The Tiny Desk Contest is back for 2022, with a new (and stacked) panel of judges and another opportunity for unsigned artists to earn an invite to perform on the revered, improvised stage in front of Bob Boilen’s desk at NPR Music HQ. Listen to our interview with Tiny Desk creator Bob Boilen from First Coast Connect. Over the past …
On ‘Melt My Eyez See Your Future,’ Denzel Curry’s ambitions get the best of him
Let’s be honest about South Florida’s rap scene: The region is full of creative talent, most of it unheralded. The Haitian hairstyles, Trick Daddy’s dirty grimaces, Miami Hurricanes jackets and “The U” hand symbol that dominates Miami’s hot blocks are pillars of the South. And yet, the melodic stylings of Atlanta and Louisiana draw most of the region’s attention, even …
Madi Diaz | 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. Fitting many people into a small space has been key to the Tiny Desk formula since its …
Tiny Desk Meets SXSW | KAINA
Every year, NPR Music participates in the SXSW music festival, whether it’s curating a stage or simply attending hundreds of shows at the annual event in Austin, Texas. In 2020, the festival was canceled due to the pandemic, but it returned last March as an online festival. We programmed a virtual “stage” of Tiny Desk (home) concerts in 2021 in …
Interview | Bob Boilen on the 2022 Tiny Desk Contest
The Tiny Desk creator offers tips on submitting your video to the 2022 contest
Attention unsigned Jacksonville musicians: The Tiny Desk wants to hear your music. NPR’s 2022 Tiny Desk Contest is underway. Over the past seven years, nearly 35,000 musicians have submitted their videos to the Tiny Desk Contest in the hopes of being chosen to perform as part of NPR Music’s signature music discovery series. Now, NPR is once again calling for …
Mitski’s ‘Laurel Hell’ confronts the wild complexity of feeling
All over the world, every day, people are losing it. It happened to me just last Tuesday, driving onto I-40 on my way back from Trader Joe’s. Phoebe Snow’s 1974 seduction “Poetry Man” turned up on my playlist and suddenly I was sobbing so aggressively I nearly had to pull over on the freeway on-ramp. That song’s a masterpiece of …
Local Spotlight | Listen to 3 new tracks from Jax artists out now
Fresh new tunes from locals John Aloszka, LRK Chronicle feat. Mr. Al Pete and BeBe Deluxe
We’re always keeping our ear to the ground in order to put the spotlight on the beautiful noise emerging from Northeast Florida and reverberating across the globe. This week, Jacksonville Music Experience contributors share three great new tracks by local artists out right now. Let’s dive in. “Simple As That” by LRK Chronicle (feat. Mr. Al Pete) With laid-back flow …
Crosby, Stills, Nash follow Young in removing music from Spotify
CSNY reunites in spat with popular streaming platform
David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash have joined on-and-off collaborator Neil Young in removing their music from Spotify over the music streaming giant’s refusal to remove podcast host Joe Rogan’s program from the platform. The comedian and actor, whose podcast is one of Spotify’s most popular, has been criticized for spreading coronavirus misinformation. Young made headlines when he issued …
Want to play your own Tiny Desk concert? Enter the 2022 Tiny Desk Contest
The Tiny Desk Contest – NPR Music’s annual nationwide search for the next great undiscovered artist to play a Tiny Desk concert – is back for its eighth year. We’ll begin accepting entries next Tuesday, Feb. 8 at 10 a.m. ET. We’re thrilled to announce our panel of judges – the folks who will be selecting the 2022 Contest winner. …
On ‘CAPRISONGS,’ FKA twigs vibrates at her highest frequency
Pluto scoffs at superficiality. The planet’s transit, the way that the planet’s movement activates and interacts with a person’s natal chart, demands for connection with core purpose. It is a chance to break through illusions and probe deep in search of inner truth: to evolve and be reborn without perfunctory airs. Born Tahliah Debrett Barnett, singer-songwriter FKA twigs celebrated her …
An album made entirely of endangered bird sounds beat Taylor Swift on a top 50 chart
For most of December, Adele had the top-selling album in Australia, followed by Ed Sheeran, and then there was a collection of absolute bangers that took everyone by surprise. Songs Of Disappearance is an entire album of calls from endangered Australian birds. Last month, it briefly perched at No. 3 on the country’s top 50 albums chart – ahead of …
Listen | New year, Fresh Squeeze
The best new music handpicked by the JME team
Each month, JME contributors pick the juiciest noise emanating from Northeast Florida and beyond for our Fresh Squeeze playlist. Featuring a few dozen new tunes from local, regional, national and international artists, there are no rules or genre restrictions; just songs we thought were worth a share. Follow the Jacksonville Music Experience on Spotify and our Fresh Squeeze playlist to keep your …
Crate Diggin’ | Birth-year records
What classic album dropped the year you were born?
