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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.

Mates Of State: Tiny Desk Concert

By Stephen Thompson
Published October 5, 2011 at 10:03 AM MDT

Mates of State's music isn't the stuff of unplugged busking in subway stations, or of singing listeners to sleep. It's big, broad and bold — voices shouting in unison over arrangements that swell and billow. In short, it may be too expansive to fit behind Bob Boilen's desk, let alone find an appropriate showcase at noontime on a fall day with lots of natural light.

Muted to a fraction of their usual volume, the four musicians here — playing a synthesizer, a drum, a trumpet and a guitar — strained to find the proper balance between quiet and loud, with leaders Kori Gardner and Jason Hammel singing in unison and trying to split the difference between whispers and screams. Something about the way these players form a small circle, about the way they perform into each other rather than letting their songs unfurl out into the audience, creates a vibe of ragged, awkward intimacy.

Taken as a whole, Mates of State's 10-minute set here might seem a little... small. But the modesty of the performance both suits and complements a band whose music is about generosity of spirit, forgiveness of failing, and the celebration of all things hard-won enough to be worth celebrating.

Set List

  • "Sway"

  • "Desire"

  • "My Only Offer"

    • Credits

    Michael Katzif (cameras); edited by Bob Boilen; audio by Neil Tevault; photo by Mallory Benedict/NPR

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

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    Tiny Desk ConcertsMates of State
    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