Billy Strings: Tiny Desk Concert

VPM | By Kara Frame

Published December 10, 2025 at 10:00 AM EST

It’s rare these days for an artist to ask for fewer microphones, but after warming up in our space, Billy Strings did just that. Surrounded by his band, the bluegrass virtuoso brings back the spirit of Tiny Desk’s early days. We capture, in his own words, “the way these instruments are meant to sound.”

“We’ve been lucky to play a lot of cool venues,” Strings says, pausing to reflect. “But this one’s different. It has that same soul to it because — I’ve seen so many amazing performances that happened right here and I kind of believe that love and spirit kind of soaks into this environment, so just standing here feels like a special thing.”

Strings found his roots in bluegrass from his dad. Since then, he’s managed to expand the genre to new audiences, amassing a following of super fans — self-proclaimed Billy Goats — that sometimes schedule their lives around his tour. Once you meet Strings, it’s not hard to understand why: He’s a humble musician and a sorcerer of his craft, wielding a guitar as if it’s a part of him.

SET LIST

“Red Daisy”
“My Alice”
“Malfunction Junction”
“Gild the Lily”

MUSICIANS

Billy Strings: vocals, guitar
Alex Hargreaves: fiddle
Billy Failing: banjo, background vocals
Royal Masat: bass, background vocals
Jarrod Walker: mandolin, background vocals

TINY DESK TEAM

Producer: Kara Frame
Director/Editor: Maia Stern
Audio Technical Director: Josh Newell
Host/Series Producer: Bobby Carter
Videographers: Maia Stern, Kara Frame, Joshua Bryant
Audio Engineer: Neil Tevault
Production Assistants: Dora Levite, Dhanika Pineda
Photographer: Michael Zamora
Series Editor: Lars Gotrich
Executive Producer: Suraya Mohamed
Executive Director: Sonali Mehta
Series Creators: Bob Boilen, Stephen Thompson, Robin Hilton

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Kara Frame

Kara Frame is a video producer and director for NPR Music's Tiny Desk Concerts series. To sum up what she loves most about working on the iconic series, she says, "We put joy into the world." In addition to this work, she manages the NPR Music Instagram account. Prior to her work on the music team, she crafted stories about housing segregation in Baltimore, Md., motherhood in a refugee camp in Lesbos, Greece, and food deserts in Washington, D.C.

Frame's personal projects have focused primarily on veterans and PTSD. In 2016, her short documentary I Will Go Back Tonight was awarded first place for long-form multimedia at the NPPA Northern Short Course.

In her free time, Frame volunteers with Women Photojournalists of Washington (WPOW), a 501c3 nonprofit dedicated to educating the public about the role of women in visual journalism and fostering their professional success. She organizes the annual WPOW portfolio review and seminar, an event that invites visual journalists of all career levels to share their work with some of the world's top editors from organizations such as NPR, National Geographic, Washington Post, The New York Times, Vox, Smithsonian Magazine, among many others.

Before starting at NPR in 2016, Frame received a B.A. in African-American Studies from Temple University in Philadelphia, Pa., and a M.A in New Media Photojournalism from the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. When she's not working on videos or volunteering with WPOW, you can find her in her garden, hosting a dinner for friends or getting lost in the woods in her teardrop camper, Sunshine.

See stories by Kara Frame