Nathaniel Rateliff on 'The Future' and how it all came together

XPN | By Raina Douris,

Published November 5, 2021 at 11:00 AM EDT

In Feb. 2020, just weeks before the pandemic hit, Nathaniel Rateliff visited the World Cafe to talk about his very personal solo album, And It's Still Alright. He was just heading out to tour the album when – well, you know the rest. The tour was cancelled. The band went home.

Everything seemed precarious then — the future of live music, the world itself. And though it wasn't an easy pill to swallow, writing a new album when he hadn't gotten to tour the last one, Rateliff called up his bandmates and started writing.

The result is The Future - you'll hear them perform songs from it in this session, as well as a conversation with Rateliff about how it all came together, and how he has been keeping it together through all of the uncertainty of the last year-and-a-half. Listen in below.

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Raina Douris

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 was also involved with Canada's highest music honors: hosting the Polaris Music Prize Gala from 2017 to 2019, as well as serving on the jury for both that award and 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.

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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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