NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series has been workin’ from home for the last while for obvious reasons, with many artists instead delivering fairly straightforward, typically stripped-down performances from their bedrooms or studios.
For Billie Eilish‘s appearance on the series, she went one step further – recreating the NPR office’s Tiny Desk space with cardboard cutouts.
It’s a pretty bloody good job, with every little detail of the familiar office space captured. Squint a little and it feels just like the real thing, sans NPR staff applauding in-between songs. “Obviously we are not actually at Tiny Desk because this is a cardboard cutout of it. But it’s still real, it’s just not in-person real,” Eilish comments at one point.
Backed by brother/producer Finneas, Eilish performs two excellent standalone singles from the past year, ‘my future’ and ‘everything i wanted’. At the end of the latter, they pull back the camera to show the elaborate, diorama-like performance space. It’s great – check it out below.
This week also saw Tame Impala perform a socially-distanced Tiny Desk, with Kevin Parker and collaborators Jay Watson and Dominic Simper performing reworked tracks from latest album The Slow Rush along with 2019 single ‘Patience’. Check that out here.
