Inside NPR's Tiny Desk Concert Set - Set Tour - Architectural Digest

What up y'all? I'm Bobby, and welcome to the set of NPR's Tiny Desk. Let me show you around. So this is it, y'all. This is the Tiny Desk. There's no tricks, there's no bells and whistles. Under this desk is nothing. It's just a desk. And once you fit all of these artists, musicians, and instruments, this thing literally turns into the Tiny Desk. Where I'm standing is where Bad Bunny sat. It is where Dua Lipa stood, Chaperone, Shaka Khan, you name it. They are right here, front and center. And now that I'm standing, I'm thinking about it like, damn, this is really the spot where they stand. Can you imagine being an artist who's performing stadiums and theaters, and all of a sudden you're standing three to four feet away from an audience? It's super disarming. It's very nerve-wracking for a lot of artists. And the fact that this many people would want to cram into a space, I really, I understand the sacrifices that have been made For as many big names and stars that we've had, the true star is right here. The shell, right? As soon as you see it, you know exactly what this is. And all the knick-knacks and ---- you see back here, this is stuff that a lot of artists usually leave behind. Mostly everything has a story, and every day something else pops up. This is what I like to call set list row, and from time to time the bands, they like to have their set list printed out and placed on the desk just to make sure they're right on track. Everything from Yo Gabba Gabba to Usher to Justin Timberlake. Whenever I walk in in the morning, Juvenile is juvie juice. It's always one of the first things that really strikes a memory in my head, because Juvenile probably drank seven of these juices, which is not exactly juice. If you've seen Dave Matthews's very long and entertaining Tiny Desk, he left his water bottle. When Gary Clark was here, he was nervous as hell, but he was drenched in sweat with a leather coat on, and we decided to keep this rag here because he was probably the sweatiest act we've ever had at the desk. Still not taking this jacket off. This is Regina Spector's water that she left three years ago. Alicia Keys has her straw over there, and of course Sabrina Carpenter's martini glass. One of her team members like literally bedazzled this glass the night before the show. I've been watching this show. Everyone says this. Whatever. You guys are great. You guys know you're great. This is olive oil left by Action Bronson. These are Bad Bunny's headphones. From what his manager told me, these are very, very important headphones to him. He listens to all of his mixes for his music through these headphones, and he decided to leave these and drew a little happy face and a sad face. This is Babyface's relish. Apparently Babyface doesn't travel without sweet relish, and his manager keeps a bottle of sweet relish in their bag, and he signed it and left it. There is one item behind the tiny desk that we got jacked for, and that would be a CD that was signed by Taylor Swift. Yeah, we got jacked for Taylor Swift's CD. Saturday Night Live, they did a sketch on Tiny Desk, and this is a cue card from that sketch. Post Malone left his boots. Tierra Whack left her shoes. This is Wyclef's hat. This is Chaperone's wig. It's like so hot in here. Also, this wig, though it looks like it's all my hair, it's a wig. Chaperone's wig is actually sitting on Cypress Hill's skull, and on top of Cypress Hill's skull is Devo's hat. That Philly's hat right there, that was left by Chocolate Dropper, aka Kevin Hart, who did a really cool April Fool's Tiny Desk not too long ago. And then right up here is The Brick Bearer left by Bob Weir from The Grateful Dead. These books have almost become like a character or a part of this in the way that we will grab a random stack of books to place a microphone, to sit some keyboards on. These books always come in handy. My favorite show today is Sesame Street, right, because then the whole building was able to be a part of the show. And of course, I'm a Sesame Street kid. That's how I grew up, so tears of joy that day. Let's rock this Tiny Desk! There's one dominant theme if you're watching any number of our Tiny Desk concerts. It's how people rant and rave about the way the shows sound, and it's all due to our incredible engineers. Let's talk to Josh and get more into that. I'm the primary audio engineer and mixer for the shows. We have a number of snakes that feed back to our primary recorder, which is the sound device, the Scorpio. Everything goes into the recorder here. I do a quick mix that goes out, and then that all also backs up to a secondary computer. A lot of people are really surprised, actually, to find out that we're just standing right here, and if you watch the shows, you'll see my arms coming in and out. We do, like, a lot of keyboards, guitars, bass, strings, horns kind of here just because we have space. Drums are typically in the corner because I want to get them as far