© 2024
NPR for Northern Colorado
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
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.

Lily & Madeleine: Tiny Desk Concert

Sisters Lily and Madeleine Jurkiewicz aren't the youngest musicians ever to play the Tiny Desk, but they come pretty close. Their music — a restrained, homespun mix of folk and pop with undeniably sweet harmonies — certainly ranks among the loveliest we've heard.

Lily is just 16. Her sister Madeleine is 18. And while the older of the two Indiana natives recently headed off to college, leaving her sister behind to finish high school, they still write and record together. They released a stellar EP, The Weight of the Globe, last June, and a self-titled full-length debut followed in October.

Lily & Madeleine's openhearted ballads first found an audience in the fall of 2012, after the pair posted a video for "In the Middle" on YouTube. It quickly received more than a quarter of a million views — enough to draw the attention of the Sufjan Stevens-led Asthmatic Kitty label, which signed the sisters and released both their EP and their full-length album.

For the duo's Tiny Desk set, Lily & Madeleine chose not to perform that breakthrough song, opting instead to focus on newer material from the album: the wistful "Devil We Know," "Paradise" and "You Got Out."

Set List

  • "Devil We Know"
  • "Paradise"
  • "You Got Out"
  • Credits

    Producers: Denise DeBelius, Robin Hilton; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; Videographers: Denise DeBelius, Mito Habe-Evans, Becky Harlan; photo by Meredith Rizzo/NPR

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

    Robin Hilton is a producer and co-host of the popular NPR Music show All Songs Considered.
    Related Content
    • As a young girl in Vietnam, Van-Anh Vanessa Vo wanted to be a traditional musician although it was a world dominated by men. She pestered a master teacher for three years before he finally gave in.
    • The hot and historic band from New Orleans brings us a tuba-wielding Santa and some original holiday cheer and praise — what its members call a Cajun Christmas from the French Quarter.
    • La Santa Cecilia spreads joy every time its members plug in to do a show. They do it one dance step at a time, with cumbias, corridos, elegant mambos and plain old rock 'n' roll. The video here provides just a hint of the band's dynamic live shows, albeit a spectacular one.