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The Lumineers: Tiny Desk Concert

The Lumineers showed up at the Tiny Desk with family, friends and crew who travel with the tight-knit touring band. One special guest in particular was Lenny, the toddler son of lead singer Wes Schultz. As soon as Bob Boilen met Lenny, Bob searched for every toy he could find on the shelves behind his desk to entertain the restless tyke.

I've always been struck by how this band can make a crowd of 6,000 fans feel like an intimate jam session. Halfway through The Lumineers' set at the Newport Folk Festival in 2013, the entire band moved to the very back of the enormous crowd. I remember marveling that the worst spot in the field miraculously became the best.

Much of The Lumineers' Tiny Desk comes from the band's third LP, III, which tells a story of addiction in three acts. They began with gut-wrenching renditions of "Gloria" and "Leader Of The Landslide"(accompanied by a cassette recording of crickets made on iPhones and dubbed to play on a boombox). The third track is also from III, but was an assignment from directorM. Night Shyamalan. He tasked Schultz and his suspender-clad writing partner, Jeremiah Fraites, with composing a song for the end credits of a film. "Jer and I worked really hard on that, and then he didn't need it," Schultz confessed. The result is the stark and haunting "Salt And The Sea,"which strikes a different chord than any other song they've written.

It wouldn't be a Lumineers show without a foot-stompin' sing-along to end the set, which came with their crowd-pleasing hit "Stubborn Love". Stelth Ulvang demonstrated a level of barefoot acrobatics unrivaled at the desk thus far, not an easy feat (or should I say, feet). Right after the Tiny Desk concert, the band and entourage rushed off to play a little club in town called the Capital One Arena for another intimate show in front of 20,000 fans.

SET LIST

  • "Gloria" "
  • "Leader of the Landslide"
  • "April (instrumental)"
  • "Salt And The Sea"
  • "Stubborn Love"
  • MUSICIANS

    Wesley Schultz; guitar, vocals; Jeremiah Fraites: drums, piano, vocals; Stelth Ulvang: piano, accordian, vocals; Lauren Jacobson: violin, piano, vocals; Byron Isaacs: bass, vocals; Brandon Miller: percussion, guitar, vocals

    CREDITS

    Producers: Josh Rogosin, Morgan Noelle Smith, Kara Frame; Creative director: Bob Boilen; Audio engineers: Josh Rogosin, Patrick Boyd; Videographers: Kara Frame, Maia Stern, Bronson Arcuri; Editor: Melany Rochester; Associate Producer: Bobby Carter; Production Assistant: Shanti Hands; Executive producer: Lauren Onkey; VP, programming: Anya Grundmann; Photo: Bob Boilen/NPR

    Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

    Josh Rogosin (he/him) stumbled into NPR HQ in 1999 on his way to mixing shows at The Shakespeare Theatre in downtown DC. Since then, he has been at the controls for all of NPR's flagship newsmagazines and gathered sound in far flung places like Togo and Benin, West Africa, Cambodia and Greece for the Radio Expeditions series. He has engineered at NPR West and NPR NY and spent two years as Technical Director at Marketplace Productions in Los Angeles. He served as Senior Broadcast Engineer for New York Public Radio and Studio 360, and was an originating producer and sound designer for NPR's Ask Me Another.