Gaelynn Lea: Tiny Desk Concert

Bob Boilen — Fri, 11 Mar 2016 09:39:32 +0000

Gaelynn Lea, the winner of NPR’s second annual Tiny Desk Contest, makes music like nobody else. Her sounds are steeped in the deep melodies of great Irish fiddle tunes, but her performance and singing style aren’t traditional. More than 6,000 artists submitted videos in which they performed an original song behind a desk of their choosing with the hope of winning a chance to play a Tiny Desk concert at NPR. Gaelynn Lea was the overwhelming favorite of our six judges.

After voting for Lea, I wanted to learn more about her and her remarkable talent. Following about a minute of just focusing on the desk, her video pans to a small woman in a wheelchair as she plays a violin she holds like a cello. Lea has brittle bone disease, which made it necessary for her to reinvent the ordinary — and, in this case, a way to play the fiddle.

I also discovered, after selecting Gaelynn Lea, that she’d become friends with Alan Sparhawk of the band Low. Sparhawk first heard her perform at a farmers market in Duluth, Minn., where they both live. They’ve become friends who sometimes make music together, recording under the name The Murder Of Crows, so I also invited Sparhawk to join Gaelynn Lea for two of her four songs at this special Tiny Desk concert. There was hardly a dry eye.

Set List

“Someday We’ll Linger In The Sun”
“Southwind”
“Bird Song”
“Moment Of Bliss”

Credits

Producers: Bob Boilen, Niki Walker; Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin; Videographers: Niki Walker, Kara Frame; Production Assistant: Jackson Sinnenberg; Photo: Colin Marshall/NPR.

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First Listen: Low, ‘Ones And Sixes’

Stephen Thompson — Wed, 02 Sep 2015 23:03:00 +0000

It’s one thing for Low to have made a rewarding career of spare, dramatic, glacially paced music — for song after slow-moving song to have been constructed out of little more than crystalline guitar lines, minimal bass, maybe a few effects here and there, brushes of snare and the alternating or intertwined voices of Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker. It’s another to make those ingredients sound so incredibly dynamic; to spend 20-plus years making a dozen albums that each feel distinct, and that each introduce new ideas, twists and ways to wring drama out of the space between notes.

Low’s unwillingness to repeat itself comes in especially handy on Ones And Sixes, which follows the lovely but plain, Jeff Tweedy-produced 2013 album The Invisible Way. Here, the palette feels magnified from the very first song: The tense thud and crackle of “Gentle,” reminiscent of the unease that pervaded 2007’s Drums And Guns, announces that upfront. From there, Ones And Sixes broadens to include sounds that feel as intimate as a whisper over pillows or as obtuse as transmissions from a faraway satellite. Sometimes, they’re intermingled.

Take “No Comprende,” in which terse, bluesily chugging heaviness leaves space for Parker’s gorgeous, almost otherworldly voice to interject words that sound engineered to soothe — that is, until you hear that she’s singing the words, “Our house is on fire.” Parker, it turns out, is a perfect messenger for Ones And Sixes‘ direst warnings: After all, if we’re going to hear a suggestion that “all you innocents make a run for it,” we might as well hear it from a voice that warm and lustrous.

Throughout Ones And Sixes, the Minnesota trio somehow gives weight to airiness as comfort and discord orbit each other like a binary star. But every time the portent threatens to become overbearing — just as the mix of prettiness and heaviness tips a little too far out of alignment — Low punctures it with a burst of cleansing aggression or some pristine, exquisite surprise. Anything to keep us off balance.

Low – Bandwidth

Gaelynn Lea: Tiny Desk Concert

First Listen: Low, ‘Ones And Sixes’