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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.

Mother Falcon: Tiny Desk Concert

By Stephen Thompson
Published August 17, 2013 at 5:36 AM MDT

When it comes to Tiny Desk Concerts, we're suckers for milestones at NPR Music: We're gearing up to acknowledge No. 300, for example, and are constantly taking note of the first time a musician trots out a particular rare instrument or does something else no one has done in front of us before. The Austin chamber-rock band Mother Falcon recently scored a big distinction, at least as far as we're concerned — one it shares with its fellow Texans in The Polyphonic Spree — as the largest ensemble ever to squeeze behind Bob Boilen's desk.

Unlike The Polyphonic Spree, though, everyone in Mother Falcon plays an instrument during this performance: There's no chorus of backup singers among the 17 men and women who play guitars and horns and keyboards and woodwinds and strings here. Which made Tetris-ing each member behind Bob's desk a bit of a challenge, but Mother Falcon knows its way around cramped spaces: At one point during SXSW this year, Bob and I saw the group give a concert as it spilled from a small stage all the way onto the street outside. (Crowds gathered around both spaces, in some cases not realizing that they were only seeing half a band.)

What makes Mother Falcon so alluring, though, isn't its size, but rather the way it uses all its members in the service of great, snappy, stirring, frequently uplifting songs. Its many moving parts aren't creating mere volume, but also texture: These three songs, all from this year's You Knew, find a place for dreamy whispers and literal screams alike. Give this sweet, winning band 12 minutes — heck, give it the first two and a half, which is all it takes to perform the soaring and scrappy "Marigold" — and you ought to have yourself a favorite worth following for years to come.

Set List

  • "Marigold"

  • "Marfa"

  • "Dirty Summer"

    • Credits

    Producers: Bob Boilen, Denise DeBelius, Stephen Thompson; Editor: Parker Miles Blohm; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; Videographers: Parker Miles Blohm, Chloe Coleman, Becky Lettenberger, Maggie Starbard; photo by Hayley Bartels/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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