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National

2014: The Year In Tiny Desk Concerts

By Stephen Thompson
Published December 16, 2014 at 10:30 AM PST
This story was published more than 9 years ago.
T-Pain's Tiny Desk Concert has been viewed 6.6 million times on YouTube alone.
Maggie Starbard
/
NPR
T-Pain's Tiny Desk Concert has been viewed 6.6 million times on YouTube alone.

It's been a remarkable year for Tiny Desk Concerts: We've published a whopping 83 of them in 2014 alone, eclipsed the 400-episode mark without noticing, helped T-Pain score 6.6 million YouTube views, and launched a contest to bring an unknown band to the Tiny Desk in 2015.

So it wasn't easy to whittle down this list of highlights, which is only about 70 spots shy of definitive. (For the full list, click here.) Truth be told, you should really set aside a weekend and watch all 83 sets back-to-back. But until then, here's a cross-section of favorites, from pop to opera, hip-hop, jazz, rock, country and whatever genre is broad enough to contain the Sun Ra Arkestra.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Stephen Thompson
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.)
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