Bob Boilen | June 2, 2021
There’s a comfort to be found singing in a bathroom; we all sound better with our voices bouncing off the tiles. For Sasha Spielberg, a.k.a. Buzzy Lee, she took it a step further, recording her Tiny Desk (home) concert in her childhood bathroom, which her parents decorated with images of fairytales.
Sasha Spielberg tells me there’s “Cinderella and her fairy godmother, the Seven Dwarfs and the Three Wise Men of Gotham, which is part of Mother Goose, apparently.” She continues, “This bathroom is where I would go to sing. I would make up songs about each of the fairytales on the tiles, and I could sing as loud as I wanted, and it felt as if I had enough privacy. It was my escape. I’d spend hours on end in here dreaming of singing in front of people. It’s also where I wrote my first song, age 5, ‘You’re Just Like Pie Crust.’ It was a pop song. Huge hit.”
Buzzy Lee captured my heart with her 2021 album Spoiled Love, an album produced with Nicolas Jaar. With musicians Adam Gunther sitting in the tub playing modular synths and Jorge Balbi Castellano seated on the ‘throne’ playing drum pads, we hear songs and tales with different themes: obsession, love, attachment, and self-doubt, all filled with playful wordplay and her passionate voice.
SET LIST
• “Strange Town”
• “Coolhand”
• “Spoiled Love”
• “What Has A Man Done”
MUSICIANS
• Sasha Spielberg: keys, vocals
• Adam Gunther: modular synth, modular bass
• Jorge Balbi Castellano: drums
CREDITS
• Video: Harry McNally
• Audio: Adam Gunther
TINY DESK TEAM
• Producer: Bob Boilen
• Video Producer: Kara Frame
• Audio Mastering: Josh Rogosin
• Associate Producer: Bobby Carter
• Tiny Production Team: Maia Stern, Gabrielle Pierre
• Executive Producer: Keith Jenkins
• Senior VP, Programming: Anya Grundmann
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