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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.

Sean Rowe: Tiny Desk Concert

By Stephen Thompson
Published September 16, 2011 at 11:35 AM MDT

On paper, Sean Rowe's music should be the stuff of ineffectual self-parody: He is, after all, a bearded guy who sings acoustic folk-rock songs, complete with themes revolving around humanity's relationship to nature. But this is big, bold, muscular stuff — a closer relative of Man vs. Wild than the nearest coffeehouse. When Colin Meloy's beard is cornered in a dark alley, it summons the assistance of Sean Rowe's beard.

We didn't exactly have to crane our necks to hear Rowe — he's got a voice built for bellowing into canyons — but he came packing a succession of ever-louder acoustic-guitar set-ups just in case. A native of rural New York, Rowe devotes his off hours to wilderness survival and what he calls "primitive living." But if he ever made the move to his home state's biggest city, he'd be nicely equipped to busk in the subways: He's got enough presence and volume to drown out local trains and noisy wildlife alike.

We recently asked Rowe — whose name, incidentally, rhymes with "how" — to play a few songs from his recent album Magic at the NPR Music offices. As you can see here, he happily obliged, even tossing in a story about survivalism that renewed our collective faith in indoor living.

Set List

  • "Night"

  • "Bluegrass Baby"

  • "Surprise"

    • Credits

    Michael Katzif (cameras); edited by Bob Boilen; audio by Kevin Wait/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