Tag Archives: NPR

For today’s Tuesday Tunes, I’m going to highlight National Public Radio, to which I regularly listen, and to which I’m going to make more of an effort to listen this week. Lately, I’ll be honest I haven’t even had music on in the background during the day while I work here from home.

I don’t know when I began listening to NPR. I don’t think it really happened until I moved to near Philadelphia after I was married 11 years ago. The station to which we regularly listened to XPN, which introduced us to a whole new group of artists, which we might never have discovered. A few such artists include Fountains of Wayne, Joss Stone, Lucinda Williams, Nellie McKay, Patty Griffin and Raul Maulo. Most of them were through the show World Cafe with host David Dye. The station now has three other streams available online, in addition to its main stream:

• XPonetional Radio with an eclectic blend of blues, rock, world, folk and alternative country
• Folk Alley, which is produced by WKSU in Kent, Ohio, with a blend of singer-songwriter, Celtic, acoustic, Americana, traditional and world sounds.
• Y Rock on XPN, which keeps the alternative music, from the former Y100 in the Philadelphia, alive.

Another NPR station from Philadelphia that I began to enjoy when I lived “downstate” was WRTI, which features both classical and jazz, including in High Definition online.

Because we lived in between Philadelphia and Lancaster, we also could pick up WITF from the Harrisburg area. However, I don’t think they have music available online unfortunately, as far as I could tell from their site. If you’re in the area, though, well worth a listen.

Now that we live in northcentral Pennsylvania, we listen to NPR on WVIA from Pittston, Wilkes-Barre and Scranton. I really haven’t listened to this enough, but do know they have a good mix of classical and jazz as well.

So to what stations do you listen either offline or online? What do you recommend? I’m always looking for new stations to which to listen. My taste in music is very eclectic, from classical to jazz to country to rap (mostly old-school) to rock to metal (not much on the death metal, though).