away from the vocals as possible since they're the loudest instrument, and then we currently have guitar and bass set up over here, just kind of typical setup. This space sounds shockingly good for being an office, but that said, it's not the perfect performance space. I'm under an air conditioning vent, for example. A lot of the teams come in, and they're surprised that this isn't a real performance space. There aren't monitors, so we do have to get them, like, hey, if you need to hear each other, you all have to play quieter. We're not using drum samples. We're not doing autotune. It's a very natural thing. One of the other things we do battle is people often bring in their own gear, and often it's truckloads. People are very surprised that this isn't a proper soundstage, so we had someone come in the other day with giant gongs and cymbals, and then, hey, I'm playing flute and contrabass, clarinet, baby grands. We had, what, a 16-piece horn band. We had a 12-person choir, the six-octave marimba. We've had people play water glasses on the desks. It's pretty crazy what people bring in and work in the space. When the question comes back, how many people can you fit back here, what we respond with is, well, what are they doing, because that's also a very big aspect of it. So we got a few pieces of equipment out here, but let's go into the equipment room and show everybody what they call it. So we have our upright piano. Can't fit that in the storage room, but that lives in the corner, and then this is behind the scenes of tiny desk equipment storage. We've got our keyboards and some basic amps over here. I have one gobo in case I really need it with the piano. This is where we keep our house cymbals. We also have a couple in-house snare drums, just some of the auxiliary percussion stuff. You need a tambourine, we got tambourines. Guitar amps, keyboard amps, you've got Latin percussion, cajones, congas, bongos, chimes, extra cymbal stands, extra drum heads if people need them. We've got music stands in case we need them. We have leftover alcohol in case artists need leftover alcohol. Extra keyboard covers for our beautiful roads here. Kind of everything that people really need, we can cover about a good 75-85% of the equipment needs just in-house. I'm the senior producer and host of All Songs Considered and Tiny Desks. I helped get the series going in the early days. My biggest claim to fame with the Tiny Desk is that I named it. I got the name from a band that Bob Boylan was in back in the late 70s and early 80s called Tiny Desk Unit, and our desks were next to each other. They had a little miniature desk, like a toy doll house desk on his desk, and we were trying to decide what should we name this thing. I looked at the little desk and I said we could call it Tiny Desk Concerts. I think the thing people are most surprised by is that it is an actual desk in an open office with people working around. It's not a set, it's not a stage, it's not a recording studio, it's an actual open office. So in the early days it was kind of just us grabbing people who were coming into town that we really loved. We did a lot of stripped down acoustic sets and then the productions got bigger and bigger over time and nowadays bands are coming to us and saying can I play the Tiny Desk. I'd probably get hair implants and work out a lot more. I don't think any of us would have ever predicted that it would take off like it did. It was always a passion project. It was just a group of friends joking around having fun. They were incredibly disruptive because we were bringing bands in to play in this open office and people were trying to get work done. They're like, what are you doing? Do you want to go back to the Tiny Desk and take a look at some of my stuff? I'll just go over there, yeah. So that's my name up there along with All Songs Considered and Bob Boyle and NPR. So years ago musicians would send us CDs trying to get us to play their music and they would send all kinds of crazy things with them and this is something that one of the musicians sent in, a guy named Leo Glaze, and as soon as we got them we put them up here on these shelves. These shelves, NPR's facilities built these shelves custom-made them for us to store CDs. That's right. Because we got so many CDs in the mail. Around the time we started putting CDs, streaming started taking off. We started getting more downloads. We never did fill these shelves up with CDs and we started doing Tiny Desks and I think if there was a patient zero it was probably Adele. 