Nature As Music: Young the Giant’s Unconventional “In The Open” Series, by Emma Rudkin

You know you’ve made it in the music industry when you can afford state of the art equipment that allows you to drown out all ambient noise. You’re the master of your own audible domain — listeners only hear what you want them to hear. Without echoes, background noise, or feedback, you monopolize sound in a way that’s impossible with most affordable equipment. Artists may not intend for their music to be listened to in a vacuum, but it certainly is created within one, unfettered by cacophonic ambience. Noise can be harnessed for artistic vision, but even then it is curated by the artist themselves — they contain it in a way environmental noise could never be controlled.

However, Young the Giant completely throws a wrench in this desire to contain noise with their “In The Open” YouTube series.

In these videos, they perform reimagined versions of their songs in settings ranging from a national forest (“Anagram”), to a standard American football field (“Amerika”). While not a household name, Young the Giant have had their fair share of mainstream breakthroughs. The first, and perhaps most pervasive to this day, is “Cough Syrup” off of their 2010 self-titled album Young the Giant; the title track off their second album, Mind Over Matter (2014); and, more recently, “Superposition” off of their fourth album, Mirror Master, released in 2018. Their discography prior to their 2025 EP, In The Open Volume One, is no exception to the tendency of artists to cut out background noise — as this is the general practice in mainstream music, anyways.

Let me be clear, though: a lot of creativity can be harnessed in more controlled, audibly sterile settings. I don’t consider this norm as sacrilegious to artistry by any means. However, it’s a norm that artists enjoy subverting every once in a while. Evidence, of which, I point to the success and popularity of NPR’s Tiny Desk concerts. While the equipment is still top-notch to best capture the acoustics, there’s a more intimate feeling to these performances due to the limitations of the titular “tiny” space. These performances are often reimagined and/or acoustic compared to their studio counterparts, and I often end up liking these versions even better (“Cry, Cry, Cry” by Coldplay and “Rotten” by Kenny Beats). It breathes new life into songs that I thought I was all too familiar with. It allows the artist to try new things with their performance, instrumentation, and beyond.

Artists and fans alike love these Tiny Desk-esque performances, and they’re usually a platform that hosts a lot of other artists for more intimate performances. Vevo, Capitol Studios, and NPR’S Tiny Desk of course — these all provide platforms for artists to display another dimension of their work. The artists themselves rarely make a platform to do just that, yet Young the Giant does. Alongside each album since the band’s formation, they’ve added to their “In The Open” catalogue one song at a time. As of September 2025, there are 37 “In The Open” videos that span their entire discography — with at least a couple songs from each album.

Where Tiny Desk informalizes the studio performance setting, Young the Giant surmounts it. The goal isn’t to make music where the environment doesn’t, but to complement the environment’s noise with their music. They have control over where to film these videos, but as for the environment itself, it’s out of their hands. Is it super windy on the mountain range where they’re performing “Anagram”? That’s okay. Does the wind kind of inhibit your ability to hear their performance here and there? Sure it does, and that’s okay. The environment itself is a character enhancing the band’s performance, even if that means it elicits “mistakes.”

Actually, these mistakes are what best define the series for me. In “I Got,” there’s a part where one of the guitarists plays a couple wrong notes in between verses. When I listen to the studio version, quite frankly, the song feels incomplete without the unabashed rawness that moment offers.

September 18, 2025 was my third time seeing Young the Giant in concert. This tour, unlike the previous two, was branded as an acoustic “In The Open” tour. Everything from the venue, to the band’s attitude felt more raw and intimate. Sameer Gadhia, Young the Giant’s vocalist, shared on stage that he believes that mistakes are what defines “In The Open” and what makes it so special. “In The Open” doesn’t just allow for mistakes, it welcomes them, for they are what make us human. His sentiment was echoed by the crowd when, later on in the concert, he sang the first two words of a song, stopped, and asked if he could try again — only to be met by applause.

The goal of music isn’t to be perfect, though, right? Mistakes and all, “In The Open” gives the band a medium through which, not only they express themselves in the form of their music, but also for the environment to display its beauty and presence; which rather than being ignored, is featured. The coexistence of these versions and the studio versions displays the beauty of music. Whether in a studio surrounded by heavy, cumbersome instruments or at a dinner table with a spoon in hand over orange juice, music has the power to move us from anywhere it’s played to wherever it’s heard.