The Tiny DeskConcert is working from home for the foreseeable future. Introducing NPR Music’s Tiny Desk (home) concerts, bringing you performances from across the country and the world. It’s the same spirit — stripped-down sets, an intimate setting — just a different space. April 24, 2020 – When John Fogerty breaks out his baseball bat guitar and swings into that famous guitar lick from “Centerfield” to open his Tiny Desk (home) concert, I can almost taste the Cracker Jacks. Welcome to Fogerty’s Factory, the tricked-out basement where the Fogerty Family (John, his sons Tyler and Shane, and his daughter Kelsy) make music in these quarantined times.
His desk is the road case his band Creedence Clearwater Revival used when they played Woodstock, and John shows off a guitar he played at the festival as well. He plays three of his CCR classics from 50 years ago (still singing in the same key), surrounded by family and sending out words of encouragement to all of us.
Set List: “Centerfield” “Down On The Corner” “Long As I Can See The Light” “Proud Mary”
John Fogerty is getting an early start to sharing new music in 2021. The legendary songwriter and Creedence Clearwater Revival frontman has released “Weeping in The Promised Land,” a reflection on the state of the country over this past year. John Fogerty is no fan of President Donald Trump; the former Creedence Clearwater Revival leader even issued a cease-and-desist order (promptly ignored) this fall when “Fortunate Son” was cranked during Trump rallies. Now, Fogerty will be sending Trump off in his own way — with “Weeping in the Promised Land,” the 75-year-old rocker’s first new song in eight years. “It’s kind of like being a rock star in a band and then the band breaks up,” Fogerty says of Trump’s refusal to step down — and his affinity for rallies. “I used to stand in front of 30,000 or 40,000 people and they were all cheering for me. I know what that is. I understand the emotion he’s feeling. I’m trying not to sound like a basher — more like trying to understand the situation. I think he enjoys the rallies very much.”
In lyrics that touch on the dispiriting events of the last year, Fogerty references Trump’s attacks on Anthony Fauci (“He dances on their bones/Pharaoh shoutin’ down the medicine man”), health care workers (“With dread in their eyes, all the nurses are crying/Everywhere sorrow, everywhere dying”), and the murder of George Floyd (“Out in the street / On your neck with a knee / The people are cryin’ / Your words ‘I can’t breathe’ and the white judge say been no crime here”).
“I took a look back at what 2020 has been and tried to get my feelings out about the political climate, Black Lives Matter, COVID and everything else that occurred this year,” Fogerty said (via press release). “Friends are dying, we are stuck at home, we are indeed weeping in the promised land.”
Centered around Fogerty’s voice and piano, with only a handful of gospel singers accompanying him, the song marks a return to the socially conscious themes that powered Creedence anthems like “Fortunate Son” and “Who’ll Stop the Rain.”
Fogerty has kept busy during quarantine. In November 2020, he released Fogerty’s Factory, an album of his classic songs performed by him and his family.
As part of her ongoing reissue series, PJ Harvey has announced a vinyl reissue of her fifth album, 2000’s Stories From the City Stories From the Sea. It will be released alongside Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea – Demos, a collection of unreleased demos of every track on the album. Both sets arrive February 26th 2021. Listen to a demo of “This Mess We’re In” below.
Later this month, Harvey will reissue Is This Desire?, also with a new demo collection. Over the last year, Harvey has reissued her albums Dry, Rid of Me, To Bring You My Love, and Dance Hall at Louse Point. Her documentary film A Dog Called Money, which followed the creation of her 2016 album The Hope Six Demolition Project, will be released later this year following screenings last December.
Coming from Britain’s most chameleonic musical export, the shouted lyric “I want a pistol! I want a gun!” remains a jarringly American sentiment. Heard at the outset of PJ Harvey’s fifth album “Stories From the City Stories From the Sea”, this line was then Harvey’s most U.S.-evoking to date. Musically, though, her prior albums were rife with American musical influence: On her clamorous 1992 debut album Dry and her third album, 1995’s varied and biblical To Bring You My Love, she respectively built grunge and blues backdrops for bracing tales of despair. The album between the two, Harvey’s uncompromisingly abrasive 1993 pinnacle Rid of Me, pulled equally from both genres. Though she mined the distinctly British influence of trip-hop for 1998’s often-underrated Is This Desire?, one of that album’s music videos took place in the heart of the Big Apple. That’s exactly where Stories, released twenty years ago today, gets its start.
