For 15 years, National Public Radio
here in DC has been bringing in the
biggest names to and music to play
behind a totally normal Tiny Desk.
These performances they have been
viewed hundreds of millions of
times and their YouTube channel
has nearly 8,000,000 subscribers.
Skyler Henry recently went behind the
Tiny Desk to find out how they got from
indie guitar players to rap legends,
asking the NPR audience to
back that thing up.
Many of music's biggest stars,
The spectacle of a live stadium show
is no match
with the Tiny Desk.
I didn't know it was actually in the office,
so this is very uncouth.
And yet, artists from every
genre have been coming to this
cramped office space in Washington, DC,
to play stripped down versions of their
songs in front of dozens of NPR staffers.
The first thing I tell artists now,
this is a real desk and a real office.
All of those crutches and
things that people use to.
Be on stage and feel
comfortable They're all gone.
Hosted musician Bob Boylan
created it 15
years ago. Bobby Carter is one
of the program's producers.
What's the secret sauce passion about music?
I mean, simple. It's
we don't. We're not trying to bring
in the biggest artist in the world.
We're trying to bring in the
ones we care about. Sure, the
big artists show up here,
but they shared this space with up
and coming musicians and singers like
Tank and the Bangas and Little Moon.
Even the Broadway cast of the iconic musical
The Lion King jammed out at the desk.
Singer Laura Gibson was
Tiny Desks first artist.
In 2008, Boylan had gone to
see her at a music festival in
Texas but couldn't hear her set,
so he and his colleague invited
her to play at the desk. We're
going to videotape this for our
blog and and maybe it's a start
of something, and maybe it's not.
It was the start of a phenomenon.
That's all that's real here. Now what
do you think of that intimacy?
Where you're stripping down the layers of
what artists are normally accustomed to.
For me it's most compelling when it's an
artist where you don't see that anyway,
cuz I'm gonna hit it. Like when we
bring in hiphop artists at the desk,
you're gonna hear interpretations of the
music that you've never heard before,
as it was the case with you.
Before April of this
year, hip hop legend Juvenile had
never even heard of the Tiny Desk,
and I posted it and it
Oh man, the backlash.
Now I know what Tiny Death is,
and you go from performing in
front of thousands of people to
something more intimate like this.
Yeah. It's something that's that
you have to get used to when
you so used to moving around.
Instead, he and his longtime collaborator
Manny Fresh brought New Orleans and
their 99 and 2000s hits to the desk,
along with the band and a couple of Grammy
winners, Tremblan Shorty and Jon
Baptiste. Two tiny Desk alums.
You had any advice from juvie?
No. He doing his thing.
I was just like,
don't hurt him too bad.
At back that thing up.
You seen that?
Yeah. Seen that.
I don't know if Tiny that's
that that that was like
bringing New Orleans here
and that's truly a special
special cultural moment.
Just not
this is weird as hell for me. The
big turning point for a lot of
what we do is the T Paint concert.
Don't for using auto tune.
I know everybody's wondering where
the auto tune is going to come from.
It's OK. I got it in my pocket.
Rapper and singer T Payne came here
to perform in 2014 without it.
It was priceless.
Carter helped introduce
Tiny Desk to a new audience.
Now more R&B, hip
hop and gospel artists are being booked.
I think it's important for us to be
in spaces where it's unexpected.
For NPR. There's still people out
there who don't know what this is,
and to me that's a fun challenge.
On quieter days, you'll catch boiling
working at the desk behind him.
The shelves are bursting with
items artists leave behind.
It seems like every Chotsky you
can possibly think of is here.
Musicians are musicians,
and they're kind of spare and
they'd leave stuff behind.
This is Adele's water bottle,
Big Bird's Feather.
That was an amazing experience.
Finish the sentence for me.
Tiny Desk is phenomenal. I
think it's a gift for a musician. It's
a way to be expressive and be yourself
without sacrificing who you are. CBS News.
I'm Skyler Henry.