![]() ![]() ![]() (He was depressed for years, he has said, after Usher told him that he had “killed music.”) T-Pain used his Tiny Desk performance to demolish the idea that he lacked talent, sitting beside a single electric-piano player and singing, beautifully, with no digital adornment. Even fellow artists complained that he was polluting the industry. By the time the Tallahassee star performed a Tiny Desk concert, in 2014, his use of Autotune as a musical signature had led plenty of casual listeners to assume the pitch-correcting tool was hiding a weak voice. The Tiny Desk series became a prime venue for artists seeking an authenticity baptism. But its biggest gets, back in the late aughts, were acts like The Swell Season or Tallest Man on Earth - musicians practiced at addressing small, hushed rooms with acoustic instruments. The series has always introduced listeners to new musicians, and it still hosts performances in an impressive array of genres. In its early days, Tiny Desk programming was geared toward exactly the kinds of performers you might expect to find playing an intimate set in a mundane corner of an office, with no stage or lights or flashy videography: folk acts, singer-songwriters, crooning indie-rockers. That’s something of a coup, given its roots. Gradually, over its 15 years of existence, the Tiny Desk series has come to host some of the biggest names in music - artists like Taylor Swift, Alicia Keys and Harry Styles. Recently, though, the singer sat down on the set of NPR’s Tiny Desk concert series - in an unassuming, tchotchke-filled corner of a Washington office - to perform a handful of his songs with a larger ensemble: 12 musicians, including four backup vocalists and four string players, rearranging his hits to highlight multipart harmonies and the twinkle of acoustic instruments. What does anyone stand to gain from a string quartet accompanying Post Malone? At one of the megastar’s typical performances, you might find Austin Post standing alone on a vast stage, shirtless, mimicking the postures you might see at a rapper’s show, warbling his melodic pop with its intermittent hip-hop gestures. ![]()
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