This Week on World Cafe: August 13-17

Call it psychedelic, call it classic or call it the new sound of Nashville – Liz Cooper and the Stampede are leading the rock scene in Tennessee right now. Liz shares her take on 21st Century psychedelia with Ann Powers, and the band performs selections from their debut album, Window Flowers.

The Brooklyn-based three piece has been making dynamic pop and rock for the last 15 years, having just released their fifth album, Off to the Races. It’s a joyous affair with no shortage of inventive pop melodies, big hooks and plenty of piano. We’ll talk about some of the fun tricks they used on the album, including layering vocalist Ben Thornewill’s voice over 100 times, plus a live performance.

Jimi Hendrix’s musical vision was captured by his engineer Eddie Kramer. Eddie joins us to talk about a new album of previously unreleased Hendrix material, and shares stories from back in the day including Hendrix’s Woodstock performance, late-nights hangs with popular musicians of late 60s rock-and-roll and more.

Death Cab for Cutie releases a new album called Thank You For Today tomorrow – and you can hear the new songs live. Singer Ben Gibbard reflects on the band’s earliest days in Seattle, talks about how running ultra-marathons has changed him as an artist and reveals some of the moments in the group’s career that have meant the most to him.

On her new album, Plays Well With Others, Nashville singer-songwriter Lera Lynn decided to broaden her songwriting and, for the first time, collaborated on a collection of duets. She teamed up with Nicole Atkins, John Paul White, Rodney Crowell and Dylan LeBlanc and several other acclaimed singers. To celebrate the release of the album, Lera gathered many of her collaborators for a special record release concert at Nashville music venue 3rd and Lindsley, and we’ll play a bit of the show.

Listen to World Cafe every Monday-Friday at 11pm on KXT!