Fruition recently tossed their collective hat into the ring for this year’s Tiny Desk Contest from NPR, offering up a video of the band playing an unreleased tune written by Kellen Asebroek and featuring lyrics taken from “The New Colossus,” the Emma Lazarus poem that is inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty.  And they picked the perfect locale for the shoot. 

According to Fruition’s statement, the band “borrowed a friend’s tiny desk” to get into the spirit of the contest and set up their instruments in Red Hood, Brooklyn, to be able to get the Statue of Liberty and a portion of the New York City skyline in the background. The video’s sound was actually captured by the members’ individual iPhones and compiled by drummer Tyler Thompson.

“I was at a local theater in Manhattan a while back, right around the President’s first executive push for travel/immigration bans (and the ensuing backlash and protests),” Asebroek says. “At the end of the performance (it was a Fireside Mystery Collective live radio taping) a woman delivered an impassioned rendition of ‘The New Colossus.’ It was the first time I’d heard it in it’s entirety and it moved me to tears. It garnered a standing ovation and left a lasting impression on me. The next morning I started trying to figure out a way to put it to music.”

Watch below, and view other Tiny Desk Contest submissions here.