Steve Forbert's Story Spans 2 Media

XPN | By Talia Schlanger,

Published February 4, 2019 at 3:14 PM EST

It's been 40 years since Steve Forbert released his debut album, Alive on Arrival, and he's marked the occasion with a new album and a new memoir. The new album is calledThe Magic Tree, a collection of songs, all but one of which have never been released before and some of which he started writing back in the '80s.

In the memoir, Big City Cat: My Life in Folk-Rock, Steve tells stories of his journey from his Mississippi home to the NYC scene in the '70s, and the way his career unfolded, complete with photos and excerpts from journal entries. It's a revealing ride that includes playing at CBGBs, opening for Talking Heads and John Cale, turning down being featured on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, and reuniting with a past love from the '80s in the kind of way you usually only see in romantic comedies.

Steve reflected on some of the stories from the memoir, and played some songs in front of an audience back in the fall. We start off with his studio performance of the title track from Magic Tree. Hear it all in the player.

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Talia Schlanger

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.

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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).

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