NPR’s Tiny Desk is the least forgiving stage in music. No effects, no lighting, no crowd to disappear into — just a musician standing a few feet from a room of NPR employees, in front of a bookshelf.
Tori Kelly played it this week, performing seven songs — six of them off her latest album, God Must Really Love Me — with an all-woman band.
The set included “Hurts So Good,” “Without You,” “Fly,” “Bird,” “Control” and “Tokyo,” plus a cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing.” She played guitar on some of it and, at one point, a toy glockenspiel.
The cover came with an explanation: “Have y’all heard of the movie ‘Sing’?” she asked the room. “So do you know Meena the elephant? That’s me.”
She voiced Meena in the animated film and sang that song in it. “It was so much fun being Meena that I wanted to do her song from the movie,” she said. “It’s by the legendary Stevie Wonder.”
God Must Really Love Me came out in June, her sixth album. It isn’t her first record in this territory — Hiding Place, in 2018, was a full gospel album made with Kirk Franklin, and it won her a Grammy.
In introducing “Bird,” she opened up.
“This song in particular,” she said. “I just got really vulnerable one day, and I was just hit with a wave of anxiety. And this world is crazy, y’all. This world is really, really crazy. And so I just put all those feelings into this song.”
Watch her performance here: