The VERY FIRST Tiny Desk Concert at NPR: Laura Gibson
1,595 views · Published 11 June 2010 · 3:34 · Indexed 2 October 2026
Channel: Andy Carvin · 2010 · People & Blogs
This was the very first Tiny Desk Concert at NPR, featuring Laura Gibson in the spring of 2008. We had recently returned from SXSW, and Bob Boilen had gone to hear Gibson perform a live set, but her performance was so quiet it was difficult to hear her in the venue. So Bob invited Gibson to visit NPR and perform a few songs at his desk in the far corner of our floor at NPR HQ. In honor of both his small desk and his old band, Tiny Desk Unit, Bob christened it as a "Tiny Desk Concert." The rest is history. I streamed it using an experimental app called Qik on a Nokia N-95 phone. Qik was one of the very first live-streaming services. Despite the low streaming resolution - if I remember correctly, I had to run it over a cellular network rather than wifi - it was a harbinger of things to come, years before live-streaming became a basic function of social platforms around the world. Here's the official video recorded by NPR Music that day: https://www.npr.org/2008/04/22/89836427/laura-gibson-tiny-desk-concert
