On a hot day in June, I’m packed like a sardine in an 80-person semicircle around a desk at NPR’s Washington, DC, office.
The desk, made out of some kind of composite material, is no coming attraction. It sits in the middle of a quiet floor, surrounded by cubicles, stacks of CDs, and coffee-buzzed interns. It is the middle of a workday, and it’s business as usual.
Then a gong rings out — and Blue Man Group emerges from a utility closet.
In seconds, the desk becomes an impromptu stage, lit up with strange noises, lively instrumentation, and performance art. The crowd leans in, feet away — a confluence of cardigan-wearing hipsters and old fogeys in suits. There is an awkward intimacy in our closeness to the act, and to each other; everyone senses it. And that’s what makes NPR’s Tiny Desk concert series so special.
Over eight years, more than 550 musical acts have played at this “Tiny Desk.” The show has attracted a cult following on the internet, partly thanks to its musical curation — a peculiar mix of indie rock, hip-hop, world music, and jazz — but more so because of its authenticity.
In an age of overproduction and digital manipulation, Tiny Desk offers us something honest: performances rife with awkward pauses, untuned guitars, and hiccups. It reassures us that our vulnerabilities are meant to be celebrated, not hidden.
What is Tiny Desk?
The concept of the show is simple: Musical acts come to play a show behind the desk of All Songs Considered host Bob Boilen.
They run the gamut from little-known alt-rock bands (Car Seat Headrest, Mothers) to legends (Yo-Yo Ma, Adele). They could be quiet acoustic duos, metal acts, 23-piece Brazilian brass bands, or hip-hop artists. There’s only one rule: All equipment has to fit behind the desk. No PA system, no elaborate effects rigs, no fancy electronics.
The shows are recorded and then posted to YouTube and NPR Music’s website, where they garner millions of views.
Confining an artist to a desk has a very real effect on the outcome of sound. Sets are incredibly intimate, up-close, and personal — sometimes almost painfully so. As one producer tells me, “There’s nowhere to hide at Tiny Desk”: Stripped of typical stage equipment, musicians are forced to confront the essence of their art form.
But to really understand the passion that drives the show, it’s necessary to first tell the story of Bob Boilen, its creator and host.
How Bob Boilen became a tastemaker
On August 15, 1965, more than 55,000 people flocked to New York’s Shea Stadium to watch the Beatles play. Ten miles away, on a stoop in Queens, Bob Boilen — then 11 years old — clutched his Westinghouse transistor radio and gazed out at the distant lights of the venue.
“I was so charged up,” he recalls. “The idea that you could actually go see a band play was unimaginable.”
Boilen spent the next five years of his youth holed up a room, spinning 45s: the Zombies, the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Beach Boys, the Byrds. At the onset of FM broadcasting, the radio waves began to populate with DJ personalities — “tastemakers” who curated their own playlists and guided the musical tastes of America’s youth. Boilen would scratch together his own sets.
In the late ’60s, Boilen’s family moved from Queens to Bethesda, Maryland, and the teen — by then a “budding hippie” with flowing locks and bell-bottoms — found respite from the prevailing jock culture at Waxie Maxie’s, a local record store chain. He got a job as a record store clerk, and quickly became something of a local tastemaker.
“It was a musical education: I’d spend the entire day listening to all different kinds of records and talking about music” says Boilen. “It was my job to know the tastes of my customers. I became the personal shopper for many people who walked into the store.”
Eventually, Boilen decided to give music a try for himself. In 1979, he left the record store, spent his $2,000 savings on an ARP Odyssey synthesizer, and, with a few friends, launched his first band, Tiny Desk Unit. The name was something of an inside joke: “Our friend Bill had this little tray with a calendar and a pencil holder,” says Boilen. “He’d just pick it up and move it around. It was his tiny desk.”
At the time, the polyphonic synthesizer was just on the cusp of being popularized in mainstream music. Boilen, an early adopter, was recruited to work on an art installation imagining the history of sound from beginning of time to end of time. The resulting project, “Whiz Bang: A History of Sound,” was featured at Smithsonian’s American History Museum in 1983 — and Boilen’s composition caught the attention of NPR’s All Things Considered, which produced a story on it.
