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Laura Marling: Tiny Desk Concert

When Tom Jones performed at the NPR Music offices in 2009, it felt like an exercise in cruelty: His Tiny Desk Concert took a larger-than-life icon, a superstar for whom intimacy is implied but impossible on a huge stage, and shrunk him to where every bead of sweat could be seen. Young English folksinger Laura Marling, on the other hand, lives for that sort of intimacy. A performer who once held a series of unplugged and unrecorded concerts in a near-empty room, each consisting of a single song performed for two strangers at a time, Marling thrives on connection in confinement.

Though still only 22, Marling is an industry veteran with six years of accumulated gravitas: Twice nominated for Britain's Mercury Prize, she's made three gripping albums that helped popularize modern English folk music while fitting comfortably on a continuum spanning generations. Here, two pieces from her newest record, 2011's A Creature I Don't Know, bookend a gorgeous new song called "Once." She'd never even recorded "Once," let alone released it, so consider this performance a premiere of sorts.

Set List:

  • "Don't Ask Me Why"
  • "Once"
  • "Sophia"
  • Credits:

    Producer and Editor: Bob Boilen; Videographer: Michael Katzif; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; photo by Nick Michael/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.)