NPR Music Tiny Desk Concerts

Neffy: 2021 Tiny Desk Contest Winner (2021x126)

: 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 five-person Tiny Desk crew. We had filmed almost 1,000 Tiny Desk concerts before we abandoned the office in mid-March 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 Contest-winning song "Wait Up" is about living in New York, most recently during the COVID-19 outbreak, but yearning for home.