Five years later, in 1988, Boilen was toiling in a television production job he hated. Reminded of the story he’d done with NPR, he decided to give radio a shot.
He quit his job and tracked down the guy who’d worked on his synthesizer story — a young All Things Considered producer named Ira Glass. In an impassioned pitch, Boilen asked Glass for work.
“[Ira] asked me if I cut tape, and I said, ‘Sure, I cut tape!’” recalls Boilen. “Of course, I’d never cut tape in my life.” He was given a 20-minute interview and asked to cut it down to four minutes. With a reel, a razor blade, a grease pencil, and splicing tape, Boilen meticulously completed the task, and Glass asked him to come back the following week.
“I would literally show up at NPR every day, and say, ‘Hey, guys! Need any help today?’” says Boilen. “I just did it.”
The perseverance paid off: He was hired full time as an editor — and remarkably, within a year, he was directing All Things Considered.
“What did you just play?”
As the director of All Things Considered, Boilen was tasked with selecting music to play between radio segments.
“I had to select pieces of music that elicited the right tone out of a story,” says Boilen. “You can teach the mechanics of directing radio show — like how to follow a clock or edit segments on time. But it’s hard to teach musical aesthetics, and that’s something I had under my belt before from playing music. They felt I intuitively had it.”
In finding music, Boilen reverted to his old technique: He went to record stores and browsed through bins and bins of albums, picking out instrumental-only LPs with cover art that spoke to him.
He showcased his selections on air, and they began to draw interest from the public. “All these people would call in, or hand-write letters to us, asking, ‘What was that music you played on Thursday at 6:30 pm, after the story about barking dogs?’ or whatever.”
Boilen had become a certified tastemaker.
In 2000, 10 years into his tenure at All Things Considered, Boilen had the idea of turning his musical picks into their own program. At a time when the web was still coming of age (dial-up was the connection du jour), he launched All Songs Considered and hosted the program.
At first, the show was meant to serve as a hub where listeners could find All Things Considered tunes. But Boilen and his producers soon had a bigger idea.
Boilen is among planet Earth’s most prolific show-goers. On any given night in Washington, DC, he can be found at the 9:30 Club, or another venue, milling around in his signature fedora and a bolo tie. During the summers, he attends various festivals around the United States. Between January 2013 and December 2015 alone, he saw 1,830 performances in 12 states (and Iceland) — an average of more than 600 shows per year.
Gradually, All Songs Considered became a hub for covering some of these shows: Boilen began podcasting, blogging, and webcasting shows from the venues and festivals he attended.
It was at one of these festivals that Tiny Desk — the show’s flagship series — was born.
The birth of Tiny Desk
While roaming around at the South by Southwest music festival in 2008, Boilen and Stephen Thompson (a co-producer at NPR Music) went to check out Laura Gibson, a relatively unknown singer-songwriter from Oregon.
“It was this awful bar — the speaker was pointing out the door, people were watching basketball games and cheering for their teams. [Laura] had a quiet voice, and we could barely hear her at all,” says Boilen.
Then an idea struck.
“Stephen jokingly said [to Gibson], ‘You should just come play in our office,’” says Boilen. “I just lit up. I thought that would be so cool.”
Three weeks later, Gibson showed up at NPR’s DC office. Boilen and some colleagues cleared some space off a desk, grabbed a couple of microphones and a camera, filmed a completely unadulterated, raw performance, and put it online.
“We had no idea what we were doing,” recalls Robin Hilton, Boilen’s co-host on All Songs Considered. “You’ll notice the shelves behind Laura are nearly bare. We’d just had those put in to hold all the CDs we get. You’ll also notice the video quality is pretty raw ... Bob set up the cameras himself.”
But the underproduction was precisely what made the show special.
“There was something that happened there I never would’ve imagined,” says Boilen. “It was the intimacy, as I’ve come to understand it. There was nothing between you and artist. There was no silly music video of someone running through a field. It wasn’t lip-synced. No reverb, studio niceties, just Laura’s voice coming through a beautiful microphone. Humble. It just worked.”