Of course, despite the gun-toting salvo of Stories’ storming opener “Big Exit,” New York isn’t a haven of American gun culture in the same way that, say, Virginia is. Instead, New York is all in Stories’ presentation (Harvey wrote much of the album while living there for nine months in 1999). On the album’s artwork, Harvey is clearly in Manhattan and well-dressed for the part. Her love of legendary New Yorker and punk poet laureate Patti Smith pervades her unprecedented mostly-not-gloomy guitar work, and the vocal vibrato of “Good Fortune” is supreme Horses-core. It remains debated whether Harvey’s newly upbeat guitars and lucid vocals were attempts to recapture the mainstream success she almost achieved with To Bring You My Love, but what’s clear now is that her unabashed enthusiasm for turn-of-the-21st-century New York hides a much darker interior.
Released just weeks before the Bush vs. Gore presidential election, and less than a year before 9/11, Stories is an unsettlingly prescient view of how the Bush era would accelerate the dystopia in which we currently find ourselves. Revisited just weeks before the 2020 presidential election, the album is a striking referendum on the terrors that accompany city life under proto-fascist rule. After 9/11, lyrics about planes and helicopters eternally overhead resembled New York’s understandably paranoid state; twenty years later, it’s still easy to close your eyes in major American cities and hear those same choppers above multiple times a day, seemingly patrolling (or just searching for) another anti-fascist demonstration.
In Harvey’s Clinton-era dream of New York, these disturbing details were just background noise. “The planes keep winging,” she mutters over a rollicking, starry-eyed eighth-note wash of guitars during the glowing chorus of “A Place Called Home,” which is otherwise a strong plea to a romantic partner. The first lyrics on the Thom Yorke–featuring rock ballad “This Mess We’re In” are Yorke singing “Can you hear them? / The helicopters / I’m in New York,” but it, too, is otherwise a love song. It’s a reminder that even as the police and military fly overhead, even as chaotic cities buzz and bristle and never sleep, everyday romances continue. It’s 2020 city life in a nutshell.
Harvey continues to unintentionally predict a future much closer to Stories’ setting throughout the album. The power-chord blast of “Kamikaze” is a prime example: It’s full of references to, as its title suggests, suicide pilots. Sure, in the song’s proper context, “How could that happen again? Where the fuck was I looking? When all his horses came in / And he built a whole army of kamikaze” is ostensibly about her partner continuing to surprise her, but when she describes her setting as “another war zone,” it’s hard not to connect her suicide pilots to the men who flew two planes into the Twin Towers. She might have meant to say that love is a battlefield, but she accidentally forecasted just how literally New York would become one.
Twenty years and more after Stories’ release, it remains fascinating and disturbing to see how well PJ Harvey’s most accessible, joy-filled album (when Stories survived Rolling Stone’s revisions to its 500 Best Albums of All Time list last month, the newly written blurb still expressed surprise about the LP’s felicity: “Polly Jean Harvey happy?” accidentally predicted some of its setting’s darkest times. Its twentieth birthday is also its first big-number anniversary to arrive after Harvey’s failure to work through American politics when she intended to do so. Her most recent album, 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project, rightly received backlash for engaging in Washington, D.C. poverty tourism and describing American political problems with minimal context and no solutions. Whereas Stories songs such as the ghostly arena-rock highlight “One Line” are ever more chilling for casual mentions of “This world all gone to war,” Hope Six’s “The Community of Hope” is…well, let D.C. politicians tell you for themselves.
But this reflection on Stories, not Hope Six, right? Well, sure, but now that the latter exists, it’s impossible not to consider its version of America when analyzing the former’s. The albums’ contrast suggests that the best way to get to know a place, its culture, and its people is pretty easy: Fully immerse yourself in it. As Harvey wrote songs about the whirlwind romance that defines Stories, she couldn’t help but detail New York—it’s where she was. That the helicopters, planes, guns, and war are peripheral only makes them more significant; they’re constantly in Harvey’s descriptions becausethey’re part of everyday life there.
What would such a world look like? It’s not the dystopia Harvey paints on “Big Exit” when she wants a pistol: “Too many cops / Too many guns.” Like much of Stories, this complaint isn’t just a story from the city told after ample time immersed in its lifestyle—it’s a vision and a solution for a place called home. “I live with hope that things can change,” Harvey said in an interview shortly before releasing Stories, which, for the first time in her career, showed this hope—and, in classic PJ Harvey form, the darkness threatening to crush it.
