© 2025 WSHU
NPR News & Classical Music
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Ben Folds brings a dose of wit to the holidays on 'Sleigher'

World Cafe/NPR

Christmas is a holiday full of traditions. You might watch the same movie on Christmas Eve, or you might have a special way you open the stockings and the gifts on Christmas morning. Maybe, you always make that cookie recipe your family has passed down through generations.

When Ben Folds was making his new Christmas album, Sleigher, the idea of coming back to those traditions over and over again was on his mind.

"I think, at the end of the day, Christmas, because it happens every single year, gives you something to measure your life by. That is what I really connected to," he says.

In this session, Folds performs some of his new Christmas songs live, and he talks about his most memorable gift he got as a kid.

"That was my first instrument, the tape recorder," he says. "To me, that was the first thing I played — and then piano."

Set List

  • "The Christmas Song"
  • "Me and Maurice"
  • "We Could Have This"

This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Kimberly Junod. The web story was created by Miguel Perez. Our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.

Raina Douris, an award-winning radio personality from Toronto, Ontario, comes to World Cafe from the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), where she was host and writer for the daily live, national morning program Mornings on CBC Music. She is also involved with Canada's highest music honors: Since 2017, she has hosted the Polaris Music Prize Gala, for which she is also a jury member, and she has also been a jury member for the Juno Awards. Douris has also served as guest host and interviewer for various CBC Music and CBC Radio programs, and red carpet host and interviewer for the Juno Awards and Canadian Country Music Association Awards, as well as a panelist for such renowned CBC programs as Metro Morning, q and CBC News.
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).