A collaboration of music geeks
What started eight years ago as an acoustic performance at a desk has since turned into one of the internet’s most popular music series. To date, NPR Music has recorded and produced more than 550 Tiny Desk concerts, which have collectively generated more than 80 million views on YouTube.
Though Boilen is at the helm, he no longer monopolizes the show’s act selection: Suggestions for artists come in from a variety of NPR employees. The show still intrinsically caters to Boilen’s tastes — hipster-infused indie rock — but over the years, a wider variety of genres have been represented, from nu-jazz to hip hop.
“A lot of listeners think Tiny Desk is just Bob [picking bands],” NPR Music staffer Niki Walker tells me. “He’s certainly a tastemaker — but over the years there have been so many more people contributing music suggestions to the show.”
In October 2014, Frannie Kelley, then a co-host of NPR’s Microphone Check podcast, noted a lack of hip-hop artists on Tiny Desk and recommended T-Pain. Known for his heavy use of Auto-Tune pitch correction software, the artist showed up with a just a keyboard player and delivered an impressive vocal performance that has since become the most popular Tiny Desk concert ever recorded. (Boilen didn’t care much for this particular show, but he attributes its success to T-Pain “totally abandoning the technology people think he’s reliant on” and proving his raw artistry.)
When Suraya Mohamed, a producer at NPR Music, pitched RDGLDGRN — a “hip-hop, go-go, world, alt-rock, punk” band — she says Bob “was totally open to it.” The band, which typically performs at loud volumes, reengineered their sound for the set and performed completely unplugged.
Mohamed has brought a sweeping range of acts to Tiny Desk, from Afro Blue (an a cappella group from Howard University) to Rahim AlHaj (an oud player from the Middle East).
“We have a bunch of very eclectic music listeners on our team,” says Boilen. “Anyone is allowed to bring to the table an artist they’re in love with. Maybe Patrick, our jazz guy, will find someone we’ve never heard of. I trust Patrick: I know he’s going to bring to the table someone who turns me on. That keeps it interesting.”
Tiny Desk has courted some big names — Adele, Wilco, Peter Frampton, Cat Stevens — but Boilen prefers to pluck acts from relative obscurity and give them a voice: He featured CHVRCHES, Hozier, and Real Estate before they were known to larger audiences.
“It’s the ones that come out of nowhere that are the most exciting,” he says.
The “authentic music” movement
Much of the show’s appeal is what Boilen calls a “special intimacy” — capturing a performance with its imperfections and hiccups offers something markedly different from a studio track, which is ironed out and heavily produced. There is something about hearing a stripped-down show that reminds us of our own vulnerability and makes it exciting.
The concept of bringing intimacy back to music is not new.
As music became increasingly overproduced and synth-laden in the late 1980s (think Milli Vanilli), MTV’s Unplugged series found a tremendous audience. The show challenged big names like Eric Clapton, Aerosmith, and Kiss — acts typically laden with huge production crews — to go completely acoustic on a minimal stage.
Robert Small, the creator of Unplugged, conceived of the idea while working as a roadie with metal bands.
“I started noticing a lot of the enjoyable experiences were during rehearsal in a hotel room or on a bus when they played acoustically,” he tells me. “There was something really vulnerable about it.”
He sees Tiny Desk as a modern incarnation of his show — an “antidote” to the digital era.
“You’re really seeing something about the performer,” he says. “If something sounds bad, or if someone messes up, it’s a moment that’s human.”
In Bristol, England, a man named Jon Earl has attempted to create something similar. One night in 2009, drunk at a local pub, he had the idea to transform a shed in his backyard into a music venue. Artists like KT Tunstall, Passenger, and Pokey Lafarge have flocked to perform there, and adhere to Earl’s one rule: “nothing plugged in.”
“Our ethos is not about studio perfection; it’s about a moment in a shed,” he says. Like Tiny Desk, his shows strive to capture “a moment of authenticity.”
How a Tiny Desk is produced
Authenticity is not easy to capture.
Strangely enough, NPR employs a bevy of technological skill and knowhow to relay its “undoctored” vibe to a digitally engorged internet audience. As the masters of social media understand, quite a bit of work goes into making something seem clean, natural, and unencumbered with effects.