100%. Adele left her water bottle behind and one of us noticed and we were like, oh we should keep that and we wrote Adele's name and we stuck it on the shelf. It just really grew from there. So you know many people don't know this is actually the second Tiny Desk. We lived in another building not too far from here. Well we wanted to make a video out of it and we were thinking if we're gonna do some crazy video where we move the Tiny Desk from that location to this location, what band could we have play? And you're not going to get a better band for crazy videos than OK Go. We dismantled the desk, got them onto a flatbed truck, brought them here and put a little bag in there and they're playing through the whole thing and they've studied the photos and very meticulously put everything back where it had been in the old building. When we moved into this new building they got all new furniture. So this is not the original Tiny Desk. The original Tiny Desk still exists. Where is the desk? It's in Bob Boylan's apartment. That's crazy. It needs to be in a museum. Well I'm taking this one. I'm joking. So no shortage of things to admire behind the desk but there are a couple little things that mean a lot to me that no one will ever notice. The first one is this little Curious George doll back here. This is one of the first things that was ever on the desk. I had this dream where Curious George and I were having dinner with Bob Boylan. So I got him this little Curious George and this sat on his desk for the longest time. But my all-time favorite, which no longer exists, is this banana. So we brought in Run the Jewels and L.P. felt so self-conscious. He's like, I'm used to holding the mic. I need something. And there was a banana on the desk and he grabbed the banana and so he wraps into the banana. Isn't it cool? This feels more natural. And afterwards we tried to keep the banana. It rotted away anyway. All right so I got a few more moves to make but I just want to thank you brother. All right. I'll see you later. So we cannot talk Tiny Desk without talking to one of the co-creators, the one and only Stephen Thompson. What's up my brother? Bobby. Nice to see you. Nice to see you too. I started working at NPR in 2006 and NPR was starting to put together this project where they wanted to do something called NPR Music. And then in 2008 we started putting this together. And what happened? I mean it's the stuff of legends at this point. March 14th, 2008. Yes. Bob Boylan and I go to a concert by the great singer-songwriter Laura Gibson. It was held at this club. It was called the Thirsty Nickel and it just was not set up for live music at all. March Madness. March Madness was going on. And so every individual Yahoo in the crowd was louder than Laura Gibson on stage. And so I lean over to Bob and I said, this is ridiculous. I said, next time she's in DC we should just have her play at your desk. And he kind of, you know, like, I could tell. Delightful moment. You can tell when you have a, when you throw out a dumb idea and the other person is like, he's like, ask her. So Stephen invited Laura to come play at my desk and she called the preaker, whatever it's all going to, I think, basically I'm coming to town. And we said, well, we got the desk ready. So we're going to videotape this for our blog and maybe it's the start of something and maybe it's not, but we're certainly glad to have Laura Gibson here today. Because she jumped right at it. Because she was so game and so fun to work with. Because she came and performed and it was beautiful. The heart and soul of it just came down to, we loved a singer. We wanted to hear her without distraction. And here we are. If you go back and watch the very first Tiny Desk Concert, the first thing that people notice, besides kind of how generally shabby it looked, is how barren the shelves are. I used to work at The Onion and my office in The Onion was kind of like my dorm away from home. And I wanted to put a little piece of that office up at the tiny desk. And so if you look up in this far corner, you see this talking Master P doll. I don't think he works anymore, but if you press his chest, he goes, And apparently somebody told me Master P was in the building doing an interview and somebody took him by the tiny desk and he saw his own action figure and signed it. When Harry Styles played a Tiny Desk Concert, we had this idea kind of almost on the spot. Harry Styles has a Green Bay Packers tattoo. That's right. And I'm a huge lifelong fan of the Packers. So we reached out to his people. I was like, do you think he'd sit behind the desk with us for like a second and talk about why he likes the Green Bay Packers? And so I brought all my Packers paraphernalia from home. That's right. And a Packer helmet that Guy Raz gave me. And so we did this little interview behind the desk. So when I was when I was about six years old, I fell off my bike and I cut my knee and I bled green and gold. And at the end of it, Harry Styles signs the Packer helmet and we stuck it like right here behind the desk. It was there for a while. March of 2020. And I'm talking to my partner and I was like, you know, we're we're going to be home for a few weeks. I'm like, I don't know when we're going to come back. And she's like, take that Packer helmet off the shelf and bring that home or you'll never see it again. That was smart. And so now it sits on my mantle. Yeah, there you go. So in this area, there's a lot of foot traffic. And