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Clem Snide With Scott Avett: Tiny Desk (Home) Concert

The Tiny Desk 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.


Recording a Tiny Desk concert at home naturally subtracts a lot of familiar elements: Bob Boilen's desk, for example; the wooden shelves full of weird ephemera; the crowd of work-shirking news-gatherers and the applause they provide. But when Clem Snide (the three-decade-old project of singer-songwriter Eef Barzelay) and special guest Scott Avett (the Avett Brothers co-founder who produced and performs on Clem Snide's latest album, Forever Just Beyond) performed together in Avett's barn, they added a few new features you've never gotten to hear at the Tiny Desk — most notably a noisy flock of birds and the unmistakable cries of a nearby rooster.

We've had a few disruptive animals at the Tiny Desk over the years, from the occasional dog to Bob Boilen himself, but this had to be our first rooster. As for Barzelay and Avett, they not only maintained social distancing throughout their set, but also rigorously enforced it with the aid of a visible tape measure. Still, their voices blended warmly as they tackled three spiritually searching songs from the (great) new record, as well as an older track that fits Forever Just Beyond's themes perfectly: "Jews for Jesus Blues," from Clem Snide's 2005 album End of Love.

SET LIST

  • "The Stuff of Us"
  • "Jews for Jesus Blues"
  • "Some Ghost"
  • "Roger Ebert"
  • Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

    Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)