I Submitted to the Tiny Desk

Submitting my first song to the NPR Tiny Desk Contest feels a little like stepping into a room where a lot of incredible musicians have stood before me and saying, well, here goes. I have watched so many of those performances over the years. Just an artist, a few instruments, and a stack of office supplies in the background somehow turning into a stage that feels bigger than an arena. There is something about that setting that strips everything down to what matters. The song. The voice. The story.

The song I am submitting is called Let’s Do Something Different. I wrote it after spending a lot of time thinking about the way the world seems to be working right now. Or maybe not working. It is not a protest song exactly. It is not angry. I keep noticing how often we say we want change, but then fall right back into the same routines, the same arguments, the same systems that keep producing the same results. We talk about big dreams, but then we settle into small patterns.

This song came from that tension. It is the feeling of looking around and thinking, we have all these hopes and plans and visions for something better, but this can’t be it. This cannot be the final draft. What would it look like if we really meant it when we said we wanted something different. What if we were willing to shift the rhythm instead of just changing the lyrics. The melody carries some hope in it, but the words are asking honest questions. We know the problems, but we accept it. We accept that most of us are sitting in a toilet bowl being pissed on by the wealthy. I wanted to hold up a mirror, including to myself, and say why don’t we do it differently?

The room where I recorded myself works perfectly for the song, and I wish I would have been smart enough to plan that. Instead that IS my music room/closet/office/storage space! We bought our house prior to Covid and we’ve been living in it while we fix it. Not something I recommend. But it made a good background.

The last verse of the song is pulled straight from a night that stuck with me. I was driving back into America from Canada and reached the border later than I should have. It was closed. Just like that. No dramatic music playing in the background. No big speech. Just a quiet checkpoint with no one around and the realization that I was not crossing that line that night. So I turned around and found a place to park. I slept in my car.

There is something humbling about sleeping in your car when you thought you would be home in your own bed. Trucks passed in the distance. I remember staring at the ceiling of my car and thinking about how a random line on a map drawn by some dead man can completely change your plans. I thought about how often we assume the road will just keep opening in front of us. And then sometimes it does not. Sometimes you have to pause. Sometimes you have to wait.

That moment found its way into the song because it felt like a metaphor for more than just travel. It felt like standing at the edge of something familiar and realizing you are not in control of your own destiny. You are the pawn that can’t go where you want. You have to reconsider the route. You have to ask whether the direction you were heading in was the only one available.

So sending Let’s Do Something Different to NPR for my first Tiny Desk submission feels fitting. The contest celebrates songs in their simplest form. No big production. No hiding behind noise. Just the truth of what you have to say. This song is my attempt to say something honest about where we are and where we could go.

I’m pretty sure my song will not end flip the world on it’s head. Out of thousands of entries, how would it even show up? That’s a cluttered desk. Whatever happens, I am glad I recorded it. I am glad I sent it. Sometimes doing something different starts with something small. Sometimes it starts with parking the car, turning off the engine, and letting yourself really think.