to get to the tiny desk, this is the primary way. And Saraya is always the first face you see. On a typical day, I get in here pretty early. Artists come in, we start getting set up. There's a variety of things that we do to support and help the musicians. Right before the show, we let the audience in. The room gets full, up to like 250 people. When we have big artists come in, like people kind of lose their minds. And so we're always trying to figure out ways to crowd control. It's tough putting on massive concerts in New York. Because people still break the rules. You clearly got a couple things you need to get to. I do. Thank you. Thank you. So we talked about the origin story. We talked about the sound, the tiny desk, but the tiny desk ain't the tiny desk without the look. So let's talk to our mighty, mighty video squad. Maya provides me and this team such a sense of calm. And she's just brilliant at what she does. On the video team, there are three video producers. And it kind of works out because there are typically three concerts a week. We each direct and edit one of the shows. So when one of us is directing, the other two are assisting and helping film, of course. And then after the show, that director then edits that show. And it also works out that we publish three a week. So I'm like editing a show now that publishes tomorrow. And then I'm looking at the calendar to make sure Bobby doesn't add us a show for tomorrow. Usually you see like a late night, or you'll see like the morning show, they do one quick song, it feels big, and then it's done. Here, it's like they capture these human moments within these shows that makes you feel like you're just sitting right there. Up next, we got the one and only producer, director extraordinaire, Cara Frain. And she always has the energy. She's directed and produced some of our biggest shows. I would say my favorite part of this whole process is actually working with the bands, making something that they love, and like bringing it to life and being able to make an experience for them here at Tiny Desk. I'm very much a visual person. So I love to like plot out where everybody's going to go. So I can envision where camera angles where they're going to be, and how that's going to look for the overall concert. The number one question we get from bands is always how many people and instruments can we fit behind the desk? Oh my god, what show is that? This is the Philharmonic, which is our 2024 Tiny Desk contest winner. Up until recently, there was just a giant cardboard box here of tapes, and I'd love to show you where they're at now. These are the OG Tiny Desks before we recorded them on digital SD cards. My favorite, we have Adele, Anna Tijoux, Lard Gibson, we have Esperanza Spalding, we have the Cranberries, Chuck Brown, Raphael Sadiq, Reggie Watts. It's just endless. And I really love having it here because I think it's kind of special. When you look at the way that the look of the Tiny Desk has evolved over the past five years, Josh Bryant, you can thank him. I have kind of started the whole Polaroid process here that we've done after concerts and post to social media. I've worked on helping get the color correction a little bit more elevated. And part of that with working with color also involves getting our lighting situation a little bit more elevated as well. Before I started here, we weren't using really any lights at all. We have a lot of instances where we'll have like a big audience, or it might be like a dark, cloudy day, and we need just a little bit of a punch. So that's where I kind of came in and helped us try to develop a lighting system that works. So these are our photo albums where we keep all of the best of our shots. We've got Usher. Did get a good one of Usher. Then we've got Benzo Curry, J.I.D., Omar Apollo, Pigeon Pit. The artist signs one, leaves one with us, and then they get to take one as well. Right. We always take two of each photo. You look through this and you're reminded of just how much output. You're able to reflect on something. Then we'll fill up so many more albums. It's just going to just keep going. All right. In three, two, one. Got it. When you watch Tiny Desk Concerts, it is such a team effort. This group is just a bunch of music nerds, each one of them extremely passionate about what they do, from the shooters, to the audio, to our social team, to our writers and our editors, from our podcast team, Alt Latino, all songs, to our jazz, to rock, to R&B, hip hop, reggaeton, classical, you name it, we have it covered here. So whenever you see anyone playing at the Tiny Desk, it's because someone on this team is super passionate about it. It's just so dope to be a part of something where you're highlighting a set, and the set is the true star, no matter who we bring behind this desk. All right. So thanks for hanging out today, following us, seeing how we do it there at the Tiny Desk, but we actually have a show to do tomorrow, so y'all got to go. Bye, Iggy! Yeah, there you go.