Madi Diaz | Tiny Desk (Home) Concert - JME - The Jacksonville Music Experience

The Tiny Desk is working from home for the foreseeable future. Introducing NPR Music’s Tiny Desk (home) concerts, bringing you performances from across the country and the world. It’s the same spirit — stripped-down sets, an intimate setting — just a different space.

Fitting many people into a small space has been key to the Tiny Desk formula since its beginning, so it only makes sense that Madi Diaz would perpetuate the tradition as she presides over a “tiny living room” concert in her Nashville, Tenn. home. “Never have there been so many people in this apartment,” she notes between songs.

Diaz’s living room may not have been designed to accommodate a four-piece string section and a drummer, but together these six musicians make beautiful work of four tracks from the singer-songwriter’s stunning 2021 sleeper History of a Feeling. Opening with “Resentment” — a song she’d originally co-written for Kesha‘s 2020 album High Road — Diaz steers her four-song set toward History of a Feeling‘s quieter moments, in the process coaxing new power from career highlights like “New Person, Old Place.”

One of the strongest and subtlest breakup albums in recent memory, History of a Feeling works through a broad range of emotions with clear-eyed attention to detail and a willingness from Diaz to examine her own missteps and darkest impulses. So it only makes sense that in this performance, Diaz would give this material restrained arrangements to match — knowing full well that the songs’ beauty and quietly bold truth-telling would shine through. Her work has rarely sounded richer or more radiant than it does here.

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