The Tiny Desk is working from home for the foreseeable future. Introducing NPR Music’s Tiny Desk (home) concerts, bringing you performances from across the country and the world. It’s the same spirit — stripped-down sets, an intimate setting — just a different space.

As usual, Rina Sawayama is one step ahead of us. She’s back in the office, clad in a periwinkle blazer with waist cut-outs and a high ponytail cleaner than the view of the city skyline. Make no mistake: even in fluorescent lighting, the Japanese British pop star performs with the same tenacity and drama you hear in her 2020 debut album, SAWAYAMA , a lustrous pop epic peppered with early aughts R&B, nu-metal and classic rock.

Unable to tour because of the pandemic, the artist has been holding onto these songs for the last year. Sawayama’s Tiny Desk (home) concert successfully reminds us — in just three tracks — of her range and versatility as both artist and performer. Tears calcify in “Dynasty,” a song like a salve to wounds inherited from generations past. The heaviness of the music never overshadows her voice, which ascends heroically. “Won’t you break the chain with me?” she belts out.

As if turning the other cheek, Sawayama swiftly moves into the sweet, cha-ching pop of “XS,” and later the soft-hearted ballad “Chosen Family,” rendered in the style of her 2021 collaboration with Elton John. The song was reborn, in part, because of John’s admiration for Sawayama and her ability to cross-pollinate genres, but also because the two held “Chosen Family,” both the song and concept, dearly. Funny enough, the song’s thesis — “I chose you / You chose me” — reflects their meeting, too.

From Publisher: NPR.org

In Rina Sawayama, Elton John Found a Collaborator and a Friend

John, 74, and Sawayama, 30, found they have much in common. During his breakout years in the early to mid 1970s, John was something of a pop heretic as well, a rock icon steeped in glam, psychedelia, blues, you name it. Both singers are outspoken about their politics and motivated by passion and care for the queer community. They also brandish imaginations global in scope. John has lately been agitating for government intervention on behalf of young British musicians left logistically stranded in the wake of Brexit. And recently, thanks to intense lobbying from Sawayama — who was born in Japan and raised in England — the British Phonogram Industry extended eligibility for the BRIT Awards and the Mercury Prize, the U.K.’s marquee music prizes, to artists who’ve resided in the United Kingdom for five years.

Rina Sawayama Taps Elton John for New “Chosen Family”:

“This song, I thought, ‘God, this is exactly what we need to be saying right now.’ It’s a song about peace,” Elton John told Sawayama of the track on the latest episode of his Apple Music 1 radio show  Rocket Hour . “I don’t care if someone wants to vote Republican or Democrat or be gay or be straight or be Asian or be Black or be Indian. I didn’t care about that. But people are using that to stir up hatred. And I don’t know whether they mean it or not. I just think they’re stoking the furnaces, and I don’t like it.”

From Publisher: The New York Times