Ian Brennan and Gaelynn Lea Talk the Americans with Disabilities Act, 35 Years Later

Ian Brennan is a GRAMMY-winning producer and the author of nine books; Gaelynn Lea is a violinist, singer-songwriter, disability advocate, and author from Minnesota, whose memoir, It Wasn’t Meant to Be Perfect, will be published in 2026. Gaelynn’s latest record, Music from Macbeth, was just released in the spring, so to celebrate it, she and Ian caught up about its creation, her memoir, Vic Chesnutt, and much more. 
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music

Ian Brennan: Tell us about the new album, Music from Macbeth.

Gaelynn Lea: In 2022, I recorded a score for the play Macbeth on Broadway. The music was sort of the glue between scenes and the cues that came up, to kind of complement the action onstage. So, the music wasn’t ever meant to be performed live. It was more like a soundtrack in the background of the play, and it was really fun — and a humongous project! And so, I knew that if I could, I would want to release it as a soundtrack album later. And luckily, I got permission to do that from the show’s producers.

The album follows along the same structure as the play, and it uses a lot of the same music. How it worked was, when I first got hired to do the project, I read through the script, and marked down all the places I heard music, and then matched it up with the director’s vision. The method I went about with the project was each main character had their own musical theme — especially in the case of Macbeth. They all kind of present differently as they progress throughout the play. Macbeth is maybe the most noticeable, where his theme starts out kind of classical, and then really descends into like grinding dissonance — distorted, horrible sounds by the end — because that’s sort of his trajectory. Then I went out to New York and the reality of live theater kind of interjected itself. And so, a lot of the cues that I really liked got cut or shortened or moved or altered by the sound designer, who I worked with as a team.

Ian: How is the record itself different from the live score?

Gaelynn: I worked so hard with the recording engineer, Jake Larson. He even taught himself Atmos just so there could be a surround sound release for this. He’s the engineer that recorded my first solo album in Duluth. And there’s some other musicians that worked with me — Jeremy Ylvisaker [guitar, bass], Dave Mehling [keys, synth, piano], and Al Church [drums, percussion]. And I mean, it was the biggest project I’ve ever done, and with the album I wanted to at least have some lasting memento, if nothing else. But also, I really think the record is quite cool. Like, it was so fun to think that far outside of folk songwriting.

On the album, there are also two songs included — one at the beginning and one at the end — to kind of set-up the action and conclude it, but the rest of the tracks are just really out-there, instrumental stuff. And for the record itself, I figured it was more musically appealing to have all of those little bits kind of be combined into one long journey per act. This is not the type of music that I would’ve made otherwise, and so it was a really fun way to explore recording.

Ian: That’s awesome. So how did the experience of working on a major Broadway play with stars like Daniel Craig and Academy-award nominated actress, Ruth Negga, inform writing and acting in your own play, Invisible Fences?

Gaelynn: Invisible Fences was the next thing I did after Macbeth. Being part of a play, it’s just so different than being a solo artist, where instead of being alone you’re just one little part of this huge teamwork effort — like a little cog in the wheel, practically. Working on Macbeth just reminded me that theater is a cool medium. I used to do a lot of plays. I grew-up around theater. My parents had a dinner theater for 20 years when I was growing up, and they met doing a musical.

Ian: Is that right?

Gaelynn: Yeah, I did like, 12 plays as a kid. But I hadn’t done any theater since high school. Macbeth was my first foray back into theater since I was 18. So that was pretty cool. It kind of felt full circle.

Ian: Your parents ran a dinner theater in Duluth for 20 years?

Gaelynn: Yeah, when my mom was the age I am now, she decided she wanted to start a dinner theater. She was a choir director at church, and loved performing, and so did my dad. They were both in a lot of plays as I was a little child growing up. But then when I was 10 and my mom was 40, she decided she wanted to start this theater project, and my dad did it with her. My siblings and I grew up going to plays. My parents couldn’t afford babysitters, so we would go to all of the play practices, and they had these little mats that we would sleep on if we got bored or tired. And the theater was in a shopping complex on the third floor, so we would just, like, run around the empty complex. A lot of my childhood was spent in that building. Yeah, so it was fun, and my parents were both so excited about my working on a Broadway play — about my doing Macbeth. Watching the rehearsals for the show Macbeth was really fun for me, because it was sort of reminiscent of growing up, except for it being on a much larger scale. And so, when we did my play, Invisible Fences, I asked my dad to direct it. And that was really great.

Ian: Oh, wow. That’s beautiful. I didn’t know that he directed it. 

Gaelynn: Yes, and I also grew-up doing plays at this thing called Access Theater — which I don’t even know why.

I got so lucky to exist in a town that had this. It was the very early ‘90s and there was this theater troupe in Duluth that was an integrated theater group. So, half the people had disabilities, and half of them didn’t, and they had an ASL interpreter at every single show and often we had deaf actors, too. So, I grew up doing those plays. And my dad directed some, and my parents were in a few with me, and I did some on my own, too. It was just so cool, because that’s not something that exists most places. I also took, adaptive ballet classes as a little girl. They started an accessible and inclusive dance troupe locally for those with disabilities. I was talking to a friend in New York — and my friend was raised in New York City — and she said, “Yeah, there just wasn’t any of that kind of stuff for us in the city.”

Ian: Wow!

Gaelynn: Yet, I had both of these amazing programs. And in Duluth, Minnesota! It really doesn’t make any sense that we had stuff there that wasn’t even apparently easily available in Manhattan. But it was awesome. It was a supportive cultural environment that I was raised in, for sure.

Ian: That is remarkable. So, what was the first song you ever wrote?

Gaelynn: Yeah, the first song I ever wrote was “Grace and a Tender Hand.” It was in 2011. I wrote the song on the way to work. And I remember being like, Oh, weird, I’m writing a song. Because I had never actually done that. And then I showed Alan Sparhawk at our band practice and he said, “That’s good. Let’s do it at tomorrow night’s show.” So, we did it the next day, and it was very scary, because really I only thought of myself as a violinist. I had been playing for 17 years at that point, so I did not expect to ever start writing songs. I liked poetry, I would write poetry sometimes. But the idea of putting it to music was just completely not on my radar. But then when the songwriting started — the lyrics and the melodies would always arrive together. I think about chords much later.

Usually, the songs start with at least a snippet, and then the goal… I’m trying to get better at sitting down and finishing at least a rough draft of the song right when I have the idea of the whole song. I’m trying to get better at building it all in the moment that I have the first inspiration. I’d like to write more often, but it has always felt a little bit mysterious, how a song just pops into my head.

Ian: I recall that Alan played a pivotal role in your musical life.

Gaelynn: Yeah, I had met Alan earlier that year because he saw me jamming at a farmer’s market, and he was like, “Oh, she can improvise,” because I really like improvising. And so he asked if I would do the live show for a Lon Chaney film with him on Halloween. He had this vision of looping my violin in, but I didn’t know what a looping-pedal was or anything, and so he looped those parts in. But just that idea of having the violin be so central to the melody instead of just being an ornamentation, I think it really shifted something in my brain. Because it wasn’t long after that I started writing — like, just a couple weeks later. Something just unlocked, I think, from the looping. I owe Alan a lot, because I don’t think he was planning on that being my foray into songwriting and neither was I. It was pretty weird.

Ian: That’s incredible. So, I know you’ve done a lot of work with your organization RAMPD.org, advocating for stage and venue accessibility. I’m curious with this tour of the UK that you just completed, what was the experience there with accessibility versus in the USA?

Gaelynn: Yeah, this tour was probably my favorite one in the UK so far, because I feel like I’ve had enough practice at accessibility and community building due to all of the work with RAMPD, and my own career. You don’t have to have a million dollars to make something accessible. Since 2018, I’ve been playing only at accessible venues. I wait until I find a place that is accessible before I book a date. But this time, I wanted to also meet more disabled people at my shows, so I had all the openers — nine out of 10 of them were disabled themselves. And so that was really cool, too. And I made sure to have BSL [British Sign Language] interpreters at three of the performances — there was BSL in London and at both shows in Scotland. So this tour felt more aligned with what I want to do anyways. And the difference was evident, since at every show there were disabled people. It was really cool. It was like an “if you build it, they will come,” kind of thing.

