RDGLDGRN is based in the D.C. suburb of Reston, Va. Local music fans know the band well, and have enjoyed watching it win fans across the country and around the world. A few years ago, I heard its first album (Red, Gold, Green) and fell in love with RDGLDGRN’s style. It’s not only because Dave Grohl played drums in most of the songs, while Pharrell Williams cowrote and co-produced “Doing The Most.” I loved the group’s fresh sound, and how its members rapped over the top of real drums. Their catchy hooks and harmonies quickly grabbed my attention.

When planning for RDGLDGRN’s Tiny Desk show, many details were up for consideration: time, date, technical arrangements, and so on. Of biggest concern, though, was how the group would fit into the scaled-down setting of our space. If you go to a RDGLDGRN show, you’ll see a traditional stage set-up with a full complement of instruments. In the venue, you can hear and feel the excitement of a full-blown band and a full drum set; heads bob, hands wave, bodies move, and you don’t find a single person in the audience standing still. It wouldn’t be easy to contain the energy in such a small space.

The colors in the band’s name represent RDGLDGRN’s members: Red (Marcus Parham), Green (Pierre Desrosiers) and Gold (Andrei Busuioceanu), who wear their respective colors all the time, even when offstage or away from the camera. In light of their recent experimentation with Brazilian-style percussion over acoustic versions of their songs, they decided that an all-acoustic set infused with Brazilian vibes would make for the perfect Tiny Desk concert. After performing “Karnival,” the group’s latest single, RDGLDGRN treated us to unplugged versions of a handful of its best-known songs.

“Karnival” is available now (iTunes) (Amazon).

Set List

• “Karnival”
• “Chop U Down”
• “Doing The Most”
• “No Pixar” (Freestyle)

Credits

Producers: Suraya Mohamed, Niki Walker; Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin; Videographers: Niki Walker, Morgan McCloy; Production Assistant: Anna Marketti; Photo: NPR.

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Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

“There was a large concern about the album being sort-of released via grainy video and leaked out online,” said Wesley Schultz, the band’s lead singer.

So the band decided to lock up people’s phones — not take them away, exactly, but just lock them up for the show. Like a timeout.

At the concerts, The Lumineers started working with a company called Yondr, which created a locking pouch for people to hold their phones in during performances. Audience members keep the pouches with them, and they stay sealed as long as they’re inside an established “phone-free zone,” but unlock outside of that.

Schultz said he was surprised at how well it works.

“If you can set it up so that people can’t get to their phones as easily or are deterred, people actually really welcome that,” he said. “It’s just such a strong force of habit in our lives right now.”

Schultz has taken it a step further and adopted the mentality in his personal life: At his wedding, he and his wife asked guests to check their phones at the door.

“It wasn’t because of any sort of a, ‘I don’t want photos of anyone at the wedding’ — it was more, we wanted people to be present,” he said.

That’s become somewhat of a mantra for entertainers these days.

As Beyonce herself told fans at a recent show, “Y’all gotta put the camera phones down for one second and actually enjoy this moment.”

Adele, too: “Yeah, I want to tell that lady as well, can you stop filming me with a video camera? Because I’m really here in real life — you can enjoy it in real life.”

Smartphones may be ubiquitous, but there are still limits to common courtesy. Recently the movie theater chain AMC backed off a proposal to allow texting in cinemas after it garnered enormous public backlash.

Schultz thinks that sense of decency should extend to live music.

“I think of it like, if we had that same attitude and you went to see Hamilton, people would be totally up in arms about that,” Schultz said. “But for some reason it’s completely acceptable to do at shows.”

(That said, Hamilton isn’t immune to cellphone faux pas either. As The New York Times reported, the musical’s star Lin-Manuel Miranda once chastised a certain celebrity on Twitter for incessant texting. Meanwhile, Patti LuPone grabbed a phone away from one audience member in the middle of Shows for Days.)

