‘It’s going stronger and stronger all the time’: WXPN’s ‘World Cafe’ is celebrating 35 years on the air

Shortly after she moved to Philadelphia, a stranger in a Center City bar reminded Raina Douris she has a really cool job.

“I was out at the Locust Bar with John” — then boyfriend and now husband, writer John Semley — “and we were talking to this guy who asked: ‘What do you guys do?”

“I told him I host World Cafe,” Douris recalled this week, in her studio at the University of Pennsylvania public radio station where the nationally syndicated public radio music and interview show is produced.

“At first he didn’t believe me. And I said ‘No really, I host World Cafe, the radio show.’ And he said: ‘Who’d you have to kill to get that job?!“

Thankfully, no one.

In 2019, World Cafe executive producer Bruce Warren hired her to replace exiting host Talia Schlanger after being impressed with the Stouffville, Ontario, native’s work on the Canadian Broadcast Company’s Mornings radio show.

This month, World Cafe — which is broadcast on XPN from 2 to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and airs on 311 stations around the U.S. — is celebrating 35 years on the radio.

That birthday coincides with the seventh anniversary on the air for Douris, who did her first World Cafe show on the final day of October 2019. That Halloween show was followed by her debut interview, with The Who’s Pete Townshend.

“I probably prepped more for that than I’ve ever prepped for anything in my life. I was so nervous, but he was very kind,” said Douris.

She is just the third principal host in the program’s history, whose name was coined by late Philadelphia radio legend Gene Shay as an ad man for hire.

World Cafe was meant for a world music-focused show, which didn’t test well with listeners. Instead, XPN settled on the singer-songwriter sensibility that remains at the core of the station, with artists like Brandi Carlile, Jeff Tweedy, Lucinda Williams, Arlo Parks, and Josh Ritter.

(So what’s the difference between World Cafe, the radio show, and World Cafe Live, the music venue? When Hal Real founded the latter in 2004 — and XPN moved its headquarters from digs on the Penn campus at 39th and Spruce to the building at 3025 Walnut St. — Real leased the World Cafe name from the station.

That’s led to confusion about the relationship between the station and the venue — which are separate businesses — especially since 2025 as World Cafe Live has been in the news while going through a slow death spiral. It is closing Halloween, with final shows under the name World Stage, which it began using in March.

David Dye helmed World Cafe, the radio show, from the 1991 beginning, when it was on a total of five stations. In 2016, he gave it up and made room for Schlanger.

Dye, who’s still heard on XPN on his Sunday morning show Dave’s World, conducted 200 or so interviews a year for a quarter century.

“I was privileged,” he says. “I got to sit across from Sonny Rollins.”

Other highlights: Yo-Yo Ma, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Jeff Buckley, Beth Orton, Les Paul, and Rudy Van Gelder, at his North Jersey studio where many jazz classics were recorded.

Not to mention Elvis Costello at the old XPN studios when his band’s equipment didn’t show. Warren crossed the street to the Pi Lam fraternity house — famous for “Human Barbecue” punk shows — hoping they had a keyboard for Costello’s cohort member Steve Nieve to play. They did, and the show went on.

Ten years after his departure, World Cafe “is a better show,” Dye says. “It’s incredible that it’s gone on so long and it’s doubly incredible that it’s going stronger and stronger all the time.”

Dye praises both Douris and contributing host Stephen Kalleo, who tends to do two artist interviews a week to Douris’ three. She hosts most of the show’s high-profile features, such as the “Sense of Place” series that has recently taken deep dives into the music of Ireland, Japan, and Philadelphia. Asheville, N.C., is next.

“They’re both really good interviewers and both really approachable and smart,” Dye says. “It’s not precious. The show is more pop, and less public radio, which is a good thing.”

World Cafe has become more visual since the arrival of Douris who, during her early years in radio, hosted a video music show from her Toronto basement called Rain’s World.

