Friction Is Essential To What Makes Sylvan Esso's Creative Collaboration Tick

XPN | By Stephen Kallao,

Published October 9, 2020 at 12:00 PM EDT

There's something intriguing about how much drama can go into great albums. Sometimes it ends partnerships, sometimes it fuels them. For Nick Sanborn and Amelia Meath of Sylvan Esso, the friction is essential to what makes their creative collaboration tick.

Realizing that is one of the many stories behind their beautiful new album, Free Love, the third Sylvan Esso record. We talked to the happily married couple (yes, they're married) in early September about how they made, in my estimation, their best album yet. They also recorded four performances for us from their new studio outside Raleigh, N.C., just for our show. Hear it all in the player above.

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Stephen Kallao

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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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