In this environment, Yondr has found fans of its own in artists like Alicia Keys and comedians like Dave Chappelle, Louis C.K. and Hannibal Buress.

It’s not just about cutting the distractions of glowing screens and, worse, ringing phones. For some, there’s also a concern of creative security.

According to a Washington Post article, Keys hired Yondr for a concert where she planned to premiere new songs from her first album since 2012’s Girl on Fire. Louis C.K. did the same when he was trying out a new set at the Comedy Store in West Hollywood.

A new patent granted to Apple — for infrared technology that could disable smartphone cameras remotely from the stage — might make those pouches obsolete one day. But the idea is the same.

Not everyone has reacted positively to the idea of a “phone-free zone,” however.

“Even at one of the shows, a guy brought in a knife with him — just, he usually carries a knife, I guess — and he tried to stab through the case,” Schultz said. “And it’s got steel, I think, woven into it. So his knife got stuck in the thing, and then when he had to leave, he had the embarrassing deal of having to tell the people that he tried to open it, and they had to pry his knife loose.”

Will Yondr, or methods like it, eventually become the norm in entertainment? Schultz thinks so: “Something tells me in a little while we’ll kinda look back and say, ‘We were a little out of control with our use of phones — we didn’t really know boundaries. We were sort of working it out.’ ”

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Asked in a 1997 interview about the grunts, growls and screams she’s incorporated into her singing, Yoko Ono told the sound artist Miya Masoaka that she’s reaching for “deep-rooted memory, human history… a kind of memory cell in DNA.” To scream, according to some therapeutic techniques, is to excavate what words can’t touch, uncovering the damage and oppression that our enculturated selves keep concealed. Ono’s music reveals the purposeful irresolutions of female utterance; the way anger can meld with joy and sensuality is often both tied to pain and defiant of it. “There is no line, or maybe it’s a fine line,” Ono said. Think of all the different ways that a woman can say “I’m happy” or “I’m hurting” or “I’m done.”

Kathleen Hanna, one of Ono’s most brilliant inheritors (as well as a veteran of both Bikini Kill and Le Tigre), makes that last phrase the title of a key song on The Julie Ruin‘s second album, Hit Reset. As the band raises choppy waves of sound for her to ride, Hanna calls out the voices that shame and constrain her. Her obvious subject is the plague of Internet trolling, but she’s also calling out the voices of others — so-called friends, authority figures — embedded in her head. “I’m d-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-one!” she wails in octave leaps and shattered sustained notes, her rage transforming into a source of power and fun. In the even more Ono-esque “Be Nice,” Hanna’s distorted baying, her mouth pushed up against the microphone, veers into Kenny Mellman’s slashing keyboard lines. The unnamed woman Hanna embodies here is battling presumptuous advances, spitting back men’s demands to “be nice” and take violation in stride. Playing both the dissembled survivor and the furious avenger, Hanna finds Ono’s fine line and turns it into a strangling wire.

Throughout Hit Reset, Hanna faces down the abuse she’s suffered in her own life, beginning in a youth spent with a father she feared: “Slept with the lights on, on the floor / Behind a chair that blocked the door,” she sings in low tones in the album’s opening title track. Hit Reset is by her own admission some of her most personal work, the result of insights she’s gained about how her all-too-common childhood experiences connect to both her adult struggles with chronic illness and her life as a feminist. Hit Reset takes a wide perspective on an adult woman’s decision to “be more hellbent on living than I am just surviving.” Some songs are tender; others, like “Mr. So And So,” an anti-ode to an entitled male fan, are amiably sarcastic. But the music always generates joy. The sound Hanna has developed with Mellman, bassist Kathi Wilcox, guitarist Sarah Landeau and drummer Carmine Covelli is deceptively loose, invoking girl groups, glam, hardcore punk and the party jams of Hanna’s own protégés, like her labelmates in Tacocat, while always keeping humor and truth-telling at the center.