In America, we don’t have as good of public transportation for the disabled. In Europe, I can take a train and call two hours ahead, and it’s made accessible — the companies make sure that you’re taken care of by staff. They have that built into their rail systems. And then in terms of accessible bathrooms. They are definitely less places I can get into in Europe, that’s probably true. But the places I can get into are more accessible in a lot of ways than the ones in America. But, I mean, I think there’s work to do in every country for accessibility.

Ian: Yeah, here in Italy, where I live, a lot of businesses get away with having no bathrooms at all — let alone accessible ones — due to their being in historic centers which are exempt due to certain buildings being quite ancient.

Gaelynn: Yes, in the USA we do have the American with Disabilities Act (ADA) nationally, and this July is its 35th anniversary. And in some ways that does really help, because new buildings, even if they’re a tiny coffee shop, are required to be accessible. But that’s not always adhered to. Like, there’s a new business that just opened in my neighborhood and yet it’s not accessible. I don’t know how that happened. It’s not enforced, and it’s not funded, so it’s not that the ADA is worthless — because it’s not — but it needs more support and more teeth.

Ian: Turning to your upcoming book, there’s a lot of talk right now about bibliotherapy. It’s an older concept, but it’s come back in fashion recently — the idea that instead of psychotherapy, recommending people specific books can help them with their emotional life, and even their mental health. These are “Try a dose of Walt Whitman, and call me in the morning,” type of prescriptions. It remains questionable whether books can actually treat serious mental health issues, but it’s been demonstrated clearly that reading literature does help most readers increase empathy and kindness, and also reduce prejudice and aggression. I’m wondering, with your memoir, It Wasn’t Meant to Be Perfect, being published in the spring of 2026, what do you hope to achieve with the book?

Gaelynn: Well, it’s sort of a two-thread memoir. The first thread is about disability — growing-up disabled and dealing with accessibility, and hopefully to just give people who haven’t experienced it, or haven’t experienced this type of disability, a window into this concept: debunking the idea that your life in general is somehow less enjoyable, or less valuable and rich, if you’re disabled. Because I think, unfortunately, when you talk to people about disability the things that come to mind for them are primarily negative. There’s also a call to other people without disabilities to be thinking about access. But I don’t want it to be preachy. So it really is following my life. And there’s stuff about sexuality and medical trauma, and the different lessons I’ve learned from disabilities. COVID’s in there. I debated whether to include COVID, but I decided historically, it’s really important to hear the disability perspective of COVID, because that’s been really neglected.

So, yeah, disability is one thread in the book. And then the other thread — which I really like how they ended up balancing each other out — is really just about music. About what it feels like to make music and write music, and why music is important. And also about being a musician behind the scenes. Because I love that stuff, personally. I love hearing people’s touring stories. Also just exploring the broader sense of, what is the point of music? I taught fiddle for three years, and I think getting to work with my students reminded me that music is definitely bigger than the professional pursuit of music. It’s kind of like what you’re doing with the field recordings you do around the world — you often like to work with people that don’t think of themselves as musicians. I think music is so much bigger than we give it credit for, or than we think about.

The end of the book kind of culminates in the Macbeth project, actually. That’s sort of where the book resolves. But it still ties-in with disability — the fact of, a generation ago, I probably wouldn’t have been able to do the MacBeth project, how much has changed, and how much we owe the generation above us who did all of the activist work so that a person with a disability now can actually pursue music and have that be their career. I met Judy Heumann — she’s the activist that was in the Academy-award nominated documentary, Crip Camp, and we got to know each other. She certainly was a mentor, and I really liked her. I wish I had gotten to know her even better. I only got to spend time with her the last few years of her life. But she called me as I was on the way home to Minnesota after doing Macbeth, and she had just seen the play. That’s sort of where the book ends, since Judy was just, over the moon about the production, because theater had been what she’d wanted to do. She’d wanted to be an actress. But it obviously wasn’t going to happen for her in that era. So she got into activism instead. So I think her recognizing that moment, it all kind of ties together what she and her peers did for our generation, and what we can hopefully do for the next generation. 

