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NPR Music: Tiny Desk Concerts
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.

Patty Griffin: Tiny Desk Concert

By Stephen Thompson
Published June 24, 2013 at 12:38 PM MDT

Patty Griffin has always had a gift for locating a song's nerve endings; for surveying her subject matter and identifying the most efficient possible pathways to listeners' emotions. Her warm, wise voice is comforting, inviting and relatable, even — perhaps especially — as she tackles weighty subjects like middle age and the death of a parent.

The memory of Griffin's father hangs over her recent seventh album, American Kid, but the singer remains far too resourceful to make it a collection of navel-gazing dirges about mortality. In sampling a few of the record's many highlights at the NPR Music offices, she takes care to balance the exquisite mourning of "Faithful Son" — and the sweetly somber "That Kind of Lonely," which Griffin describes as "a song about finally letting go of your delayed adolescence" — by closing her set with the playfully bawdy, kindly celebratory "Get Ready Marie." Inspired by a favorite photo of her grandparents, the song finds Griffin viewing two complicated lives with the generous, hopeful eye she's been casting on her subjects for three fruitful decades now.

Set List

  • "Faithful Son"

  • "That Kind Of Lonely"

  • "Get Ready Marie"

    • Personnel

  • John Deaderick, accordion

  • Patty Griffin, guitar

  • Dave Pulkingham, guitar

  • Craig Ross, baritone guitar

    • Credits

    Producer: Bob Boilen; Editor: Denise DeBelius; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; Videographers: Kainaz Amaria, Denise DeBelius, Gabriella Garcia-Pardo; photo by Denise DeBelius/NPR

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

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    Tiny Desk Concerts
    Stephen Thompson
    Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)
    See stories by Stephen Thompson
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