Inspired by classic rock, Carpool Tunnel serve old-fashioned grooves fitting for a slow dance at a ’70s prom with “Empty Faces.” Taking influence from social media and how through it we can feel connected to people we’ve never met, the track mixes the perfect amount of surf riffs and contemporary breaks. Swinging beats hold down the tempo while a slightly distorted guitar leads the rest of the band through each verse. “Empty Faces” was the fourth in a string of singles from the band in 2020. The group are expected to drop their debut LP early this year via Pure Noise Records.
Hailing from the indie rock haven of San Francisco, Carpool Tunnel is an up-and-coming band with a relaxed yet engaging sound. The group’s distinctive musical expression can’t be nailed down by a single genre.
Well, it’s been a long time coming but it is finally here. Our debut album, “Bloom” is coming out February 26th!
Auckland-raised Molly Payton relocated to London two years back, as a 16-year-old and dropped her debut EP Mess in Spring of last year. Her brand of lyrically mature, angsty, shambolic pop juts between extremes of melody and discord, and found a fan in schoolfriend Oscar Lang, who produced her first tracks.
London-based artist Molly Payton takes us down the dark, emotional bottom of our own monophobia in her latest single “Warm Body” Over the luminescent, gauzy production, the gal breaks down the carnal distractions we indulge in when we want to avoid confronting our own feelings of loneliness. Directed by Silence Aitken-Till, the video features Molly on her own as she passes the time within the confinements of an RV: “I’d much rather go through bad stuff, feel it completely and write about it, and work through it in all those ways than protect myself from it and not have anything good happen ever. I think it’s tied together— you can never feel bad without feeling good. And vice versa.”
‘Warm Body’ is about looking for comfort in people when you’re lonely and letting yourself make mistakes. The first time I met my producer Oli-Barton Wood, we wrote ‘Warm Body’ together, and by the end of the day I knew that I wanted him to produce the whole EP. Oli is insanely talented and was so lovely to work with, and recording ‘Porcupine’ was easily one of the best times of my life. He brought in Swedish band Francobollo to do some live band recording, they ended up becoming my live band and have been really good influences musically for me. The EP title relates to keeping people at arm’s length for fear of getting hurt, plus when I was recording it, I bleached my hair so many times that it broke off at the top and I spent three months looking like a porcupine.”
“Warm Body” is the first single from Molly Payton’s sophomore EP ‘Porcupine’
Irish poet Sinead O’Brien has shared her debut EP “Drowning in Blessings” today via Chess Club Records. It follows the release of previous singles “Roman Ruins” and “Strangers in Danger,” the latter of which was named an essential art rock track of 2020. The EP was produced by none other than Dan Carey, known for his work with Fontaines D.C., Kate Tempest and more.
Sinead O’Brien has also unveiled a video for “Most Modern Painting,” the opening song on this four-track release and the one that spawned the EP’s title. The video was directed by Saskia Dixie and shot on 16 mm film. “Most Modern Painting” is another carefully threaded art rock track, with O’Brien’s thoughts—both uninhibited and calculated firing quickly.
O’Brien says of the new single: “Most Modern Painting” is about the creation and maintenance of “the self” – the most epic task we are faced with in our lives. I wanted to work with structure in an unconventional way, linking the movements together using various voices from the narrative. The lyrics are voiced through a dialogue between the conscious and unconscious, through dream recall, memory, the individual and the ego.
“It’s about the creation and maintenance of the self. We never talk about it, but it’s the task that you were faced with from the minute you’re born – to create and develop yourself, forever.”
Limerick artist Sinead O’Brien’s sprechgesang-meets-post-punk poetry spills over with evocative literary references and captivating everyday observations. The Vivienne Westwood fashion designer started out penning poems and performing them with the musical backing of her regular contributor Niall Burns of whenyoung, with a style that’s since grabbed the attention of Chess Club and Speedy Wunderground.
Sinead O’Brien – Drowning In Blessings EP, out now:
“We start with these honest, bedroom-folksy songs. Then we just start adding like 808s and weird found sounds and pretty soon it’s something totally new and exciting. The Los Angeles based singer/songwriter Noah Weinman leads Runnner, often recruiting close friends including Skullcrusher’s Helen Ballentine and A.O. Gerber to help with vocals. His poetic, melancholic lyrics shine through on his 2020 second EP One of One, which meanders through contemplative, folk-tinged ballads to an almost unrecognisable, anthemic rework of Thundercat’s “Captain Stupido”.
