Last fall, attendees of CD Baby’s DIY Musician Conference got to spend the weekend with NPR’s Bob Boilen, host of All Songs Considered and the Tiny Desk Concerts series, and CD Baby artist Gaelynn Lea, winner of 2016’s Tiny Desk Contest.
Two things were clear by the end of the weekend:
- Bob remains curious and hungry for great new music (that’s impressive for a man whose job involves listening to music all day long), and he responds to — for lack of a better word — authenticity, unique and honest qualities that shine through in song.
- Winning the Tiny Desk Contest was a career-changing opportunity for Gaelynn, who has since embarked on an extensive world tour where she’s not only captivating audiences with her haunting and emotional sound, but speaking about her music, disability, and more.
Do you have a unique sound, and a great song to highlight it? Got a desk? Got a video camera? You should enter that song into this year’s Tiny Desk Contest. The full details of the contest are HERE. But here’s the main points:
- Create a new video that shows you playing one song you’ve written.
- Do it the way you’d perform a Tiny Desk concert: at a desk. (Any desk!)
- Upload your video to YouTube.
- Fill out our entry form before 11:59 p.m. ET on Jan. 29, 2017.
If you create a video for the contest, we’d love to see it too. Put a YouTube link in the comments below.
Chris Robley is an acclaimed singer-songwriter and award-winning poet from Maine.
His Beatlesque indie-pop and milltown Americana songs have been praised by The Associated Press, No Depression, KCRW, The LA Times, Boston Globe, NPR, American Songwriter, and others.
His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, The Poetry Review, and more.
Robley has received a Maine Literary Award in Poetry, Boulevard’s Emerging Writers Prize for Poetry, and in 2016 was selected by former US-poet laureate Robert Pinsky as a finalist for the Dorset Prize.