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Ben Folds brings a dose of wit to the holidays on 'Sleigher'

XPN | By Raina Douris,
Kimberly Junod
Published December 23, 2024 at 2:08 PM CST

Christmas is a holiday full of traditions. You might watch the same movie on Christmas Eve. You might have a special way you open the stockings and the gifts on Christmas morning. Maybe you always make that cookie recipe your family has passed down through generations.

When Ben Folds was making his new Christmas album, Sleigher, the idea of coming back to those traditions over and over again was on his mind. "I think, at the end of the day, Christmas — because it happens every single year — gives you something to measure your life by. That is what I really connected to," he says.

In this session, Folds performs some of his new Christmas songs live and talks about his most memorable gift he got as a kid. "That was my first instrument, the tape recorder," he says. "To me, that was the first thing I played — and then piano."

Set list

  1. "The Christmas Song"
  2. "Me and Maurice"
  3. "We Could Have This"


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

Copyright 2024 XPN
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Artist Interviews World Cafe
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).