And the book is funny. I mean, I hope it’s funny. [Laughs.] I tried to weave in humor whenever possible, because it’s heavy at times, too. It’s strange, because writing the book was such a long project. I think I started really in earnest working on it in 2021. And I still have a couple more small rounds of edits to do. It’s just such a big, big project. But I think it says what I want it to say now, so that feels really good. When you start out writing, you’re like, Well, what am I doing? Like, who cares? And also, What is the theme of this? And it kind of became evident that the theme was both disability and the arts. Because I do think disabled people who are artists do want to be seen as artists, too, not just as activists and stuff. So I tried to keep those themes both running through the whole book. And I think I did.

Ian: Judy was so great. She was supposed to write the introduction for my last book, but unfortunately wasn’t able to do so before she passed. But one thing that struck me about her — more than anybody I’ve ever known — was how she always would ask about me, about how I was doing. But she did so with such a penetrating and sincere depth of interest. Not just like, giving lip service.

Gaelynn: Yep.

Ian: She was always truly asking that question. And she was always wanting and willing to help. My sister, Jane — who sadly passed away earlier this year — was disabled and had Down syndrome, and Jane went through some really horrible mistreatment during COVID. And Judy immediately said, “No, this is unacceptable… We’ve got to do something! Call this person, call that person. What happened isn’t OK.”

Gaelynn: Wow, that’s so cool! I didn’t realize you knew her personally. She was amazing.

Ian: Yeah, she was. A true American hero — right up there with Cesar Chavez and Rosa Parks. Anyone who had the pleasure to meet her I’m almost certain had their life enriched significantly by the experience.

Gaelynn: I had a friend whose daughter was disabled and she also passed away, unfortunately. And the friend told me how Judy — even if he didn’t know her extremely well — how she checked-in on him and his daughter more than most of his family members did. Just to make sure that he and his daughter had everything. Like, “Is there anything I can do to help support you?” She was awesome.

You knew Vic Chesnutt, right? I recently went down a rabbit hole with his music. 

Ian: Yeah, that’s easy to do. He was brilliant. And so prolific — 18 records in just 19 years.

Gaelynn: Do you know to what degree he struggled with accessibility? Did that bug him? Like, he performed in a very different era in a lot of ways.

Ian: Yeah, I mean, I’m sure it did bug him. But I’m not sure that he would easily admit that part of it. He was very self-reliant, and was an extremely tough, sometimes wild, Southern dude. I got him a show in Fresno opening for my band on Vic’s first tour. And he drove himself up there the four hours from LA all by himself in a van equipped with accessible hand controls. He even wrote a stellar song “Big Huge Valley” about the trip that’s on his second album. He came all the way to town with no place to stay when he got there, you know? He ended-up just crashing at some college kid’s apartment that he’d just met the night of the show. And it was like a six-foot high stage, and I had to hoist him in his wheelchair up onto the stage, from the front-of-house. It was a ridiculously unwelcoming place. 

Vic was really sweet, but also a badass when he had to be. There were some buffed, frat boy hecklers that night standing in the back and Vic just stared them down hard until they grew so uncomfortable that they skedaddled out of there as if a gun had been drawn.

Gaelynn: Yeah, that’s kind of the vibe I’ve gotten from watching videos of him and stuff, but I didn’t know for sure.

Ian: Vic did the free show for Food Not Bombs’ 20th anniversary in San Francisco in 2000 that I organized the music for, and the staging and PA. It featured Fugazi and Sleater-Kinney, for free. We didn’t know if anybody at all would even show up. But over 15,000 people ended-up coming. And Vic played that show. Vic became good friends with Guy from Fugazi. Guy is a really special person and artist, and Guy became very involved with the latter part of Vic’s career — producing records, accompanying him, and taking him out on tour. My band also played at Vic’s first show ever in the Bay Area. It was in 1990 at UC Berkeley and there was hardly a soul there. But it was one of those monumental instances where within 30 seconds, I knew, “Oh, man. No matter what I do or how hard I try, I’m never going to be as gifted as this guy.” And in many ways, it was an epiphany. In that moment, I largely surrendered the dream of being an artist and instead slowly began embarking on a path as a producer— investing my energies towards helping others raise their voices, ones that are far worthier than my own.