Bob Boilen

What is the role of a white person in the struggle of black people fighting injustice? That's the question posed by Ben Haggerty, better known as Macklemore, as he puzzles out his own role as a white artist in love with hip-hop on a new song called "White Privilege II." ...

I think of Wolf Alice as noisy and primal, but at the Tiny Desk, the band showed a different side — one that was childlike, pretty and quietly wonderful. I knew the three songs the group played from Wolf Alice's 2015 album My Love Is Cool, but I hardly ...

It's our first show with new music in 2016! After nearly two months of best-of's, holiday and Sweet 16 specials, we get back to doing what we do best and love most: playing great new music. On this week's All Songs Considered, we share ...

This immensely talented band from Asheville, N.C., was my favorite discovery at this year's Americana Music Festival. River Whyless builds its music around fiddle, guitar and harmonies, with imagination and textures that set the band apart from many of its acoustic and folk-based peers.

At the Tiny Desk, River Whyless' ...

In the summer of 2014, Natalie Merchant came to Washington, D.C., to perform her first album of all-new material in 13 years. She was supposed to play here at my desk the day after that evening's performance. Instead, she fell ill, wound up in a D.C. hospital, and canceled ...

The 2016 Tiny Desk Contest is now open! We're accepting your videos from now until Feb. 2, so get your friends together and send one our way. We'll begin to share some of the more intriguing submissions in our weekly newsletter and on our Tumblr, so keep an ...

After seeing exactly 662 bands in each 2013 and 2014, my concert attendance plummeted in 2015. This past year I saw only 506 bands take the stage, but I have an excuse. I wrote a book.

So more than 100 times this year I ...

Sixteen years ago All Songs Considered started as NPR's first online-only program. This month we're celebrating its sweet 16 birthday, and to mark the occasion on this week's episode we're counting down our favorite songs from each of the past 16 years. Hearing some of these cuts is ...

In just a few weeks, NPR Music will publish its 500th concert recorded live at the famed Tiny Desk — in fact, in 2015 alone, we've put out a whopping 84 of them. Winnowing those 84 down to the 15 you see here wasn't easy, but we settled on an ...

At this point, it's basically tradition: The last show of the year is dedicated to the loud, the fast, the heavy, the cosmic and the sublime. A.K.A., when All Songs Considered host Bob Boilen and I talk about metal, punk and a broad definition of experimental music. Maybe you've listened ...

It's A Holiday Soul Party! isn't just the title of Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings' new album. It also describes perfectly what you're about to see. No one does old-school soul like this band, and having the group perform traditional and nontraditional tunes for the holiday brought joy and ...

Every year around this time we like to take a break from our usual musical discoveries and get together with old friends for what we call the All Songs Considered Holiday Spectacular, a seasonal special done in the tradition of old-time radio.

A few years ago, we rented a cabin ...

Son Little's music pushes gospel and blues into the 21st century with guitar processing, including backward drones, and choirs made from his looped voice. As wonderful as his 2015 self-titled album sounds, having him at the Tiny Desk with his acoustic guitar and unprocessed voice, accompanied only by ...

It's long been a dream of David Bowie to make a jazz record with a big band. On Jan. 8, 2016, Bowie's 69th birthday, we'll hear his dream realized. The path to ★ (pronounced "blackstar"), Bowie's 25th album, is filled with chance meetings with all the right people, but the ...

You never entirely know what you're going to get when you ask listeners to rank their favorite albums of the year. But the results of All Songs Considered's 2015 listener poll may be the most diverse we've seen in ten years of doing these lists. From Kendrick Lamar's ...

When Alejandro Rose-Garcia, aka Shakey Graves, breaks out his guitar and suitcase kick drum/hi-hat, a palpable rush of swooning adrenaline hits the room. I felt that at the Americana Festival in Nashville, at the Newport Folk Festival and here at the Tiny Desk.

The Texas singer's charisma is matched ...

When I first saw this Denver trio on its home turf last spring, I was swiftly drawn into its mysterious swirl. Martina Grbac sings quietly, and her voice — echoing and effects-laden — sits nicely on top of her percussive cello, James Han's textures and Ross Harada's perfectly placed percussion.

The moment Brooklyn soul singer Sharon Jones sang the line, "We're cooking up the brisket the kosher butcher sold my uncle Saul," I knew the world had a new Hanukkah classic. This week, Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings played a special, holiday-themed Tiny Desk Concert that included this new ...

2015 was a year for lyricists to excel and express. And with one exception, all the albums at the top of my personal heap were perfect examples of that richness:

Courtney Barnett is my favorite lyricist. Her words are smart, funny and memorable. Sufjan Stevens came to terms with the ...