When Taylor Swift came to the office: How the Tiny Desk Concert became pop’s biggest stage
The handful of stages that almost all musicians hope to grace one day is a small and exclusive club. New venues open regularly, but most of them are vibeless arenas paid for by the sale of their naming rights, or else gimmicky visual experiences. To the biggest acts, they probably look like any old stop on the road.
And so the top tier remains set. In pop and rock, New York’s Madison Square Gardens and Glastonbury Festival’s Pyramid Stage seem obvious, long-standing members. So too the versatile and still striking Sydney Opera House. In the worlds of classical and jazz, the Berliner Philharmonie, the Royal Albert Hall and Carnegie Hall surely merit mention.
New names are seldom added, but that makes the most recent addition to that must-play list all the more noteworthy: the gap behind Bob Boilen’s old desk in an office building in Washington DC. The capacity is a few dozen, depending on whether the photocopiers can be moved. The lighting is of the industrial strip variety. The acoustics are surprisingly good. As for the performance space? Well, that’s tiny.
As everybody from Taylor Swift and Adele to Chaka Khan and Yo-Yo Ma could attest, over the past 16 years, NPR’s Tiny Desk concert series has metamorphosed from cult online muso content to a fully-fledged cultural phenomenon, in doing so becoming one of the most in-demand stages for artists of any size.
To those somehow unfamiliar, the set-up is mercifully brief to explain. A few times a week, a solo musician or band will visit the headquarters of NPR (National Public Radio) in the US capital to perform a lunchtime gig on the office floor. The backdrop is a now instantly recognisable, kaleidoscopic wall of bric-a-brac, and for 20-minutes or so the act holds court, vulnerable and engaged, in an environment unlike any other they normally play.
The results, swiftly posted on YouTube, are outstanding. We get to watch the likes of Swift, Dua Lipa, Harry Styles and Justin Bieber charm an audience less than a hundredth the size of their other tour crowds. We can revel in the squeaks, ums, pauses and bum notes of the world’s virtuosos, rendered nervous by such a stripped-back setting.
We hear the sheer power of voices and the subtleties of others; witness multi-instrumentalists forced to choose one; see superstar bands huddled in closer proximity than they have in years; and admire rappers dispossessed of their braggadocio.
And thanks to curators who make a glorious art of eclecticism, a random binge of Tiny Desks could see you enjoy concerts from the UK rapper Dave, followed by US artpop sensation Chappell Roan, followed by Cuban piano legend Chucho Valdés, followed by the main players from Sesame Street (Big Bird sounds incredible live), followed by Bono and The Edge, finished with Fred Again. The most popular gigs have been watched in excess of 100 million times.
“I’ll tell you the story of how it all came to be, because it’s important to get that right,” says Bob Boilen, 71, from his home in Washington DC. In 2008, several NPR staff attended the South By Southwest (SXSW) music festival in Austin, Texas. Boilen, a musician and broadcaster who by that point was already an NPR veteran and host of the long-running music show All Things Considered, was keen to hear some artists in intimate settings.
“It’s an amazing music festival, but everything becomes a music venue, from the big stages to bars to dog shampoo parlours. We went to see [US singer-songwriter] Laura Gibson in a bar, and in that bar there was a basketball game on TV, everyone was screaming at the TV… It just wasn’t the place you’d see a nice quiet singer from Portland, Oregon and expect to hear her. As much as I love SXSW, that’s the kind of thing you sometimes deal with.”
Despite attempts to shush the patrons and glare at the sound booth, they could still barely pick out Gibson’s voice or playing, so when she came off stage, a colleague of Boilen’s, Stephen Thompson, jokingly said to her: “We couldn’t really hear you, you need to come and play in our office.” It really was a joke, but a lightbulb in Boilen’s brain lit up. They soon set a date with Gibson to do just that.
“Happy Monday morning,” Gibson says to the smattering of “curious” NPR workers who gathered for that first Tiny Desk. Boilen had cleared his belongings, given Gibson his chair, and, save for a microphone and camera, that was about it. After the first song, he and Thompson told the SXSW story and explained why the “mini-concert” was happening.