Exile on Main St., The Rolling Stones (1972) My favorite release of 1972 was dropped on March 21 of that year, nine wailing, placenta-sealed pounds, gruntingly pressed in a limited edition of one. My second favorite release is arguably Exile on Main St. The Stones’ double LP is mired in as much pharmacological lore as it is filled with viscerally …
Lil Nas X is the boundary-smashing pop revolutionary of 2021
Rapper-singer-songwriter visionary Lil Nas X is the MVP of Gen Z. Born between the mid 1990s and early 2010s, so-called “Zoomers” have been maligned by naysayers as navel-gazing narcissists and emotionally weak snowflakes. But Gen Zers deserve props for rejecting millennials’ “bottle-up-your-emotions-and-hustle-til-ya-die” ethos, and for prioritizing self-care and confessional vulnerability. Like no other generation before it, Gen Z has made …
When ‘The Boss’ is worth $500 million, it’s time for stars to sell their back catalogs
"It's scorching hot... Hot, hot, hot!"
Bruce Springsteen’s entire back catalog – including songwriting and recordings – reportedly cost Sony Music Group north of $500 million. Even before the official announcement of the purchase in May, Sony Music Group’s chairman, Rob Stringer, told investors he’s spent about $1.5 billion just on music acquisitions since the beginning of the year. “Including rights to some of the most …
Robert Plant and Alison Krauss: 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. What a remarkable sight to see the reunion of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss gathered around a …
How Black women reclaimed country and Americana music in 2021
If 2020 was the kickstart of a reckoning—of country/Americana music (and, really, all of America) being forced to come to terms with its history of racism and exclusion—2021 was the year of reclamation. Even as sustainable, systemic change remains elusive, Black women, in particular, have leveraged the power of streaming platforms and social media to bridge the chasms previously carved …
Get More ‘Get Back’ | What we learned from the new Beatles documentary
If you’re a fan of The Beatles or even just a regular user of social media, you’ve probably heard the buzz around the new documentary The Beatles: Get Back. Director Peter Jackson pored over more than 60 hours of footage and exponentially more hours of audio, all of which was originally captured for Let It Be, the documentary that chronicled …
Barry Harris, beloved jazz pianist devoted to bebop, dies at 91
Barry Harris, a pianist who carefully preserved the language of bebop throughout a seven-decade career as a brilliant performer and influential teacher, died Wednesday at Palisades Medical Center in North Bergen, N.J. He was 91 and lived in Weehawken, N.J. Harris had been hospitalized for the last two weeks and died of complications due to Covid, said Kira von Ostenfeld-Suske, …
Wet Leg: 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. No other band has brought me more joy in 2021 than Wet Leg, and I truly needed …
After Get Back | What happened to The Beatles after that rooftop concert?
Dig deeper on the new Beatles documentary on WJCT 89.9FM
If you’re a Beatles fan or even just a regular user of social media, you’ve probably heard the buzz around the new documentary The Beatles: Get Back. Over the course of more than eight hours, Peter Jackson’s film documents the tumult, joy and creative breakthroughs as The Beatles worked their way through the recording of Let It Be and plotted …
Honored onscreen and in sound, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, a messenger whose time is now
Beverly Glenn-Copeland, or Glenn as he’s known to friends, compares himself to a radio that’s tuned to pick up certain frequencies. These ideas and sounds, which typically defy classification, come to him by way of what he calls the “Universal Broadcast System.” He sees his role as merely to receive and transcribe them, then send them back into the world …
Fresh Rotation | Three juicy tunes handpicked by the JME team
New music from La Luz, Joy Orbison and Amyl & the Sniffers to add to your playlists
Each and every week the JME team handpicks the juiciest new tunes from local, regional, national and international artists to concoct the tasty, tall-glass-of-a-listening-experience that is our Fresh Squeeze playlist. Each song is chosen with intention. And so we often feel like they are worthy of a broader discussion (or at least a bit of context). Here are three new songs …
Dave Grohl retraces his life-affirming path from Nirvana to Foo Fighters
Dave Grohl still remembers the first punk show he ever saw: Naked Raygun, in Chicago around 1982, at a little corner bar across from Wrigley Field called The Cubby Bear. “They knew four chords and the singer was, like, on top of my head, and I was against the stage, and it was life-affirming, because I thought … ‘Oh my …
Adele asked Spotify to remove the default shuffle button for albums, and they obliged
