Culture
Speaking With Musician and Public Speaker Gaelynn Lea
By: Emily Votaw
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“Someday We’ll Linger In the Sun” by Duluth, MN musician Gaelynn Lea has made many people weep. It’s a gorgeously constructed song, with Lea looping the sound of her violin, which she plays like a small cello, under her ethereal vocals, to poignant effect.
The opening lyrics are the devastating: “Our love’s a complex vintage wine/All rotted leaves and lemon rind,” and they’re also the first lyrics that Lea wrote, she tells me in her interview with WOUB just a day prior to her performance at Arts West.
Lea was inspired to write the song after surviving an emergency surgery that she had only six weeks before she was to get married to her now husband, Paul Tressler.
“He (Tressler) was very compassionate. He slept in a chair the whole time by my bed, my family would come and go, but he was always there,” Lea said. “He was a really compassionate partner for the whole time — which made it more bearable, to be with someone like that, even though it was a scary and stressful time. About a year after that happened I wrote the song but it only started as that very first line, that was the only line that came to me for about a month. It was just stirring around in my brain for a long time.”
“He (Tressler) was very compassionate. He slept in a chair the whole time by my bed, my family would come and go, but he was always there. He was a really compassionate partner for the whole time — which made it more bearable, to be with someone like that, even though it was a scary and stressful time. About a year after that happened I wrote the song but it only started as that very first line, that was the only line that came to me for about a month. It was just stirring around in my brain for a long time.” – Gaelynn Lea on writing “Someday We’ll Linger in the Sun”
Tressler travels with Lea, acting as manager and caregiver. He’s there for our interview, too: a soft spoken man who, when he does speak, has just a touch of a lilting Minnesotan accent. He knows the ins and outs of Lea’s musical equipment and is expert help when we go about recording a live performance of hers (which we will release soon). I wonder, during the interview, what it feels like to have a song like “Someday We’ll Linger in the Sun” written, in a way, to you.
In time, Lea would finish writing the song, which would go on to be the winning submission to the 2016 Tiny Desk Contest. Thanks to that, Lea now tours full-time, traveling as both a musician and a disability rights advocate.
On Thursday, November 14, Lea will perform at Arts West (132 West State Street, Athens) at 7 p.m. The performance is presented OU Performing Arts Series and is free and open to the public.
You can hear more of WOUB’s interview with Lea embedded above, and you can look forward to hearing her live, in-studio performances of “Watch the World Unfold” and “I Wait” later this month from WOUB.