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Madi Diaz: Tiny Desk (Home) Concert

By Stephen Thompson
Published March 28, 2022 at 1:33 PM EDT

The Tiny Desk is working from home for the foreseeable future. Introducing NPR Music's Tiny Desk (home) concerts, bringing you performances from across the country and the world. It's the same spirit — stripped-down sets, an intimate setting — just a different space.

Fitting many people into a small space has been key to the Tiny Desk formula since its beginning, so it only makes sense that Madi Diaz would perpetuate the tradition as she presides over a "tiny living room" concert in her Nashville, Tenn. home. "Never have there been so many people in this apartment," she notes between songs.

Diaz's living room may not have been designed to accommodate a four-piece string section and a drummer, but together these six musicians make beautiful work of four tracks from the singer-songwriter's stunning 2021 sleeper History of a Feeling. Opening with "Resentment" — a song she'd originally co-written for Kesha's 2020 album High Road — Diaz steers her four-song set toward History of a Feeling's quieter moments, in the process coaxing new power from career highlights like "New Person, Old Place."

One of the strongest and subtlest breakup albums in recent memory, History of a Feeling works through a broad range of emotions with clear-eyed attention to detail and a willingness from Diaz to examine her own missteps and darkest impulses. So it only makes sense that in this performance, Diaz would give this material restrained arrangements to match — knowing full well that the songs' beauty and quietly bold truth-telling would shine through. Her work has rarely sounded richer or more radiant than it does here.

SET LIST

  1. "Resentment"

  1. "New Person, Old Place"

  1. "Forever"

  1. "History of a Feeling"


MUSICIANS

  1. Madi Diaz: vocals, guitar

  1. Adam Popick: drums

  1. Annaliese Kowert, Kristin Weber: violin

  1. Lydia Luce: viola

  1. Kaitlyn Raitz: cello


CREDITS

  1. Directed and Edited by: Jordan Bellamy 

  1. Tracking and Mixing: Konrad Snyder


TINY DESK TEAM

  1. Producer: Bob Boilen

  1. Video Producer: Joshua Bryant

  1. Audio Mastering: Josh Rogosin

  1. Tiny Production Team: Bobby Carter, Kara Frame, Maia Stern, Ashley Pointer

  1. Executive Producer: Keith Jenkins

  1. Senior VP, Programming: Anya Grundmann

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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NPR Top StoriesNPR Tiny Desk Concert
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