Neffy, 2021 Tiny Desk Contest Winner: Tiny Desk Concert
Bob Boilen, October 27, 2021 It felt good to be home, if only for one night: home, in this case, being my Tiny Desk at NPR. We were about to film Neffy, our 2021 Tiny Desk Contest winner, at my desk at NPR headquarters. My corner of the NPR Music department looked just as I had left it almost 600 days ago; it s eerie inside and nearly nightfall outside. There s no audience for this Sunday evening concert, just our fiveperson Tiny Desk crew. We had filmed almost 1, 000 Tiny Desk concerts before we abandoned the office in midMarch of 2020. What was then exciting yet routine now felt somewhat like a hallucination. For Neffy, it too was a dream: a dream come true. Her joy during the recording was contagious. Neffy is Mecca Russell, a young singer who grew up around Arlington, Va. , just across the river from NPR. Her Contestwinning song Wait Up is about living in New York, most recently during the COVID19 outbreak, but yearning for home. In fact, Neffy did return to her c
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