Welcome to NPR's Tiny Desk Contest Top Shelf. I'm Bob Boylin. The Tiny Desk contest is our

nationwide search to find the next great undiscovered artist to play a Tiny Desk concert.

Thousands of artists from around the country submitted videos and before we announce this year's

winner, we're running this Top Shelf series where each week a contest judge will share their

favorite entries and we'll interview one of the artists. Today we have the pleasure of welcoming

the 2020 Tiny Desk contest winner and this year's contest judge Linda Diaz. So, hi, Linda.

Hi. This has to be like completely surreal. I mean, you have this unique perspective of someone

actually who played a Tiny Desk concert in early 2020. So you came to NPR, you played my desk,

tell us about that experience as a backup singer with some rating. Oh my goodness. I don't know

Jordan's personal perspective, but from my perspective, it was a lot of nerves because if it's

your Tiny Desk, I feel like it's like your opportunity to like glow, be yourself, you know, show your

personality. If you're a background vocalist, your job is to make that person sound as good as

possible and as comfortable as possible and that was so scary for me. So I think personally playing

my own home concert was like so much more freeing and I felt like I could be a little bit more myself.

Yeah, be free to, I guess, make good mistakes. Because it was pandemic, we put you on a rooftop

somewhere in New York City, right? For the winning, you have yet to come and do your Tiny Desk yet.

I know. Maybe I'll feel differently at the desk, the desk is intimidating for sure.

Yeah, you will be nervous. I guarantee you because nobody has come in and not been nervous actually.

Yeah. Just a warning. So with this unique perspective, you watch so many videos,

you're picking five today of some of your favorites as we are now in the final rounds of

picking the winner. We're very close. This is the last top shelf with judges that we will talk about.

The favorites. Tell us about the things that you loved and videos who were about to see.

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