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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.

Real Estate: Tiny Desk Concert

Real Estate's music is a disarmingly delicate thing, crafted out of tenderly shimmering guitars and blurry images of a past that's both rose-colored and sepia-toned. But the songs are far from showy: Paced evenly and sung in a near-whisper, they could only be made by a band standing stock-still. Last year's album Days is a tiny wonder, meeting at the middle between beachy '60s pop and bittersweet '90s college radio, but it was made for the studio rather than the stage.

True to form, Real Estate's five members stood in one place throughout their three-song concert in the NPR Music offices, opting instead to re-create their sound with airy precision. Visually, this isn't a striking performance, but Real Estate wears placidity well: It's a band born and bred to convey and celebrate laconic comfort. These guys may be a little young for such winsome nostalgia — given their age, "Municipality" sounds as if they long for a youth spent listening to early Death Cab for Cutie records — but damned if they don't make it work.

Set List:

  • "Easy"
  • "Green Aisles"
  • "Municipality"
  • Credits:

    Producer: Bob Boilen; Editor and Videographer: Michael Kazif; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; photo by Doriane Raiman/NPR

    Copyright 2021 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.)
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