The Breeders celebrate 30 years of their alternative rock masterpiece

XPN | By Raina Douris,

Published September 22, 2023 at 9:25 AM EDT

When the World Cafe team arrived at the studio to interview The Breeders, the atmosphere was warm, funny and a bit chaotic.

The band travels with an espresso machine that never stopped running the entire time I was there, and they'd brought homemade brownies. It felt like a family trip. More than that, this band feels like family (and that's not just because lead vocalist and guitarist Kim Deal and lead guitarist Kelley Deal are twin sisters).

It's because they've been doing this together a long time. Kim and Kelley, along with bassist Josephine Wiggs and drummer Jim MacPherson, released their breakout album, Last Splash, 30 years ago. Now, they're celebrating that 30th anniversary with a new remastered version of the album.

In this session, all four members join World Cafe to talk about revisiting Last Splash; what they remember from when it came out and blew up; and how they see their legacy now that their music is being rediscovered by new generations of fans.

You'll also hear a song that didn't originally make it onto Last Splash called "Go Man Go." Kim explains how she'd written for the Pixies, who broke up the same year Last Splash was released.

Special thanks to Steve Albini for mixing and mastering these live performances, as well as Eric Matthews for engineering. This session was recorded at Louisville Public Media Studios, in partnership with WFPK.

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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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