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Foo Fighters Pack Stadium-Sized Rock Into NPR’s Tiny Desk, Taping Out the Space Beforehand
Foo Fighters squeeze a five-song Tiny Desk set into NPR’s cramped workspace, with Dave Grohl citing Trouble Funk as inspiration.
The Foo Fighters may be warming up in small rooms ahead of Your Favorite Toy, but even their recent club dates in New York and New Jersey felt modest compared with the sight of the six-piece squeezing behind NPR’s Tiny Desk. The performance, just released, turns the public radio staple into a surprisingly tight fit for a band built for arenas.
Dave Grohl made the point himself after the group opened with the new album’s bruising “Spit Shine.” “It’s an honor to be here,” he said, before noting that he’s watched plenty of Tiny Desk sets over the years and has a favorite of his own: Trouble Funk’s 2018 appearance, which packed 12 members into the space. That D.C. go-go set, Grohl said, was part of the inspiration for how the Foo Fighters approached their own visit.
According to NPR, they didn’t wing it. Like a lot of Tiny Desk guests, the band planned ahead and “even taping out the dimensions of the Desk in a practice space to puzzle-out the close quarters” before heading into the workspace in Washington, D.C., where Grohl grew up.
Once settled in, the set moved with a kind of deliberate looseness. Grohl picked up an acoustic guitar for a mostly unplugged version of the 1999 staple “Learn To Fly,” then shifted into another track from Your Favorite Toy, “Child Actor.” Before the song, he joked about the long stretch between finishing an album and finally playing it live, saying one of the roughest parts is realizing months in the studio have left him without a haircut and suddenly unable to see the fretboard properly. He added that during a recent scream-heavy version of the song, he inhaled some hair and ended up sounding like he was “coughing up a furball.”
From there, Grohl nudged the room into its familiar Foo Fighters ending stretch, urging the NPR crowd to sing along to “My Hero” and then “Everlong,” the two The Colour and the Shape favorites that remain impossible to keep out of the conversation when the band closes a set. For all the stripped-down framing, the point was never subtle: even in Tiny Desk form, the Foo Fighters still play like they’re trying to fill a stadium.
Next for the band is BottleRock Napa Valley in Napa, Calif. on May 23, followed by a European tour that begins June 10 in Oslo. Their 2026 North American stadium run is set to start August 4 at Rogers Stadium in Toronto.
