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Chris Bathgate: Tiny Desk Concert

Dusky and deliberate, Chris Bathgate's music can be foreboding, even funereal. But the Michigan native invests his songs with warm, rustic beauty — aided by strings, slide guitars and other instruments of emotional devastation — that makes everything too pretty to function as a true downer. A bunch of us at NPR Music fell in love with Bathgate's gorgeous 2007 song "Serpentine," so we'd been looking forward to having him in for a Tiny Desk Concert, but a follow-up to that record took an agonizing four years. (Given that he describes his song "No Silver" as "about living in Michigan and being broke," maybe he was just saving up for the studio time?)

Bathgate didn't cut any corners in his Tiny Desk Concert this past summer, lugging in his full band to perform four songs from this year's fine Salt Year — he even had a friend bring pie to pass around in a successful attempt to curry our favor. The efforts to flesh out his sound paid off: Alternating brooding ballads ("Everything [Overture]," "Salt Year") with more assertive midtempo rockers ("No Silver," "Levee"), Bathgate and his band crafted a winningly moody and frequently exquisite sound — a marvelous showcase for an unassuming Midwesterner who deserves more attention than he gets.

Set List

  • "Everything (Overture)"
  • "No Silver"
  • "Salt Year"
  • "Levee"
  • Credits

    Michael Katzif (cameras); edited by Bob Boilen; audio by Michael Katzif and Kevin Wait; photo by Tucker Walsh/NPR

    Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

    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.)