Kurt Vile's been good to Philadelphia

XPN | By Raina Douris,

Kimberly Junod

Published July 1, 2026 at 1:22 PM EDT

When you take the El — that's the elevated rail line — into Philadelphia's Fishtown neighborhood, you'll pass a giant Kurt Vile mural. It was used as the cover of his 2013 album, Wakin on a Pretty Daze.

And then, it just stayed up there. It's still there now: Kurt Vile, in giant block letters, a tribute to an artist who loves the city just as much as it loves him.

And Kurt Vile really loves Philadelphia. His new album, called Philadelphia's Been Good to Me, was mostly recorded in his basement home studio. In today's session, for our Sense of Place: Philadelphia series, Vile performs songs from the record and talks about growing up in the area and playing music there for decades. We also get to Kurt's tips for driving in Philadelphia.

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

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Raina Douris

Raina Douris, an award-winning radio personality from Toronto, Ontario, is the host and writer of NPR's daily nationally-syndicated music interview and discovery program World Cafe. She has interviewed artists like Bruce Springsteen, Barbra Streisand, Questlove and Brandi Carlile, and was a 2022 keynote lecturer on the topic of Folk Music and music discovery at the Chautauqua Institution.

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).