Since NPR's Tiny Desk concert series launched in 2008, a dizzying range of musicality has shown up behind the iconic desk. From Yo-Yo Ma to Billie Eilish to Anderson .Paak to yours truly, it's nearly impossible to choose a favorite performance. But when Tank and the Bangas played a set in 2017, as the winners of that year's national Tiny Desk Contest, their performance brought such a rush of exuberance, spontaneity and sheer joy to the desk that you might find yourself watching that video over and over again, adding to its 14 million views on YouTube.
Since 2011, when the members of the band met at a New Orleans open mic, the Bangas' quirky, vibrant, genre-defiant sound has been built around lead singer Tarriona "Tank" Ball's voice and poetry, both of which have a seemingly infinite range of expression, pitch and color. Tank herself is equal parts old soul and eternal child, down to earth and grounded in person while her creative spirit floats on clouds that might be made of cotton candy. She started writing poetry as a 12 year old, and then began setting her words to music, creating songs that are an ageless exploration of the human experience, its meanderings and missteps, its peaks and valleys.
Tank was flying high when we had this conversation at the Blue Note in New York. She'd just heard the exhilarating news that her recent recording, a three-part spoken word collection called The Heart, The Mind, The Soul, had earned a Grammy nomination for best spoken word poetry album. Her phone was blowing up with congratulations, and her mood was ebullient. With this project, she intentionally positions herself as a poet in her own right, sharing her life journey from her New Orleans childhood through the adventures of heart, mind and soul that have led to finding her strength as a woman in this world.
The opening track on The Heart is called "A Poem Is" — a song that clearly expresses Tank's mission to define poetry itself as music for our time. In her own words: "I want poetry to get more respect and for even more young people to get into the expression of poetry. I want it to be seen as cool again." And if anyone can accomplish that mission with timeless energy and grace — and a little bit of cotton-candy magic — it's Tank.
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