“So, we’re gonna video tape this for our blog,” Boilen says, “and maybe it’s the start of something, maybe it’s not, but we’re certainly glad to have Laura Gibson here today.” Polite applause follows.
“We really didn’t know [it would be], we just wanted to do something crazy,” Boilen says today. “And the reaction to it was amazing, and it was just wonderful to hear a performance like that, in an office with no fancy lights or anything, just the focus on the musician and what they were doing. Because TV producers always want a spectacle of some sort.”
It’s safe to say it was the start of something. More artists were booked, initially infrequently but by the turn of 2009, a “Tiny Desk”, as it was instantly labelled, was happening weekly. These days, Boilen says, “they’re doing three or four a week.”
Many of the first tranche of names are the kinds of artists who were perhaps used to occasional unplugged gigs in cafés and bookshops, but the first big star who may have felt thrown by the situation was Sir Tom Jones, the 13th Tiny Desk, in March 2009.
“That was a hoot. He’d just done a record of interesting music that was outside of his box, more leaning towards what an independent rock musician might do, so we thought that might be cool. He came with just a guitarist, and his son was his manager,” Boilen recalls.
“His son would come between songs and mop his father’s brow. Because Tom was nervous! This was not a Vegas stage. My intern was sitting three feet from him. It was amazing to hear that voice, unamplified, in a little room.”
Sir Tom was, Boilen says, “a bit mystified by [the concept] but totally game, totally into it, and he enjoyed it. He made really interesting arrangements. The thing about doing these, with almost every single artist who comes in, is that you have to work on this beforehand. Unless you’re just a singer-songwriter with a guitar, you can’t play a club that night and then do the same sort of arrangements.”
One of the only stipulations imposed on artists is that their vocals won’t be amplified. There are technical reasons for this, and the NPR sound engineers are often the first people complimented in the videos’ comments, but it also forces acts to “play at a level that’s much different from how they normally do”.
Success built steadily, but if there was a turning point, it came in 2014, in the unlikely shape of Floridian R&B singer and rapper T-Pain. At the time, T-Pain’s success had been built almost exclusively on his popularising of Autotune pitch correction. In fact, his clear refusal to sing in an unadorned voice had reached the point of derision and parody – he became depressed after Usher told him he had “killed music”.
The booking was not Boilen’s – his taste was a little more rock and folk – but that of a colleague, Frannie Kelley. “We said to him, ‘You can’t process your voice here. You have to sing in the room.’ And he was game,” Boilen says.
At the start of the concert, T-Pain is visibly nerve-wracked and feels as if he has nothing to lose. Bespectacled and sitting beside a single electric piano player, he then proves to the world he can sing beautifully, with a rich, velvety R&B voice as good as any of his sneering peers. Legend has it that T-Pain mistakenly thought he was at NPR for an interview, and had no idea his performance to employees was going to appear on the internet.
That video went viral – it has been viewed 28 million times – at a time when music performances didn’t. “Because nobody had heard him that way, and because the genre was much different from what we’d been covering, it really took off and opened up our audience,” Boilen says.
T-Pain not only promoted Tiny Desk to a far wider audience, he also started a trend for artists turning to this stage for what has been described as “an authenticity baptism”. Its predecessors, MTV’s Unplugged and Radio 1’s Live Lounge were either earnest or playful, usually in the extreme.
Tiny Desk could be either, but it gained a particular reputation for allowing artists to remind the world they really are talented, really can sing, and really do write great songs, they don’t just rely on DJs, backing tracks and pyrotechnics. (Occasionally that nakedness has the opposite effect, revealing how thin some songs are.)
NPR will edit almost nothing out, Boilen says, including mistakes – unless an artist “really really objects to something that happened, in which case we’ll do a retake, but that’s rare.” Performing behind the desk and not amplifying the vocals are about the only non-negotiables. Artists, and their managers, took to it.
