first to admit that many people's image of him was locked down back in 1995 as Billy Corgan, frontman of The Smashing Pumpkins. The Pumpkins had just released Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, the album with the song "Bullet with Butterfly Wings." You know, the one where despite all his rage, he's still just a rat in a cage?

As Corgan tells me, that persona became something of a cage — or, at least, the trappings of fame did. The first time he ever walked a red carpet with Smashing Pumpkins, Corgan flipped the bird to the cameras who were trying to take his picture, and his relationship to the press has only gotten more complicated since. (Read More)

On her latest album, Courtney Barnett does something I don't think many people could do. (I know I couldn't do it.) She takes an insult that was hurled at her and turns it into a powerful lyric in one of her songs. The insult-turned-lyric is this quote: "I could eat a bowl of alphabet soup and spit out better words than you."

OK, that's a clever diss. But it's also ridiculous. Barnett is a wordsmith of the most special kind. Her ability to collect details from everyday life and weave them into lyrics with equal parts deadpan humor and heartfelt depth helped launch the Australian artist into the international spotlight in 2015 when she released her full-length debut Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit. (Read More)

For a lot of music fans, uttering the name Jeff Buckley is tantamount to prayer, and whispering the title of his song "Eternal Life" is prophecy. While there are limited morsels of Buckley's otherworldly essence left on this earth, there are untold stories from those who knew him. It's taken Dave Lory two decades to tell some of these tales.

Dave Lory picked Jeff Buckley up in a white Ford contour van in the winter of 1994 for Buckley's first solo tour, and co-managed the remarkable star (along with George Stein) all the way through Buckley's tragic and untimely death in 1997. Lory shares many of those stories in a new book he co-authored with Jim Irvin called Jeff Buckley: From Hallelujah to Last Goodbye. (Read More)

I'm so happy to share our latest session with David Crosby. He made me howl with laughter, he's got so much heart, and he was truly generous in sharing his stories. Crosby is here to talk about his new album Sky Trails, which features some of his contemporary collaborators — Becca Stevens, Michelle Willis, Mai Agan, and Michael League of Snarky Puppy. But we covered a lot of ground on Crosby's formative cronies, too, including The Byrds, Crosby Stills & Nash, Miles Davis, Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell.

He told me about hearing Mitchell perform for the first time and falling in love with her, just like everyone else did. (Read More)