© 2024 NPR Illinois
The Capital's Community & News Service
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Logan Ledger Weaves New Ideas With His Love For Classic Country

Logan Ledger
Chris Turpin
/
Courtesy of the artist
Logan Ledger

Growing up, my parents would make the drive from Chicago to my grandmother's house in Waukon, Iowa (population: just over 3,000) for visit. While in town, I distinctly remember the only sounds we'd hear in that tiny house: The only radio station played all classic country, all day long. From Hank Williams to Patsy Cline and Johnny Cash to Merle Haggard, it was something rare and different for me, a person who didn't otherwise hear much country.

Our guest in this session, Logan Ledger, would fit right in with those musicians, almost like you'd taken a time machine back to those classic recordings. Though he grew up in the Bay Area, his love for classic country is interwoven with new ideas that reverberate and resonate. Ledger's self-titled debut was produced by T Bone Burnett, a guy with a reputation for appreciating sounds of different eras. He was impressed. So were we.

This session starts with a performance of "Imagining Raindrops," recorded live. Listen in the player above.

Copyright 2021 XPN. To see more, visit XPN.

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).