“I’d get easily 50 to 100 requests to do Tiny Desks every week,” says Boilen, who retired from NPR last year. As well as accepting offers, he’d look at who’s coming to Washington DC and ask artists if they’d like to drop in, as well as taking suggestions from staff.
“The one rule I had with my staff was that they could bring any artist idea to us, but you had to be passionate about them. They couldn’t just be popular, or interesting. You had to be really, really into them.”
The balance between new acts who the team have discovered and wish to share, and world-famous artists who they’ve always wanted to see on Tiny Desk, is a fine one. “The nice thing about balancing it out is people come for those popular artists and then stumble upon others, and that has made a huge difference to hundreds and hundreds of artists who’ve played the desk. And that’s amazing.
“It’s a great spot for discovery. But some people really don’t need to be discovered. You’d get some people who just want to do it, because it’s so different, and out of the box, and so memorable for them. Taylor Swift doesn’t need to do a Tiny Desk concert, but she really wanted to. It’s a challenge, but artists want a challenge.”
Boilen managed to book many of his favourite artists, but singles out Yusuf/Cat Stevens, especially the song Father and Son. He grew up listening to that song, and then brought his own son to the Tiny Desk. “I got pretty teary-eyed on that one, I’ve got to say.”
There’ve now been well over 1,200 Tiny Desks, and everybody’s favourites are different. As a format, it somehow lends itself just as well to hip hop acts – The Roots, Noname, Run the Jewels and Anderson Park are among the best – as it does soul singers and folk artists, who we perhaps expect to excel.
Others are a time-capsule. One of the most popular Tiny Desks is one of the earliest – the 2012 performance by The Cranberries, just as the band had reunited. In some ways, it is the ideal way of hearing Dolores O’Riordan’s extraordinary, distinctive voice, full as it was with rasps and yodels and keening beauty.
“Thanks, lads,” O’Riordan says after Linger. “Any requests?” she asks, later on. Boilen can be heard asking for Zombie. Moments after, O’Riordan’s lost in the song, playing it largely facing her bandmates and smiling with them.
The comment sections underneath music videos on YouTube are the last lovely place on the internet, and Tiny Desk’s have even more humanity and poetry than most. “Her voice sounds like a smile after an unexpected compliment,” appears under Lianne La Havas’s effort. Since O’Riordan’s death in 2018, The Cranberries’ own mini-concert, which has almost as many views as Taylor Swift’s, has become a makeshift tribute wall.
An afternoon lost in Tiny Desks is never wasted, and several new concerts now appear each week. It has come so far from cult that Saturday Night Live parodied it in a sketch earlier last year. In it, the band – led by Ramy Youssef’s irritating troubadour, who’s revelling in the stripped-back nature of it all – receives a noise complaint from an NPR employee just trying to work. “I loved that tribute, especially their attention to detail in the set design,” Boilen says. “Being made fun of was an honour.”
He’s now passed the Tiny Desk torch on. “I feel really proud and fortunate to have done it, to have been allowed to have an impact to be able to do work I feel needs to be seen and heard by a larger audience.”
Instead, it’s something he can enjoy as a fan. “But not all the time. My tastes are different from a lot of what’s coming on the scene, and part of leaving was that it needed a newer generation of people picking the music, not some old dude. But they’re doing an amazing job and it’ll only continue to grow, I’m sure.”
Boilen booked hundreds of acts himself, and saw many of his heroes play where his laptop normally rested. But some still eluded him. “I had what I call my ‘great white whales’ – Neil Young, Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, people I grew up on that I would have loved to have had play the desk. Obviously, I asked them and that didn’t happen, but none of them said ‘no’ flat out....”
There are a few other notable acts who’ve never played it. Bruce Springsteen, Beyoncé, Jay-Z and Rihanna are yet to appear. So are Madonna and the Rolling Stones. But you get the sense they will eventually.
After all, most of them have played the Pyramid Stage, Madison Square Gardens and all the rest. It’s only a matter of time before they’ll want to complete the set. Boilen laughs, but not out of incredulity. “Yeah, you know, that’s absolutely true.”