Hip Hop artist T-Pain from NPR’s Tiny Desk. Image from Entertainment Weekly.
Back in 2014, hip-hop artist T-Pain was famous for his creative use of Auto-Tune software, not to put his voice on the correct pitch but rather to produce a sound that was instantly recognizable as his own. But that wasn’t what he delivered when he showed up to do a stripped-down show for an NPR Tiny Desk Concert. (NOTE: This video contains potentially offensive language.)
“The audience was expecting to hear classic T-Pain, his trademark autotuned voice with its robotic-like pitch singing over a hip-hop beat that gets the club moving,” says NPR Weekend Edition host Ayesha Rascoe in a program looking back at the concert series. Instead, they got T-Pain sitting in front of a crowded bookshelf with his keyboard player, a classic soulful R&B singer with a subtle jazz-infused accompaniment. He was singing his hits, but in an all-new way sitting back behind show producer Bob Boilen’s tiny desk, no other technology in sight. (NOTE: If you have a little time, listen to the stream of Rascoe’s program. Much better than reading the transcript!)
The reaction to T-Pain’s Tiny Desk was so fantastic that three years later he followed it up with a short acoustic tour at small venues. (As of this writing in early 2024, T-Pain’s Tiny Desk had more than 27 million view on YouTube.)
Tiny Desk got started in 2008 when NPR Music producers Bob Boilen and Stephen Thompson were in Austin for the South By Southwest music and tech festival. They tried to hear musician Laura Gibson at a bar, but the noise there was so bad, they couldn’t hear a thing. So they told Gibson that she should come to their office at NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C., and play some music at their desks. Thompson says he was “half joking” about it, but three weeks later Gibson showed up, the producers recorded her singing for about 15 minutes in Boilen’s office, and history was made.
It took two months before the second show in the series with the late Vic Chestnutt, but they now come out on a steady basis. Audiences and performers love the shows, which are streamed via video over the internet rather than airing on the radio. By 2022, Tiny Desk was an institution, hosting its 1,000th concert with West African singer and activist Angélique Kidjo. (NPR used to be known as National Public Radio, but as of 2010 it started going by just its initials because it sends out as much programing online as it does on its affiliate radio stations. )
It’s almost impossible to classify what kind of music you will get from a Tiny Desk. Artists who have appeared include hip-hop star Megan Thee Stallion from before her ”WAP” fame, pop music queen Taylor Swift, jazz greats Chick Corea and Gary Burton, the cast of the Broadway musical Wicked, and even cello legend Yo-Yo Ma.
Senior Tiny Desk producer Bobby Carter says that when he’s prepping artists for their show, he tries to explain how different this will be from their regular shows: “We always let them know, like, listen, whatever you’re used to doing on stage, once you come into this building, it is going to be the complete opposite. This not a soundstage, which many artists think it is. This is an office and a real desk, real shelves, real NPR employees.”
You might think that Tiny Desk with its basic setting and no room for lots of equipment would focus more on singer-songwriter coffee house type performers, but as we have seen, it’s a major home for hip-hop presented in a new way. Producer Carter says, “I’m fulfilled the most when we really, really nail a hip-hop Tiny Desk because in many ways, that’s the biggest adjustment for most artists because that’s not the way they originally recorded these songs. So with hip-hop Tiny Desk, you usually almost get a completely new interpretation of the records, and you make them new.”
You can find all of my Tiny Desk posts using the link below: