With Oscar nominations now out, we recommend a performance to accompany each of this year’s 10 nominees for best picture; plus, watch new shows from BLK ODYSSY and Hania Rani, and the Tiny Desk Contest is open for submissions.
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While watching movies in anticipation of this week’s Oscar nominations, which were announced on Tuesday, I kept noticing threads that led straight to amazing music. Some of this year’s best picture contenders (like Barbie) have soundtracks packed with contemporary musicians, while others (like Killers of the Flower Moon) dropped the contemporary musicians directly into their casts. It didn’t take long to determine that this would be the perfect week to prepare a menu of Tiny Desk concerts to pair with each nominee for the top prize at the Oscars. Think of me as your sommelier, except the music is amazing and all the wine is poured out of the same $7 screw-top bottle.
American Fiction. Cord Jefferson’s funny and thoughtful dramatic satire has a terrific and Oscar-nominated score by Laura Karpman. Karpman has never played a Tiny Desk concert — though the marvelous Jeff Lunden did profile her for Morning Edition back in 2009 — so let’s kick this thing off with a roundup of American Fiction co-star Issa Rae’s favorite Tiny Desk concerts, plus a Tiny Desk (home) concert by three favorites of Rae’s show Insecure: B.K. Habermehl, Nnena, and TeaMarrr.
Anatomy of a Fall. No, Justine Triet’s two-and-a-half-hour legal drama isn’t exactly packed to its exposed rafters with Tiny Desk tie-ins. But the cast does include Savages lead singer Jehnny Beth — and, though she’s never appeared at the Tiny Desk (more’s the pity), there isa full, nearly 90-minute Savages concert from our Front Row series in 2016.
Barbie. No scavenging necessary for Tiny Desks connected to the year’s biggest movie. Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas, whose Barbie hit “What Was I Made For?” seems destined to duplicate their best original song win from 2022, played a Tiny Desk (home) concert in what at least appeared to be the NPR Music offices. And the Barbie soundtrack is packed with Tiny Desk veterans, including Dua Lipa, Khalid, HAIM, Tame Impala, Karol G and Sam Smith. But let’s pick one Tiny Desk concert to rule Barbie Land: last year’s performance by the Indigo Girls. The folk duo’s Tiny Desk set even opens with “Closer to Fine,” which doubles as one of Barbie’s greatest needle drops.
The Holdovers. Alexander Payne’s bittersweet comedic drama begins in late 1970, and peppers its soundtrack with era-appropriate songs by the likes of Cat Stevens and Labi Siffre. But it opens with a song that merely sounds like a gem from the ’70s: “Silver Joy,” from Damien Jurado’s 2014 album Brothers and Sisters of the Eternal Son. If watching The Holdovers drew you to that gorgeous song (and why wouldn’t it?), then you don’t want to miss the spare beauty of Jurado’s solo Tiny Desk concert from 2011.
Killers Of The Flower Moon. Martin Scorsese’s films evoke a love of many things. Antiheroes. Rule-breaking men. Epically long runtimes. And, of course, the guy adores music. I counted six high-profile musicians in the cast of Killers of the Flower Moon — Sturgill Simpson, Jason Isbell, Jack White, Randy Houser, Pete Yorn and Charlie Musselwhite — and two of them, Simpson and Isbell, have headlined Tiny Desk concerts. (Heck, Isbell has three to his name: one with his band, one backing up Josh Ritter and one home concert with the great Amanda Shires.)
Maestro. Maestro is a biopic of a famous composer and musician, so picking a Maestro-adjacent Tiny Desk concert should have been a breeze, right? Well, no one has ever performed Leonard Bernstein’s music at the Tiny Desk (we had the same problem with Lydia Tár last year) and Bernstein himself died in 1990, so… this one was surprisingly tricky. Let’s play Two Degrees of Leonard Bernstein, then, and say this: Several of Bernstein’s career milestones involved him conducting works by Beethoven — his first TV appearance, in 1954, contains moments from Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, while the 1989 Berlin Celebration Concert finds him conducting a performance of Beethoven’s 9th — and the great Russian pianist Igor Levit graced the Tiny Desk with three of Beethoven’s works in 2019.
Oppenheimer. The Oscar-nominated score for Christopher Nolan’s three-hour J. Robert Oppenheimer biopic was composed by Ludwig Göransson, who participated in our Tiny Desk Talks series back in 2018. But that conversation is no longer archived on the Internet, so we’re gonna have to bend the rules again. Did you know that the 2007 film Once, which won a best original song Oscar for Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglová, was originally slated to star Oppenheimer’s Cillian Murphy? So here are Hansard and Irglová, neither of whom has ever been slated to star in Oppenheimer, as they play the Tiny Desk in 2009.
Past Lives. The lovely score for Past Lives was composed by Christopher Bear and Daniel Rossen of Grizzly Bear, who (incredibly) never performed a Tiny Desk concert despite inspiring roughly 5,000 pieces on NPR Music in the early 21st century. So let’s go instead with Sharon Van Etten, who recorded the song “Quiet Eyes” for Past Lives’ soundtrack. The track actually made the Academy’s shortlist for best original song, then sadly fell short of landing a nomination. (Hey, at least Diane Warren got nominated for the 15th time, right?) Van Etten has two Tiny Desk concerts under her belt — one in 2010, the other in 2019.
Poor Things. It’s a pity that we’ve never brought in Jerskin Fendrix, whose fantastic score enlivens the already-enlivened Poor Things. But instead, we’re back to playing with degrees of separation. Let’s begin with the actress Margaret Qualley, who has a small but memorable part in Poor Things. Qualley married super-producer Jack Antonoff last summer. Antonoff, in addition to producing seemingly thousands of massive pop songs, has his own band, Bleachers. Bleachers, in turn, has two Tiny Desk performances under its belt: one in the office in 2017 and one from home in 2021.
The Zone of Interest. Many predicted that Mica Levi would receive a second Oscar nomination (after 2016’s Jackie) for their work composing the score for The Zone of Interest, a Holocaust drama centered on unnerving sound design. Alas, it didn’t happen. But The Zone of Interest did snag five nominations, including best picture and best director, and Levi’s music is a big part of what makes the film work. Levi used to lead an experimental pop band called Micachu & The Shapes, and though that band never played a Tiny Desk concert, we did capture the group in a lovely Field Recording all the way back in 2012.
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Recent Tiny Desks
The latest Tiny Desk to drop features a man my dear colleague Bobby Carter describes as “the modern personification of funk”: Juwon Elcock, a.k.a. BLK ODYSSY. Should you aspire to one day become the modern personification of funk, here’s an 18-minute lesson plan to get you started.
The Polish pianist and composer Hania Rani, whose set dropped earlier this week, blurs the lines of ambient, classical and house music.
The U.K. singer-songwriter Amber Bain, a.k.a. The Japanese House, recasts four of her electro-pop songs in fresh arrangements.
yMusic’s unique sound, driven by its peculiar blend of trumpet, winds and strings, seems like a compelling soundtrack for an age when music genres are becoming increasingly arbitrary.
Rwandan band The Good Ones has an inspiring determination to spread its musical message.
Around public radio
Colorado Public Radio’s Indie 102.3 just published a great interview and performance with New Zealand’s The Beths, whom we cannot endorse strongly enough.
Late last year, Austin’s KUTX presented an album-release webcast by Grammy darling Black Pumas. That video is finally available to watch.
Emerging British band English Teacher made waves toward the end of 2023 with the single “Nearly Daffodils.” WFUV captured the band playing that song in its New York City studio.
Speaking of great 2023 songs, indie rock didn’t get much better than Ratboys’ “The Window.” The band’s KEXP version will send shivers down your spine.
If you’re free at noon ET on Friday and a fan of men singing sensitive songs, Philly's WXPN is presenting a fantastic double-bill live stream of Pete Yorn and Phosphorescent.
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