Spotify has removed a play button that automatically shuffled songs regardless of an album’s track list, and it’s all thanks to Adele. The singer-songwriter tweeted on Saturday that she had requested the change for the release of her fourth studio album, 30, which arrived on streaming services on Friday. “This was the only request I had in our ever changing …
The Tables Have Turned on Vinyl
Jacksonville musicians, labels and manufacturers embrace vinyl’s renewed popularity; if only they could get their records on press
The music of LPT is tailor made for vinyl. The Jacksonville-based ten piece performs original son cubano, salsa dura and salsa romántica, mambo, cha-cha-cha and other styles of Afro-Cuban Salsa, a fusion of sounds which, when introduced by Cuban and Puerto Rican musicians in New York in the 1970s, was distributed widely on vinyl records––the preferred format of the day. …
Watch | The War On Drugs play 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. In their Tiny Desk (home) concert, The War On Drugs gather in their packed studio in Burbank, …
Listen | November’s Fresh Squeeze playlist
A juicy playlist of tunes handpicked by the JME team
JME contributors pick the juiciest noise emanating from Northeast Florida and beyond for our monthly Fresh Squeeze playlist. Featuring a few dozen new tunes from local, regional, national and international artists, there are no rules or genre restrictions; just songs we thought were worth a share. Follow the Jacksonville Music Experience on Spotify and our Fresh Squeeze playlist to keep …
Fresh Rotation | Four new songs handpicked by the JME team
New tracks from Parquet Courts, Feels, IDLES and Duval’s own Wes Harris
Each and every week the JME team handpicks the juiciest new tunes from local, regional, national and international artists to concoct the tasty, tall-glass-of-a-listening-experience that is our Fresh Squeeze playlist. Each song is chosen with intention. And so we often feel like they are worthy of a broader discussion (or at least a bit of context). Here’s four new songs (all …
Lawmakers are considering awarding Prince a Congressional Gold Medal
Minnesota’s Congressional delegation wants to award an iconic hometown hero with one of the highest of awards given to U.S. civilians. The bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced legislation Monday calling for Prince to posthumously receive the Congressional Gold Medal. The bill honors Prince for his “legacy of musical achievement and… indelible mark on Minnesota and American culture.” The measure is …
Meeting Tracy Chapman In The Spaces Between
Tracy is wearing a plain, worn, black T-shirt, no pockets, no sly sayings, and I imagine her waking up in it, in just that T-shirt, and walking around my small basement bedroom in the Oakland split-ranch that I am sharing with 5 other grad students for $200 dollars a month each, so cold we can see our breath. Tracy is …
Fresh Rotation | 3 new songs we can’t stop listening to
New music from Wet Leg, serpentwithfeet and Shannon Lay
Each and every month the JME team handpicks the juiciest new tunes from local, regional, national and international artists and creates the tasty listening experience that is our Fresh Squeeze playlist. Each song is chosen with intention. And so we often feel like they are worthy of a broader discussion (or at least a bit of context). Here’s three new …
This French Pianist Has Been Playing For 102 Years And Just Released A New Album
PARIS — Colette Maze welcomes me warmly into her apartment on the 14th floor of a building overlooking the Seine River. From her flowered balcony, she has a view of the Eiffel Tower. She offers me a whiskey or a cognac — along with a hearty laugh as it’s 10:30 in the morning. It’s that humor, a sense of optimism …
Join NPR Music’s Listening Party For John Prine’s Debut Album
For its 50th anniversary, join us in an online listening party for John Prine‘s self-titled debut. NPR Music’s Ann Powers will be joined by John’s wife Fiona Prine, their son Jody Whelan, legendary singer-songwriter Bonnie Raitt and producer Jim Rooney in a live conversation about this monumental album. The event will take place on the anniversary of the album’s release, …
From A Small House In a Big Stadium, Kanye West Comes Up Empty-Handed on ‘Donda’
While recording Donda, Kanye West paid $1 million per day to live in the belly of Mercedes Benz Stadium, in a stuffy room that resembled a jail cell. As with his last several records, his hulking new album arrived in fits and starts, like a lawnmower revving up for three weeks. Three stadium listening parties – two at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, …
Dolce & Gabbana Ad (With Chopsticks) Provokes Public Outrage in China
In response to the three controversial videos, many Chinese are calling for a boycott of the brand — although Chinese ads aren’t always respectful of other cultures, either.