At 47, Hanna has developed the kind of perspective that allows her to dismantle others’ unreasonable expectations. “I can play electric guitar / while shaving my legs in a moving car,” she deadpans in “Hello Trust No One,” a perfect take-down of riot-grrrl fetishism; somewhere, Sleater-Kinney‘s Carrie Brownstein is laughing. And somewhere, Yoko Ono must feel proud of Hanna, not only for her boisterous boundary-breaking, but because she also calls upon the force Ono most passionately celebrates: love. In the unvarnished ballad “Calverton,” Hanna, singing in a murmur that almost seems like an interior monologue, wonders at her own ability to remain hopeful even at her life’s lowest points. She credits her mother’s faith in her for the gift. “Without you, I’d take the fifth,” Hanna sings; it seems impossible, but she’s telling us that silence might have swallowed her. She’s battled that threat more than once in her life, but love from her mom, her bandmates and her community got her through. On Hit Reset, she triumphs at every decibel.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Marisa Anderson‘s guitar is inextricably tied to the raw and seeking tradition of American music, even as she rolls and plucks and picks at the landscape with reverence and newness. Over the course of three albums — The Golden Hour, Mercury and Traditional And Public Domain Songs — and last year’s excellent split LP with Tashi Dorji, Anderson roots inside gospel, country, Appalachian folk and blues to find a rich bounty of sound. For her fourth album, Into The Light, Anderson looks westward.

Anderson calls Into The Light an imaginary soundtrack to a science-fiction western, which for some might immediately evoke the Yul Brynner-starring thriller Westworld, but here carries the quietness and starkness of Solaris set in the Sonoran desert. On it, she recorded and played all of the instruments — guitar, lap steel, pedal steel, electric piano and percussion — giving her songs not only layers, but also characters. There’s a celestial twang underpinning the record; it’s in the languid steel waves of the title track, the dusty blues of “The Old Guard” and the Ennio Morricone-in-miniature stand-off “He Is Without His Guns.”

But it’s in the back half of Into The Light where Anderson does what she does best: discover the unknown. But with more instruments at hand, these improvisations turn into internal dialogues. “Chimes” does what the title says, but with electric guitar and piano, doubling back on figures to clink in the lazy wind. “House Of The Setting Sun” is a woozy blues, always threatening to kick up dirt like Anderson’s often wont to do, but it’s beaten down by smoldering heat. Guitars and steel sift through “The Golden West” like soft sand before the closing credits of “End Of The Night,” a song that imagines our protagonist pulling the shawl a bit tighter as the stars remind the visitor of home.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Last year, a newly formed trio of sisters from Israel called A-WA (pronounced “AY-wah”) caught attention with a video that seemed to come out of nowhere. In the midst of an arid desert landscape, here was A-WA, resplendent in fuchsia-pink robes and accompanied by three male dancers decked out in blue tracksuits and red snapbacks topped with fez-style tassels. Their singing was just as brash — an old Yemeni folk song, utterly transformed in bracing three-part harmonies and understitched with electronic beats.

That video, for “Habib Galbi” (Love Of My Heart), became a calling card for what A-WA is all about. The band is fronted by sisters Tair, Liron and Tagel Haim, who take the Arabic-language songs of their heritage and recast them for the 21st-century dance floor. Their father’s family is Yemeni Jews, whose distinct culture and nearly extinct Arabic dialect bridges the Arab world and Israel; that video for “Habib Galbi” was shot near their home village, in Israel’s far south, nearly wedged in between Egypt and Jordan. Even the band’s name is a callback to shared cultural identity: aywa means “yeah” in Arabic.

