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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.

Saintseneca: Tiny Desk Concert

By Bob Boilen
Published July 29, 2014 at 12:03 PM MDT
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One of the many instruments you may hear Saintseneca play — beyond the banjo, baglama, bulbul, balalaika, bowed banjo, baritone ukulele, bass and bouzouki — is a stomp box. Basically, it's a roughly 2'x2' plywood floorboard meant for pounding the beat. At a show just before this Tiny Desk Concert, craftily bearded singer Zac Little put his boot right through that floorboard.

Saintseneca had its beginnings in the heart of a small Appalachian town in Ohio, and the band grew up at college in Columbus. This year's Dark Arc is a pastiche of gentle lyrical moments and punk anthems, often within the same tune and often with that aforementioned stomp, straight from a small wooden porch.

After Saintseneca left the Tiny Desk, I pointed the band to a hardware store to replace its broken floorboard — only to get a note a while later telling me that the new board had been destroyed within weeks. Here's a good sampling of what the group does best, though you should be sure to see Saintseneca in concert, where its fierceness is afoot.

Set List

  • "Happy Alone"

  • "Fed Up With Hunger"

  • "Blood Bath"

    • Credits

    Producers: Bob Boilen, Denise DeBelius; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; Videographers: Olivia Merrion, Nick Michael; photo by Olivia Merrion/NPR

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

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    Bob Boilen
    In 1988, a determined Bob Boilen started showing up on NPR's doorstep every day, looking for a way to contribute his skills in music and broadcasting to the network. His persistence paid off, and within a few weeks he was hired, on a temporary basis, to work for All Things Considered. Less than a year later, Boilen was directing the show and continued to do so for the next 18 years.
    See stories by Bob Boilen
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