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How the bird and the bee Interpreted Van Halen Classics With No Guitars

the bird and the bee
Alexa Nikol Curran
/
Courtesy of the artist
the bird and the bee

Van Halen is quintessential guitar rock. So what happens when an electronic jazz duo of self-avowed fans take on the band's blistering discography? the bird and the bee's latest album, Interpreting the Masters, Vol. 2: A Tribute to Van Halen, offers an answer: Though the songs will feel familiar to fans of the guitar rock icons, the arrangements are entirely fresh.

Producer/multi-instrumentalist Greg Kurstin and singer Inara George have done this before with Hall and Oates. But with no guitars in the bird and the bee, Van Halen presents a different type of challenge; ultimately the duo used a creative approach to recreate the melody of some of the greatest rock songs of the late '70s and early '80s.

In this session, we'll also talk about the surprising depth in David Lee Roth's lyrics (but maybe not the videos). Hear that and more in the player above.

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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).