NPR's Tiny Desk Concert contest winner is the best thing you'll hear all day
NPR's Tiny Desk Concert contest winner is a classically trained fiddler from Minnesota. And her music is simply stunning.
The winner for NPR's contest, named after its popular music series, is Gaelynn Lea, 32, a classically trained fiddler whose music is "steeped in Celtic tradition and American fiddle tunes," Bob Boilen writes. The musician was born with brittle bone disease, so she plays her fiddle upright instead of the traditional way, under a chin.
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Her winning entry, which beat out 6,100 submissions from all over the country, was a haunting song titled "Someday We'll Linger in the Sun." It's a captivating track about life and love, with lyrics like "Don't tell me we've got time/The subtle thief of life/It slips away when we pay no mind."
Lea has been a professional musician for years, previously forming a group called The Murder of Crows with Alan Sparhawk of Low in 2012 and recording an album titled Imperfecta.
The NPR competition was judged by Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, Holly Laessig and Jess Wolfe of Lucious, Robin Hilton and Boilen.
"I was profoundly moved by Lea's song," Hilton says. "Particularly its serpentine, earworm melody and the tremendous heartache in her poetry."
Now that Lea's won, she'll travel to NPR's Washington, D.C. office and record an official Tiny Desk concert of her own, in addition to touring the U.S. with NPR and Lagunitas.
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Topics Music
Yohana Desta was the senior film reporter for Mashable. She is a Northern Virginia native and an American University grad. She enjoys carefully curating her Instagram account and can often be found reading books, going to concerts, watching movies and learning way too much about pop culture.
