MILES PARKS, HOST:
More than 1,200 concerts have taken place here at NPR headquarters right here in Washington, D.C., where artists squeeze into a tiny desk area while journalists file stories an arm's length away. American singer-songwriter Laura Gibson was the first to take the tiny stage in 2008.
(SOUNDBITE OF TINY DESK CONCERT)
LAURA GIBSON: (Singing) ...Window of the day. I'll be another waking shadow cast on the covers of your bed. Give me...
PARKS: Since then, it's become an internet sensation with a dedicated fan base. And this weekend, the Tiny Desk became a radio show, only on public radio stations across the country. With us now is Anamaria Sayre, one of the co-hosts of Tiny Desk Radio. Hey, Anamaria.
ANAMARIA SAYRE, BYLINE: Hey, Miles. How's it going?
PARKS: It's fantastic. It's great to have you here. And I feel like I want to start at the beginning because this feels a little bit like a normal part of working at NPR now. Just - I'm at my desk, and then, like, Sabrina Carpenter or Usher walks by. But can you talk us kind of through the history? How did the Tiny Desk begin?
SAYRE: Yes, I love to get into the lore. So I think a weird thing that most people don't realize is that this whole thing came to be very organically. So two of my co-workers, Stephen Thompson, Bob Boilen, they were at South By Southwest one year. They couldn't hear the show, and they were like, what if we just invite the artist, Laura Gibson, to come play literally at our office? - which - I don't know why no one else before ever had this idea. To me, it's, like, the most brilliant scheme ever.
(LAUGHTER)
SAYRE: But since then, it pretty much just kept going. I think that the reason it grew so quickly is because people could feel the organic, the authentic nature of what we do, what artists do behind the space. And so, from there, it just has become kind of this pillar for artists' careers where it's really an opportunity for the likes of all kinds of artists, big and small, to come in and really prove who they are musically, to show something that people don't usually get to see. So I think it's just kind of infectious, the energy, and people can feel that, and then they want to be a part of it.
PARKS: Yeah. I mean, it's an internet staple at this point. I feel like when I tell people I work at NPR, a lot of times the first thing they say is, like, oh, my God, you get to go see the Tiny DeskS. But not everything that works online works on the radio and vice versa. And I wonder how you're thinking about bringing this show to the airwaves now.
SAYRE: Yeah, I think because the Tiny Desk lives on YouTube, a lot of times people think of it as a visual platform. But to me, really the shining most important and unique element of the Tiny Desk is still the audio. The idea is to keep the arrangement, to keep the instrumentation really stripped back, really as close to what the original music melody lyricism was supposed to sound like, so we can really give artists a moment to let their core musically shine. So in that sense, stripping away the visual, having it on the radio, actually fits quite nicely because I think a radio audience is really ready to kind of give the audio that beautiful attention that these mixes deserve.
PARKS: Well, yeah, that's what - I want to dig into the audio a little bit more because you have produced some of the most successful Tiny Desks in recent years. Most recently, the Bad Bunny Tiny Desk that came out, like, less than two weeks ago and already has, like, 9 million views on YouTube.
(SOUNDBITE OF TINY DESK CONCERT)
BAD BUNNY: (Singing in Spanish).
PARKS: What does make the kind of performances special when you strip away all the kind of extra production that people normally hear when they hear a lot of these artists' music?
SAYRE: You know, we're in a really exciting moment musically around the world where production is such a huge part of the art form of music, right? Like, you have all of these incredible pieces of sound that are not just the melodies, that are not just the lyrics, but are that the actual - all of that sound around, all the exciting electronic sound, you name it. It makes it what it is, and I think that's incredible and it has its place. But what Tiny Desk does is it gives these artists the opportunity to come in and actually just say, hey, this is my heart. This is where I was when this first came to be, whether when I first wrote those lyrics down on the page or I first just had that melody occur to me in my dream or whatever it was, and I want to give it to people.
And I think that really is something important and valuable and a little bit lost - not in a bad way, but just something that we don't always get to experience at a recording. And so what we really get to do is give people this opportunity to see their favorite artists, to see and hear those sounds that they're crying to at their bedroom, experiencing them in a more authentic, a more rich and more original way. And that is something that I think everyone can find something to grab on to.
PARKS: That's NPR's Anamaria Sayre, one of the co-hosts of the new Tiny Desk Radio. Thank you so much.
SAYRE: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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