Writing about their debut EP, “Fan On”, we described the music of Los Angeles-based band runnner as “somehow at once low key and blazingly expressive, distinctive and relatable.” If modesty and ambition seem like strange bedfellows then runnner disprove the thought, their “smooth and emotive bedroom pop combined with DIY folk leanings” working to create a sound that’s intimate yet thematically far-reaching, “explor[ing] the bittersweet nostalgia imbued in the minutiae of the day-to-day” to poke at existential questions and fears.
Though formed around Noah Weinman and Nate Lichtenberger,runnner performs live as a seven-piece yet the band are intelligent in their use of their numbers. Rather than throwing everything into the songs in some maximalist frenzy, runnner are frugal even in this sprawling form, maintaining a simple intimacy and fleshing out where necessary—with vocal harmonies, saxophone and trumpet—to further support and underline the emotion of the songs. Hectic crescendos are objectively great, but clever is the artist who can earn them with a careful balance of quiet.
The fact is pertinent because runnner are quickly establishing themselves as experts in balance, finding the sweet spot between loud and quiet, earnest and wry, and forming tracks of genuine emotional resonance. This year sees the band return with a brand new EP, “One of One”, and lead single ‘Heliotrope’ suggests that the development is continuing. Making the release one of our most anticipated of the year to come.
Born of the same South London scene that’s produced the likes of black midi, PVA and Squid, white-hot septet, Black Country New Road found their band name using a random Wikipedia page generator. The transparent artifice of that is actually fitting: With only three singles to their rather unwieldy name, including 2019’s “Athens, France” and “Sunglasses,” and this year’s “Science Fair,” the U.K. up-and-comers are growing and changing before our eyes, already reimagining the few songs they’ve released for their debut album For the first time, due out February 5th, 2021. Frontman Isaac Wood’s hypnotic speak-singing shifts subtly away from “speak” and towards “sing” on the album, so as to more effectively meld with the band’s mercurial instrumental outbursts. Their thunderous post-punk, spiked with discordant jazz, feels both explosively raw and carefully, ingeniously crafted.
Our new single, ‘Science Fair’ is out today with a new video directed by Bart Price.
The post-punk scene has been nothing but great so far… Idles, Shame, Black Midi, Sorry, Fontaines D.C, Protomartyr, Iceage, Parquet Courts, Guerrilla Toss, SQUID, Shopping, Viagra Boys, Ought… and now Black Country New Road ..2021 is going to be a great year
After just two singles they were declared “the best band in the world” by The Quietus, with glowing reviews from The New York Times, NPR, and The Guardian. Debut album, ‘For the First Time’ is due on 5th February 2021. Black Country New Road is Lewis Evans (saxophonist), May Kershaw (keys), Charlie Wayne (drums), Luke Mark (guitar), Isaac Wood (vocals/guitar), Tyler Hyde (bass) and Georgia Ellery (violin)
Taken from the album ‘For the first time’, To be released 5th February on Ninja Tune:
When Ela Minus first surfaced a few years ago with a series of gorgeous EPs that culminated with 2017’s Adapt., there was something unusually striking about her synthesized productions alongside her vapory vocals. Perhaps it’s because Ela Minus’s Gabriela Jimeno forgoes the use of computerized sounds in favour of those emanating from synths that she builds and designs herself. The Colombian-born, Brooklyn-based producer and singer just released her debut LP, “Acts of Rebellion”, via Domino Recordings, and is maintaining the analogue approach to her compositions. On tracks like “they told us it was hard, but they were wrong.” and “el cielo no es de nadie,” (translation: “heaven belongs to nobody”) Jimeno ruminates on purposeful solitude with an unwavering club sensibility. Ela Minus is a necessary Latinx voice in indie electronica.
Ela Minus’ debut album is a collection about the personal as political and embracing the beauty of tiny acts of revolution in our everyday lives. Throughout, a sense of urgency and a call to arms is mixed with this love and appreciation for reality—because even revolutionaries need to leave space for simple human interaction.
Ela Minus – “megapunk” from the new album ‘acts of rebellion’ out now on Domino Record Co.
The Fat Angel Sings 