© 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.

Shovels & Rope: Tiny Desk Concert

Shovels & Rope's presence in the NPR Music offices attracted plenty of interest; many in attendance had long since fallen in love with the husband-and-wife duo's mix of rowdy folk-rock and rootsy balladeering. But once Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent showed up, the office quickly lost sight of the approaching performance, as the murmurs began: "There's a dog in the office there's a dog in the office there's a dog in the office!" You could practically see our coworkers' brains short out from a combination of cognitive dissonance and canine adoration.

But, as endearing as our new friend was, Shovels & Rope soon won back the crowd's attention. After opening with the plaintive ballad "Carnival," the South Carolina duo ripped through one of its signature rockers — "Birmingham," during which the pair held eye contact sweetly while singing in unison — before closing with "Bad Luck," a clattering gem for which the two swap instruments (he on guitar, she on drums). The song, originally from a Michael Trent solo album, most recently appeared on a deluxe version of Shovels & Rope's 2012 debut, the winning and appropriately titled O' Be Joyful.

Set List

  • "Carnival"
  • "Birmingham"
  • "Bad Luck"
  • Credits

    Producers: Bob Boilen, Denise DeBelius; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; Videographers: Parker Miles Blohm, Chloe Coleman, Denise DeBelius; photo by Chloe Coleman/NPR

    Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

    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.)
    Related Content
    • Latin jazz works best when the musicians involved are as fluent in Afro-Cuban rhythms as they are in the deep grooves and advanced harmonics of bebop. A man with a powerful interest in both the past and the future, Arturo O'Farrill has that pedigree in his DNA.
    • The 1975 knows its way around bigness, but in stripping his band's sound down to fit the intimate confines of the Tiny Desk, Matthew Healy doesn't hesitate to transform both his songs and himself.
    • For our 300th Tiny Desk Concert, we showcase Omara "Bombino" Moctar, a Tuareg guitarist from Niger whose fierce, hypnotic and alluring jams can be traced back to a youthful appreciation of Jimi Hendrix.