The album opens with an a cappella selection, “Yemenite Lullaby,” which features the trio in those signature, surprising harmonies and fully grounded in their desert roots. But almost as soon as you settle into those otherworldly textures, A-WA flips the script and bursts into a psychedelic-soaked, drum-pad-fueled song called “Ya Raitesh Al Warda” (I Wish You Were A Rose). It’s here that you really begin feeling the influence of the album’s producer, Tomer Yosef, whose band Balkan Beat Box has provided a few massive hits with its distinctive and brassy-brash earworms, including Jason DeRulo’s “Talk Dirty” featuring 2 Chainz and Mac Miller‘s “Goosebumpz.”

There’s a lot of cheeky humor in the arrangements A-WA worked up with Yosef, a fellow Israeli of Yemenite descent. Take, for example, the ska-ish backbeat and squealed chorus in “Lau Ma Al Mahaba” (If Not For Love), the synth-driven bleeps and bloops that leaven the uneven rhythm of “Galbi Haway” (My Heart Is Lost In Love), and even the overtly childlike singsong of “Ala Wabda” (I Will Begin By Calling You) — a tune with firmly religious lyrics, beginning with, “I will begin by calling you, oh God / The great Almighty / Oh, king of kings / Who has no bounds.” The heaviest beats come late in the album, in “Shamak Zabad Radai” (Your Scent Is Of Rada’a), a song that’s ripe for remixing.

But throughout, it’s the sisters’ vocals, perfectly attuned to each other, along with their cutely off-kilter reimaginings of Yemenite folk songs, that makes Habib Galbi such a pleasure, and such a logical continuation of what they started with the “Habib Galbi” video. Instead of earnestly reconstructing the music of their cultural ancestors, A-WA has catapulted this roots material into new terrain.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Deerhoof‘s never-look-back aesthetic has become a calling card, and its unpredictability a point of pride. Time and again, the San Francisco band has surprised listeners and pushed them in new musical directions they might not immediately want to go, and yet it’s hard not to loyally follow along with each sonic jump. Still, when a group has churned through as many bizarro ideas as Deerhoof has over the course of a brilliant run of albums that date back to the mid-1990s, you have to wonder how it keeps coming back with something different.

To follow up 2014’s excellent La Isla Bonita, Deerhoof’s members ditched the comforts of a traditional studio, rented a sterile abandoned office in the New Mexico desert and, with nothing written beforehand, just played. Seven days later, Deerhoof reemerged with its 14th album, The Magic, an eclectic 15 songs inspired by the music each member — vocalist and bassist Satomi Matsuzaki, guitarists and multi-instrumentalists Ed Rodriguez and John Dieterich, and drummer Greg Saunier — grew up loving.

Deerhoof has always been masterful in concocting challenging albums that smash together genres, dissect structure and texture, and explore the depths of polyrhythms — and then abruptly blow it all up with acidic eruptions. In that regard, The Magic is no different. Bristling with electricity, these new songs are propelled by Saunier’s frenzied drumming and Matsuzaki’s funky bass lines, searing synth sequencers and finger-flying guitars that playfully switch things up when you least expect it. It adds up to a tense, visceral, unrelenting sound that doesn’t let listeners get comfortable for very long.

“The Devil And His Anarchic Surrealist Retinue” (which borrows its title from a descriptor in Alex Ross’ book The Rest Is Noise) is emblematic of Deerhoof’s turn-on-a-dime changes: It opens with slack-stringed strumming and Saunier’s ferocious snare-drum attack, a disjunct arpeggio pattern and a swoony slide guitar to accentuate Matsuzaki’s bright vocals. But then the beat drops, yielding to a jazz-infused R&B bridge that provides a smooth counterpoint to the harshness.

Elsewhere, Deerhoof cycles through sounds that deliver a little something for everyone — from infectious handclaps, rattling tambourines and messy surf-rock guitars (“Plastic Thrills”) to pulsing sequencers and thick power chords (“Learning To Apologize Effectively”) to bit-crunched, rubbery grooves (“Little Hollywood”). There’s the sneering thrash of “That Ain’t No Life To Me” and “Dispossessor,” which sound as if played from a cheaply dubbed cassette; and there’s the warped reimagining of “I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire” — a romantic classic popularized by early doo-wop group The Ink Spots, overhauled with dusty drum-machine beats and chiming pads.

