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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.

Martha Wainwright: Tiny Desk Concert

By Stephen Thompson
Published November 26, 2012 at 12:00 PM MST

Martha Wainwright's songs examine uncomfortable moments and life experiences gone wrong, but as she acknowledges in between songs at this Tiny Desk Concert, she often has to fudge her own life story to make the details more unsettling. ("Take everything with a grain of salt," she says, "except the good stuff.") What she does is the opposite of sugarcoating: She roughs up life's smooth spots, then digs her fingertips into the cracks that form.

Wainwright's new album, Come Home to Mama, addresses her place on the continuum between her late mother (singer Kate McGarrigle) and her young son — particularly in the wrenching and insightful "Everything Wrong," a ballad Wainwright calls "my first song about motherhood." That song closes both Come Home to Mama and this concert in the NPR Music offices, and it's tremendous: raw and almost painfully intimate, wonderfully humane and ultimately hopeful.

Martha Wainwright is the second member of her family to play the Tiny Desk in the last few months, following in the footsteps of her brother Rufus. Their father, Loudon Wainwright III, released a marvelous record near the beginning of this year, so is completing the family trifecta too much to ask? Consider this an invitation.

Set List

  • "Some People"

  • "Can You Believe It?"

  • "Everything Wrong"

    • Credits

    Producer: Stephen Thompson; Editor: Denise DeBelius; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; Videographers: Denise DeBelius, Christopher Parks; photo by Ryan Smith/NPR

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

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    Tiny Desk Concerts
    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
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