Especially instrumental to this process is Josh Rogosin, Tiny Desk’s sound producer.
“As a Tiny Desk artist, all the technology is stripped away from the music,” says Rogosin. “Your voice is un-amplified in a room as absolutely raw and naked and vulnerable as you can be.”
Rogosin’s job is to “make the recordings sound as natural and unobtrusive as possible.” To accomplish this, he utilizes a set of shotgun mics (microphones that capture direct sound and block outside noise), and forgoes a PA system, which allows him to “really crank up the volume” on the mics. Very little is changed after the recording is captured, other than some basic tweaking to make sure the instruments are all at equal volumes. “The audio,” he adds, “has to supplement something that’s already there rather than add something that’s not.”
Much thought also goes into capturing authenticity on film — a burden that falls on Tiny Desk’s video producer, Niki Walker.
“We don’t need to bring in the best of the best cameras or have lights,” she says. “We don’t need anything over the top. It’s all very intimate and handheld. It’s the aesthetic we’re going for — it’s the aesthetic the audience expects.”
Typically, she uses between three and five cameras (mostly Canon 5D Mark-IIs), and attempts to capture each show in one continuous take, including “the awkward moments of silence between songs.”
“There’s no hiding at Tiny Desk”
This intimacy, and the nakedness that comes with it, often presents a challenge to artists who come on the show.
In July, I swung by NPR’s office to see up-and-coming indie-folk band Big Thief perform at Boilen’s desk. For half an hour, they struggled with the minimal sound setup. Several times during the show, lead singer Adrianne Lenker — who has an especially muted vocal delivery — had to stop and reorient herself.
“Our regular set — it’s pretty rockin’, it’s pretty loud,” she told me after the show. “It was definitely a challenge being here. It threw us off at first to figure out how to translate our music more quietly.”
Other acts, like the jazz fusion trio Moon Hooch — one of Boilen’s favorite Tiny Desks of all time — seemed right at home performing behind a desk. “We got our start playing in subways,” Wenzl McGowen, one of the act’s two lead sax players, says. “We didn’t have any trouble with the sound at Tiny Desk; we just went into subway mode.”
For other acts, playing a Tiny Desk show often results in a new sound. Wolf Alice, a typically “noisy and primal” alt-rock band, came into Tiny Desk and laid down a “childlike and quietly wonderful” set that made them sound like an entirely different band. Their agent enjoyed the recording so much that he requested a copy for a potential album release.
“Bands come here and typically have to play quieter than they’ve ever played before,” says Boilen. “And as a result, they have to listen more than they ever have before. It forces things to happen that wouldn’t usually happen.”
This vulnerability of these artists, and the fact they’re playing in an office in the middle of the day instead of in a beer-soaked club, brings us closer to the stark humanity in music.
“Artists walk in that I’m completely starstruck by, like Ben Folds — and I realize he’s just a dude,” says Josh Rogosin. “With all of these other elements stripped out, he’s on the same level as us. He’s just a guy playing a piano.”
Even Peter Frampton, the quintessential seen-it-all rock star, “was a little frazzled” during his Tiny Desk: “He was saying, ‘Wow — you guys are standing right there!’ the whole time,” says Niki Walker.
Tiny Desk is more than a music show: It is a crusade for authenticity.
In today’s digital world, 56 percent of millennials claim to feel some level of disconnect from the physical. On social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook, “reality” is Botoxed; things are twisted, manipulated, and advertised to appear far better than they actually are.
Tiny Desk is, of course, a product of technology: It lives on the internet, and is heavily dependent on a weirdly complex yet minimal production process involving an array of strategically placed microphones and cameras.
But the show also embraces flaws as intrinsic to art: We hear Alt-J mess up a guitar lick. We see the veins in Hozier’s neck as he strains to hit a high note without an amplifier. We feel the awkwardness of the silence between takes in an Adele set.
The show reminds us of our own nakedness, our own vulnerabilities. And, in its own way, it tells us we’re okay as we are.
Carlos Waters captured video and audio for this feature.
