World Cafe Dublin: NPR hands two weeks of US airtime to Irish music

Why World Cafe Dublin matters for Irish acts

That is the sort of problem Dublin creates.

From Monday, World Cafe Dublin becomes a fortnight-long fixture on National Public Radio in the United States.

The nationally syndicated WXPN programme hands two full weeks of airtime to the city’s music, new sessions, new interviews and a fairly deep rummage through the archive.

It runs from 24 August to 4 September as the latest instalment of World Cafe’s award-winning Sense of Place series, and the line-up reads like a decent argument in a pub.

CMAT, Dermot Kennedy, Hozier, U2, The Chieftains, SPRINTS, Pillow Queens, KhakiKid, Loah, Florence Road, trad-punk newcomers Madra Salach and the late Sinéad O’Connor all feature, alongside Riverdance principal dancer Jason O’Neill and Ruby Sessions co-founder and booker Conor Donovan.

American public radio is one of the few remaining places where a new Irish band gets introduced properly rather than reduced to a playlist slot.

World Cafe reaches a national audience that skews older and considerably more likely to buy a concert ticket, the sort of listenership that turns a curiosity into a US tour.

For an act like Madra Salach, making their first US session, that is a meaningful door to have opened.

Host Raina Douris framed the series as a story about continuity rather than novelty.

"You don’t need me to tell you that Dublin has a long, rich history of great storytellers and songwriters," said Douris.

"But what moved me most when we recorded these sessions is just how much history is still alive in the newer generation of artists coming up in the city.

"From indie rock to hip-hop to punk-influenced to traditional, each artist in this series draws inspiration from Dublin’s past while telling vibrant stories of Ireland’s present, and future."

The sessions worth setting a reminder for

Florence Road make their World Cafe debut with a mini concert built around songs from their EP Spring Forward.

SPRINTS discuss the making of their new album All That Is Over and play a stripped-back set recorded live at Windmill Lane Recording Studios, which is about as loaded a room as Dublin can offer a visiting radio crew.

The archive digs are the other draw: a conversation with CMAT recorded earlier this year, and a 2014 Hozier session captured before his debut album landed.

Senior producer Kimberly Junod said the fortnight is a return to familiar ground.

World Cafe launched Sense of Place with a trip to Ireland the year the programme turned 20, fifteen years on, heading into its 35th anniversary, it has come back to the same city.

How to listen in Ireland

World Cafe is a US radio programme, so there is no Irish broadcast slot for it, but the episodes are published on the World Cafe website, which is where listeners here will find the full run.

The schedule opens on Monday 24 August with an encore of the programme’s U2 material and continues daily until 4 September.

If it sends you down a rabbit hole, that is rather the point.

The city has been exporting this stuff for fifty years, occasionally somebody abroad notices all of it at once.

Full details and the day-by-day running order are available via RTÉ Entertainment.