More than just the sound of loud, off-kilter textures colliding, The Magic captures a love for pop melody that provides a perfect antidote to the dissonance, with songs that are as catchy as they are noisy. “Criminals Of The Dream” eschews the grit for dancey glitter, as Matsuzaki reassuringly coos, “Dream you can dream… I know you can dream / Things aren’t as bad as they seem” atop shimmering harmonies. In another highlight, “Life Is Suffering,” Deerhoof establishes a meaty backbone, punctuated by piercing attacks high on the guitar neck. But then the chorus shifts to a more soulful mood when Matsuzaki and Saunier duet, “Note my screams of joy, higher and higher and higher / Life is suffering, man.”

Deerhoof’s words on The Magic are as abstract as ever, yet they evocatively function more as another rhythmic element, ping-ponging delightfully off the tongue. That’s true of “Kafe Mania!,” a gnarly riff-centric shout-out to coffee drinks (“Cappuccino! Macchiato! Affogato! Cortado!”), or the ’80s arena-rock homage “Acceptance Speech,” which delivers a self-referential introduction (“Deerhoof here we are, Deerhoof here we come / We love to visit your towns…”) that could easily kick off every show from now on. Meanwhile, the syncopated jam “Model Behavior” digs into politics, as Matsuzaki and Saunier sing, “A model behavior, a candidate / I am tough and I don’t give up.”

As much as Deerhoof seeks new territory, the band rarely loses its own thread. No matter the genre trappings, Deerhoof’s rhythmic precision and off-the-rails improvisation, abrasiveness and melodicism are always dialed into its DNA and immediately identifiable. It’s what makes The Magic‘s most unanticipated moments all the more daring and exhilarating.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Hally and Emmerichs have been making music since secondary school; they’re now both 24. I heard Oh Pep! first in Nashville playing the Americana Music Festival, which is a bit of an irony for an Australian band. But the band’s use of fiddle, mandolin and harmonies fit comfortably at this festival, while also standing out as refreshingly original.

Stadium Cake is Oh Pep!’s debut album, recorded in Nova Scotia. Each of the duo’s previous three EPs is a progression into ever more complex songwriting and intricate playing. They’re funny at times, and they can be thoughtful and thought-provoking, sometimes in the same song. Stadium Cake expands on Hally and Emmerichs’ talents, to the point where it surprised me how detailed and intricate they are as both players and listeners. On each listen, I’ve come to find new favorites, though “Doctor Doctor” and “The Race” were my first loves. Put this on repeat, and by the time you stop, phrases like, “I know what I want and it’s not what I need” may be part of your own personal soundtrack.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

California’s San Joaquin Valley runs right along the middle of the state, from just south of Bakersfield up to Sacramento. It was ground zero for Cesar Chavez’s groundbreaking campaign for farmworkers, and it was where I met Agustín Lira when I lived in Fresno.

He was a hero there — someone who helped kick off a historic social-justice movement using a guitar and his voice. He, along with brothers Luis and Daniel Valdez, used song and theater from the back of flatbed trucks on the edges of orchards to get Chavez’s message to the folks working in the unforgiving San Joaquin Valley sun.

Luis Valdez went on to create El Teatro Campesino, which became a world-renowned Chicano theater organization. Agustín Lira stayed in Fresno and continued to sing songs about dignity and resistance to exploitation, with a deep understanding of the value of hard physical labor.

With the release of Songs And Struggle And Hope, Lira finds a new home with the legendary record label Smithsonian Folkways. It is the 44th release in the Traditions/Tradiciones series, produced with the help of the Smithsonian’s Latino Center, and it’s a perfect match. Lira is a bit of living history who is moving the tradition of protest music forward.

