SPRINGVILLE, Utah (ABC4) — On Monday, NPR announced the winner of the 2023 Tiny Desk Concert was Little Moon, a local band from Springville, Utah.
According to NPR, they received nearly 6,000 entries to this year’s Tiny Desk Contest, which they described as the search for the next great undiscovered artist. And the band Little Moon “moved them to tears and filled them with hope,” NPR states.
The winning entry was Little Moon’s ‘Wonder Eye,’ which you can listen to on their Youtube Channel. Little Moon singer, Emma Hardyman, and her husband Nathan Hardyman wrote the song under heavy circumstances. She told NPR that her mother-in-law was in hospice care, while she and her husband were in the process of leaving The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
Her husband wrote the lyrics after his mother passed away, and Hardyman said they are about death and acceptance of death.
The church believes in life after death and eternal families, Hardyman told NPR. “There is beauty and comfort in our former beliefs of certainty, light, and life; we honor and respect such teachings,” Hardyman told NPR. “But we also find beauty in uncertainty, darkness, chaos, and death. Perhaps it’s all one and the same.”
Hardyman expresses that message in the lyrics, “To where we are and where we go, wonder I,” and “Is it a tale that we make true in the telling, is there a knowledge that is found not in knowing.”
According to NPR producers, the song was among the best of 2023’s Tiny Desk Concert entries.
“Emma’s deceptively strong voice, and the band’s ability to take the music to places completely unexpected, catapulted ‘Wonder Eye’ to the top of the heap of wonderful entries,” said Tiny Desk series producer Bobby Carter.
The band consists of singer Emma Hardyman, bassist (and Emma’s husband) Nathan Hardyman, keys player Bly Wallentine, harpist Bridget Jackson, drummer Chris Shemwell, and electric guitarist Grace Johnson.
Little Moon will play a Tiny Desk concert at NPR’s Washington, D.C., headquarters. And in June, the band will headline the Tiny Desk Contest On the Road tour, playing along with other contest entrants.
