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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.

Noah And The Whale: Tiny Desk Concert

By Stephen Thompson
Published August 10, 2011 at 2:00 AM MDT

The NPR Music offices have hosted a remarkable array of instruments in the years since we launched the Tiny Desk Concerts series: harps, koras, a pipa, a pipe organ and many more surprises, to go with the expected scores of guitars, violins and muted snare drums. Listening to either of Noah and the Whale's first two albums — 2008's warmly organic Peaceful, the World Lays Me Down and 2009's string-swept breakup album The First Days of Spring — you'd never expect the London band to spring a surprise on us.

But Last Night on Earth, Noah and the Whale's recent third album, is highlighted by the encroachment of a drum machine, which the band used to replace co-founder Doug Fink (brother of singer-guitarist Charlie) after he left to attend medical school. And, lo and behold, Charlie Fink and violinist Tom Hebden turned up at this Tiny Desk Concert as a duo with drum machine in tow. The device's tinny simu-snare takes a little bit of getting used to — it's thankfully shelved for an exquisite run through "Blue Skies," from The First Days of Spring — but it does add pep to the two new songs here, "L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N." and "Waiting for My Chance to Come." It's not Noah and the Whale unplugged, obviously, but sweet simplicity still reigns.

Set List

  • "L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N."

  • "Blue Skies"

  • "Waiting For My Chance To Come"

    • Credits

    Michael Katzif (cameras); edited by Bob Boilen; audio by Kevin Wait; photo by Amanda Steen/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