Little Big Town Gather Their Band for Stripped-Down ‘Tiny Desk (Home) Concert’

Little Big Town gave a mostly unplugged full-band performance for a new edition of NPR Music’s Tiny Desk (Home) Concert.

Standing in a sunken living-room area in front of a massive tree-trunk coffee table, Jimi Westbrook, Kimberly Schlapman, Karen Fairchild, and Phillip Sweet merged their voices for the dreamy title track from 2020’s Nightfall as well as the trumpet-assisted folk-rock chug of “Wine, Beer, Whiskey.”

“We have always wanted to do this,” Karen Fairchild said. ”Thanks for coming to our home – we don’t live together the four of us.”

Their stripped-down set, one of quartet’s first times playing together in nearly six months, also included the 2014 smash “Girl Crush” as well as their swampy 2005 breakout hit “Boondocks,” complete with its dizzying closing round of chants.

Nightfall was released in January, a couple months ahead of the pandemic’s onset, and included the singles “The Daughters” and “Over Drinking.” Producers on the project included Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk, who also oversaw Kacey Musgraves’ Grammy-winning Golden Hour. As Sweet told IndieLand earlier this year, Nightfall is an “unapologetically adult” album. “We’re not 16 years old,” he said. “For this record, we had life experience; we had things we had to talk about.”