Artist Interviews

For Sampa The Great, there's no place like home

XPN | By Raina Douris,

Kimberly Junod

Published March 18, 2023 at 6:30 AM CDT

There's no place like home. You know that feeling: When you've been away from home for a long time and you finally get back, it's like taking a big exhale. You can put your bags down. Hug your family. Be your true self. That's what Sampa The Great does on her latest album, As Above So Below.

Sampa The Great was born in Zambia and raised in Botswana, but she started putting out music in 2015 after moving to Australia. In 2019, she won the ARIA for best hip hop release for "Final Form" and then won the same award again in 2020 for her debut full-length album The Return. That same year, she moved back to Zambia to write and record her new album.

In this session, Sampa talks about what it was like to be claimed as an "Australian" artist when she didn't feel like an Australian, collaborating with Beninese musician Angélique Kidjo and how coming home after a long time away affected her music.

Artist Interviews

Raina Douris

Raina Douris, an award-winning radio personality from Toronto, Ontario, is the host and writer of NPR's daily nationally-syndicated music interview and discovery program World Cafe. She has interviewed artists like Bruce Springsteen, Barbra Streisand, Questlove and Brandi Carlile, and was a 2022 keynote lecturer on the topic of Folk Music and music discovery at the Chautauqua Institution.

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).