Watch Sierra Hull Turn NPR’s ‘Tiny Desk’ Into A Bluegrass Haven

Mandolin marvel Sierra Hull crossed off an item from her bucket list by making her Tiny Desk Concert debut. Hull played four tracks from her 2025 album, A Tip Toe High Wire, for the latest installment of the NPR Music video series.

The self-produced record was Sierra Hull’s first new album in five years. It was also her first to feature her talented touring band of guitarist Shaun Richardson, fiddler Avery Merritt, bassist Erik Coveney and drummer Mark Raudabaugh, the same group of seasoned musicians who backed Hull at NPR Music’s Washington D.C. headquarters.

Sierra Hull went storyteller style after opening her set with A Tip Toe High Wire lead single “Boom.” Hull described the subsequent instrumental “Lord, That’s A Long Way” as a traveling song that took its title from a phrase her husband’s grandmother said in regards to the couple’s trip from their hometown of Nashville to visit her.

It was Sierra’s own grandmother who was the inspiration behind the third song of the session. “My granny lived such a crazy life in her 80 years that we got to have her. I didn’t get to play this song for her before she passed, but I did tell her I was writing a song for her called ‘Spitfire,'” Hull told the audience.

Sierra Hull and her bandmates closed out the set with “Muddy Water” after explaining that she wasn’t sure what she was trying to say when she began writing the song. “After it was finished and I started singing it more, I went ‘I think I wrote this for me as much as anybody,'” Hull noted of the tune which urges people to be “who they are down deep.”

Watch Sierra Hull’s Tiny Desk Concert below: