© 2024
NPR for Northern Colorado
Donate
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
NPR Music: Tiny Desk Concerts
Tiny Desk Concerts from NPR's All Songs Considered features your favorite musicians performing at Bob Boilen's desk in the NPR Music office. This is the AUDIO only archive.Are you a fancy A/V nerd and need video? Visit our new Tiny Desk Concert video channel. Eye-popping video and all of the music you've come to expect.

Kelly Hogan: Tiny Desk Concert

By Stephen Thompson
Published June 4, 2012 at 7:00 AM MDT

The reliable backup singer who seizes the spotlight is the stuff of entertainment-industry fairy tales, but Kelly Hogan hasn't actually had to labor in obscurity. She's spent the last decade or so as a high-profile accompanist for the likes of Jakob Dylan and Neko Case; the three of them even played a Tiny Desk Concert together a couple years ago, and it's not as if Hogan had to sing behind a curtain like Debbie Reynolds in Singin' in the Rain. Hogan is no household name, but she had little trouble inspiring a load of terrific songwriters to contribute a dozen custom-made compositions for her new album.

That record, I Like to Keep Myself in Pain — a title it shares with the Robyn Hitchcock song she performs here — exudes confidence and unflappable professionalism. And, naturally, that carries over to this performance in the NPR Music offices, as Hogan and her ace band knock out three songs with seeming effortlessness and easygoing charm.

Hogan took 11 years off between her last solo record and I Like to Keep Myself in Pain, in large part because she's been working constantly with other musicians — ironically, their constant demand for her work has helped keep her from seizing the spotlight. Seeing her in action, both in performance and as a calming presence in a chaotic room both before and afterward, it's easy to see why her collaborators never want to let her go: You can't go wrong surrounding yourself with oases of calm competence, especially when they bring cupcakes to share and sing as beautifully as Hogan does here.

Set List:

  • "Haunted"

  • "Plant White Roses"

  • "I Like To Keep Myself In Pain"

    • Credits:

    Producer: Stephen Thompson; Editor and Videographer: Michael Katzif; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; photo by Michael Katzif/NPR

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

    Tags
    Tiny Desk ConcertsKelly Hogan
    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.)
    See stories by Stephen Thompson
    Related Content
    • Kelly Hogan's new album is <em>I Like to Keep Myself in Pain</em><em>.</em>
      Kelly Hogan: Cashing In An Album's Worth Of Favors
      NPR Staff
      A self-proclaimed "backup singing ninja" with a host of famous friends and admirers, Hogan has just released her first solo album in 11 years.
    • Patrick Watson: Tiny Desk Concert
      Stephen Thompson
      With a gifted backing band on hand to help flesh out three songs from Adventures in Your Own Backyard, Watson conducts a swirl of interlocking loveliness that still finds room for surprises, from a singing saw to a microphone that makes his voice sound as if it's bouncing off some faraway satellite.
    • Yann Tiersen: Tiny Desk Concert
      Stephen Thompson
      The French singer and multi-instrumentalist just released a new album called Skyline, and it captures his aesthetic perfectly: Its rich, buzzy, liltingly eccentric pop music is constructed from lots of sweet, intricate pieces.
    Load More