Here, Lira, along with his musical partner Patricia Wells, adapt their message for modern times, while maintaining the same inspirational lyrics and conviction. Their music resonates as strongly as it ever has.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

U.K. singer-songwriter Laura Mvula first broke through in 2013 with a full-length debut, Sing To The Moon, and a fully formed sound that bridged eras and genres with the aid of bright, elastic pop production. Ping-ponging from springy dance-pop anthems to sullenly introspective ballads, Mvula set the bar extremely high for the career to come.

For her second album, The Dreaming Room, Mvula tugs at the boundaries of her sound while letting a few more of her own life’s details into the mix. She even includes “Nan,” a short, pleasantry-filled recording of a conversation with her mother that hints at (without overtly spelling out) some of the most powerful forces at work in Mvula’s life — most notably a collision of cultures that can’t help but feel freighted with a sense of distance. The Dreaming Room opens with a similarly brief statement of purpose that bears a telling title: “Who I Am.”

Who Laura Mvula is, of course, is an artist versatile enough to preside over both the funky affirmations of “Overcome” (featuring a guest appearance by Nile Rodgers) and the heavily layered, brooding, six-minute slow-build of “Show Me Love.” Tellingly, both of those very different songs land at more or less the same hallowed spot: hard-won confidence, with an eye on transcendence.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The Grateful Dead is cool again, although legions of Deadheads will tell you the band never stopped being cool. The latest wave of adulation comes on the heels of last summer’s “Fare Thee Well” reunion shows in Chicago, as well as this year’s massive Day Of The Dead tribute album, curated by The National. Pianist Bruce Hornsby had a hand in both. He performed with The Dead in Chicago — something he’s been doing since 1988, including a stint as an official member of the band from 1990 to ’92 — and he contributed a cover of The Dead’s “Black Muddy River,” a collaboration with Bon Iver ancestor DeYarmond Edison, to Day Of The Dead.

Hornsby can jam with the best. His solo material, however, has always had a more structured focus. His first big hit with Bruce Hornsby And The Range, 1986’s “The Way It Is,” succeeded in squeezing extended piano solos into a pensive, chart-topping pop song. And he’s played and/or co-written smashes for everyone from Sheena Easton to Don Henley to Ricky Skaggs. On Rehab Reunion, his latest album with his current band Bruce Hornsby And The Noisemakers, the singer-keyboardist once again hits the sweet spot between joyful improv and immaculate songcraft.

What makes Rehab Reunion stand out from prior Hornsby releases is his weapon of choice; this time around, he’s ditched the ivories in favor of a far folksier instrument, the dulcimer. In the album’s title track, Hornsby’s drift toward country music over the past couple decades is evident; there’s a twang in the Virginian’s voice as he and his band — Gibb Droll on guitar, J.V. Collier on bass, J.T. Thomas on organ, Ross Holmes on fiddle and mandolin, and Sonny Emory on washboard, cajon and drums — pick and stomp through a rootsy, lighthearted account of sobriety and the lack thereof. That playful vibe permeates “Tropical Cashmere Sweater” and “M.I.A. In M.I.A.M.I.,” the latter a humorous, anecdote-filled account of Hornsby’s tenure at the University of Miami in the ’70s. Other tracks, like “Soon Enough” and “Valley Road,” take on the more contemplative tone Hornsby perfected way back when with “The Way It Is.”

Two high-profile guest stars grace Rehab Reunion with their presence. In “Over The Rise,” Bon Iver frontman Justin Vernon lends his ethereal grit to a lulling drone of Appalachian folk. And the legendary soul singer Mavis Staples brings gospel fervor to “Celestial Railroad,” a soaring duet that Hornsby originally wrote in the early ’90s, hoping The Staple Singers might record it. It took a quarter of a century, but it finally happened. Then again, Hornsby is by all accounts a patient artist, one whose earthy, unassuming music perennially finds a new audience. On Rehab Reunion, he’s never sounded more relevant.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.