© 2024
NPR for Northern Colorado
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
Tiny Desk Concerts from NPR's All Songs Considered features your favorite musicians performing at Bob Boilen's desk in the NPR Music office. This is the AUDIO only archive.Are you a fancy A/V nerd and need video? Visit our new Tiny Desk Concert video channel. Eye-popping video and all of the music you've come to expect.

Cian Nugent: Tiny Desk Concert

Cian Nugent doesn't know what he wants to be, and that's OK. The Dublin-based guitarist cut his teeth as a 19-year-old pickin' on the acoustic worlds that John Fahey, Jack Rose and Bert Jansch built. But that was five years ago, and since then, Nugent has come at his instrument and his songwriting from all sides, hitting up psychedelic folk, garage pop and cosmic guitar improvisation along the way.

On a short U.S. tour supporting Angel Olsen (herself a Tiny Desk alum), Nugent stopped by the NPR Music offices to play what he's called the "incoherent range of the mess that is my musical career." There's the acoustic "Grass Above My Head," a slow, somber melody that turns into a ragtime jaunt. The song once shared a 7" with an inventive Black Flag cover and was re-recorded with his band The Cosmos for last year's excellent Born With the Caul.

Nugent then switches to a cheap, no-name electric guitar — purchased just days before in a pawn shop — that only seems to stay in tune when a pencil's been in the nut. (Oh, yes, there's a story about said pencil.) It gives "Hire Purchase" the just-barely-off quality required for the raunchy, basement-bar choogle going down — like maybe J.J. Cale is still drunk from yesterday's gig and the only cure is more pencil!

And, in defiance of all daylight, Nugent closes with "Nightlife," which, at the time of the Tiny Desk filming, was still untitled. True to its title, it's the sad-sack set closer sure to be played at last call — heads on the bar, mops out on a beer-soaked floor, with Nugent singing about regret and "wasted time."

Set List

  • "Grass Above My Head"
  • "Hire Purchase"
  • "Nightlife"
  • Credits

    Producers: Denise DeBelius, Lars Gotrich; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; Videographers: Denise DeBelius, Gabriella Garcia-Pardo, Olivia Merrion; photo by Jim Tuttle/NPR

    Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

    Listen to the Viking's Choice playlist, subscribe to the newsletter.
    Related Content
    • Impossibly telegenic and charming, husband and wife Abner Ramirez and Amanda Sudano have the booming voices of great street buskers, but also the polished sparkle of natural-born stage performers.
    • Interweaving harmonies and guitar lines from Anna Fox Rochinski and Shane Butler set the tone for these tunes — soft and benevolent, dreamy and quivering.
    • The Argentine singer-songwriter uses his dark, husky voice to produce a specific effect in the songs he performs at the NPR music offices: Together, they jell into one impressionistic midtempo ballad.