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KT Tunstall On World Cafe

KT Tunstall
Piper Ferguson
/
Courtesy of the artist
KT Tunstall

According to KT Tunstall, the best Scottish chips have a lot in common with the best songwriters: they're "soggy and crunchy at the same time." World Cafe visited KT in Edinburgh — where the artist was born — the day after a sold-out show featuring songs from her new album, WAX. The record certainly passes the chip test: It has the bite and crunch of a big rock record and the tender heart of a singer-songwriter confessional.

WAX is the second album in a trilogy that explores spirit, body and mind, which the musician says she dreamed up in reaction to a divorce and the death of her father. (2016's KIN was the spirit record.) On WAX, she explores the body and how it intersects with spirit — or, as she puts it: "How am I meant to transcend with this meat car?"

For our Edinburgh session, KT Tunstall performs live songs from WAX and digs back to the two big breakout hits from her 2004 debut, Eye to the Telescope. In our conversation, she reminisces about a game her physicist father would play with her and her brother when they were kids that involved liquid nitrogen, and describes the first time her brother, who is deaf, was able to hear her music using a cochlear implant. She also shares her theory on why Scotland has such a massive musical output for a country with a relatively small population.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Talia Schlanger hosts World Cafe, which is distributed by NPR and produced by WXPN, the public radio service of the University of Pennsylvania. She got her start in broadcasting at the CBC, Canada's national public broadcaster. She hosted CBC Radio 2 Weekend Mornings on radio and was the on-camera host for two seasons of the television series CBC Music: Backstage, as well as several prime-time music TV specials for CBC, including the Quietest Concert Ever: On Fundy's Ocean Floor. Schlanger also guest hosted various flagship shows on CBC Radio One, including As It Happens, Day 6 and Because News. Schlanger also won a Canadian Screen Award as a producer for CBC Music Presents: The Beetle Roadtrip Sessions, a cross-country rock 'n' roll road trip.
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).