You can listen to World Cafe on XPN or other terrestrial radio stations, or by clicking on episodes on Fruit Bats or Remi Wolf (featured on the show’s actual 35th anniversary on Oct. 13) or Low Cut Connie or the Womack Sisters on NPR’s World Cafe page.

Full interviews and performances are also seen on the show’s YouTube page, with teaser clips on Instagram. Over time, Warren says, “the internet forced us to be ubiquitous.’

Between radio and digital, says the executive producer who’s retiring from the role at the end of the year, “approximately 1.2 million fans engage with World Cafe content weekly.”

Douris’ Philadelphia story began when — by chance — she and Semley visited in February 2019. They checked out Philly institutions like the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Bob & Barbara’s.

“I remember walking around Old City and saying to John, ‘I could live here.’”

Eight months later, she was working at XPN and residing near Fitler Square. She chose the “Go Birds!” route to make friends. “I got an Eagles jersey and would just go watch games by myself,” at local bars like Doobie’s or Ten Stone. “It was the fastest way to feel part of anything. People were so welcoming.”

Douris, who now lives in Fishtown, is a booster for her adopted city. She takes visitors to the Barnes Foundation and Please Touch Museum and shouts out her favorite dive bar, Les and Doreen’s Happy Tap.

“And just being here and seeing how alive and on fire the music scene is, it’s so exciting.”

She and Semley (who freelances for several publications including The Inquirer) had a wedding celebration at Philadelphia Brewing Company in 2023, but her Philly fandom is such that, when the Eagles won the Super Bowl in 2025, she said to her husband: “This is the best day of my life!”

Douris’ transition to full-on Philadelphian didn’t go entirely smoothly, however. When the pandemic hit, she went back to Toronto to do remote shows for over a year.

That changed the way the World Cafe was made.

“They’d been making this show a certain way for a long time,” Douris said. “And then it changed so drastically. With Zoom, you could get anyone anywhere at any time, and the artist was so comfortable because they’re on the living room couch in their sweatpants. So even though you weren’t together in the same room, it was the most intimate it could be.”

Those kind of casually conversational online interviews have since become the norm on podcasts like the Kelce Brothers’ New Heights or Amy Poehler’s Good Hang, which are both World Cafe’s competition in landing big-name stars. But Douris’ show has its own niche, combining in-depth interviews with well-known and newer artists, and opening listeners’ ears to music discovery, just by playing records.

“We do Bruce Springsteen, Ringo Starr, Neil Young,” Douris said, “and then bands like [Pittsburgh indie rockers] Feeble Little Horse, little bands that people maybe aren’t super familiar with.

“The thing I think about us is if you turn on your radio and hear the band we have on and you’re like ‘I don’t even like this,’ or ‘I’ve never heard of this,’ you will still be engaged enough with the conversation. That you’ll at least give it a chance, find it interesting in some way. To me, that is the most exciting part.”

Interviews with Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, and Orville Peck are the host’s recent favorites, and she’s had insightful conversations with queer country artists Andrew Sa and Boy Golden. She’ll get to talk to lifelong hero Young for the second time next week. Missy Elliott and Joni Mitchell are on the top of her wish list.

And as she adds to the trove of World Cafe interviews — somewhere around 7,000 artists in 35 years, Warren says — Douris says that when she looks through the archives, “I’m astonished when I see the stuff that’s in there.”

“There was a Herbie Hancock performance of ‘Watermelon Man’ we played a little while ago. For Christmas one year, David interviewed all the cartoon characters from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, which is so funny.”

“There’s a relationship that this show has with artists. Neil Young and David Byrne have been on a number of times. They trust us, and I feel a responsibility to carry that on and make sure it stays that way.

“Radio is such an intimate thing. People listen when they’re alone in their cars. A voice like David’s was in people’s ears for a long time, and that feels like a familiar, special thing. I knew when I started it wasn’t going to be like that right away. But my hope is that eventually, it does feel like that.”