Joanna Newsom with Neal Morgan
Saturday November 20 at The National
The environment inside the National during the Joanna Newsom show was a lot different than it normally is; chairs were set up covering the normally empty general admission floor, and people got assigned seats as they walked into the building. Some congregated in chattering groups near the bar while waiting for the show to start, but most assumed their seats and settled in like an audience at an orchestral concert hall. I saw people dressed up in nice clothes, middle aged families with kids in tow, and even the casual indie kids recognized that the air was different than the shows they usually attended. Maybe it was Ms. Newsom's use of a harp as her main instrument that made the distinction between this crowd and the indie-rock crowd that I'm used to, but I confess that it had never occurred to me in advance that anything about this show would be different from a normal show. And at any rate, my experience wasn't really all that different; with our press passes we were unable to attain seats, and instead stood in one of the separate areas behind the soundboard where there were no seats. I was totally happy with that spot, even though I wasn't as close to the stage as I'd have liked--being behind the soundboard put us in an ideal position where sonics were concerned, and the floor where we were was raised to about the level of the stage, so we had a perfect view.
After a short opening set by Neal Morgan, who turned out to be the drummer in Joanna Newsom's band, Ms. Newsom took the stage along with her six-piece band. She began the set playing her harp by herself, performing "Bridges And Balloons," which opens her first album, 2004's The Milk-Eyed Mender. In arrangement, this version was almost identical to the album version, but as she played it, it became clear to all watching that something special, perhaps indefinable, was added to the performance just by virtue of it being live. I spent the first couple of days after seeing this show explaining to friends of mine not in attendance that it was not something one could put into words, that there was some special quality about the performance that I couldn't qualify. There is at least one quality I still can't verbally capture, and that is the way Newsom's music gets under your skin and makes you feel perhaps like you are being transported to some other plane of existence. It clearly affected everyone in the place, too; during the performances of her rather quiet songs, you couldn't hear a single whispered conversation or fidgety rustle. Everyone in the place was transfixed. By contrast, when she finished that first song, as well as all that came subsequently, the crowd erupted in roaring applause that was far too vehement to be inspired by mere politeness.
Before beginning her second song, Joanna engaged in a bit of banter with the crowd, exposing a perhaps-surprising fact: that when she is not singing, she has a perfectly normal voice. Even people who aren't fans, who are only dimly aware of Joanna Newsom's existence as a musician, generally know two things about her: she plays a harp, and she sings like some bizarre combination of Bjork and Lisa Simpson. Her voice polarizes people--they love it, or they hate it. You'd think that anyone with such a distinctive and unorthodox singing voice would speak in a version of that same voice, wouldn't you? That's what I expected. And yet, as she went around introducing the members of her band (Neal Morgan on drums, Mirabai Peart and Veronique Serret on violins, Andrew Strain on trombone, and her arranger, Ryan Francesconi, on guitar, banjo, recorder, and a variety of other stringed instruments), she sounded just like any other random twentysomething American woman you could meet. And the crowd loved her. Taking advantage of the opportunity afforded by the long pauses between music, the relatively quiet hall, and Ms. Newsom's inviting friendliness, multiple young men in the hall began calling out comments to her. One said he'd driven all the way from Pittsburgh, and when she seemed impressed, another tried to impress her with the fact that he was from a mile away. She kept trying to start another song, but was unsuccessful on her first few attempts because the guys yelling from the crowd kept cracking her up. Eventually, though, she was able to begin the second song of the night, the 11-minute title track to her latest album, Have One On Me.
I mentioned already the high-art trappings of this show at the National, the things that made it seem more like a classical or operatic performance than that of an indie musician. Joanna Newsom's music has always had a bit of that air around it, by virtue of the fact that she plays a harp. On her first two albums, the presentation of her music bore out this impression; on the first record, she mostly performed alone, while on the second record she was backed by an orchestra, with arrangements by baroque pop-classicist Van Dyke Parks. It's only on her most recent album where a far more populist aspect of her music comes to the fore, and it's songs like "Have One On Me" that make it clearest. Most of the time, the players backing her up contribute accents to her music rather than playing along with the songs as a backing band. On "Have One On Me," a lot of the backing accents were provided by the two violinists, but rather than bringing the classical, orchestral touches that the violins added to her music on her second album, Ys, the violins on this song sounded basically like fiddles straight from the heart of Appalachia. That old-time mountain music that became the roots of country and western nearly a century ago traces its lineage directly back to the British Isles, from which the working classes brought their folk songs and instrumentation when they were shipped to America as indentured servants in the 17th and 18th century. When Joanna Newsom has violin players play parts that sound like hillbilly fiddles, she's harking back to that same British Isles folk music tradition from centuries past. Rather than seeing this tradition as something separated from the Renaissance musical styles that she inevitably calls up by performing her songs on a harp, and continuing with the strict class divisions that have kept these sounds and traditions separate for hundreds of years, Joanna reaches back to a time several centuries in the past when these styles hadn't yet been pulled apart and uses her music to join them together again. The violin and banjo accents on songs like "Have One On Me" make this clear, but the song that made it most apparent during her performance last Saturday night was "Colleen," a tune driven just as much by Francesconi's banjo and Morgan's drumming as it was by Newsom's harp. Lyrically, the song tells what sounds like an ancient folktale, beginning with the lines "I'll tell it as I best know how, and that's the way it was told to me." In combining these ancient and often opposed strains of musical history into an integrated and singular style, Newsom creates sound without an associated era, which is, in that sense, quite modern.
In fact, her sound is modern enough that, while I can imagine Joanna Newsom playing similar music 20 or 40 years ago, I can't imagine her finding a similarly accepting and interested audience as she's been able to capture in our modern era. I have been known to rant and rave, at times, about how disappointing it is that the indie rock sound that existed and thrived 15 to 20 years ago is no longer in favor, and that even in years when bands like Superchunk and Dinosaur Jr release new albums, it seems as if their sound is vastly outnumbered by the soft-rock descendants of the indie sound, like The Shins or The Decemberists. In all honesty, though, I recognize that I shouldn't complain, because the expansion of the indie scene to a general aesthetic from a specific sound is a positive development. When barriers to experimentation and different musical styles are removed, it can sometimes lead to a soft-rock renaissance, which may leave me frustrated at the sound of The Suburbs or the eighth Death Cab For Cutie album or whatever. On the other hand, it also allows room for someone like Joanna Newsom to go on tour with a harp and a backing band in which most of the musicians play instruments not seen as part of the "rock" canon at all. Considering the high quality of the music she produces, both live and in the studio, this is a good thing, no matter how much further it causes the boundaries of the traditional indie sound to be phased out.
Interestingly enough, when Ms. Newsom plays piano rather than harp, as she did on about half of the songs in last Saturday's set, it seems as though she comes much closer to a role laid out previously in the history of rock music. It's not an indie role, though--instead, she resembles the piano-playing singer/songwriters of the pre-punk 70s. In fact, with her strange voice, her narrative lyrical style, and the predilection she has shown on her piano-based songs toward rollicking barrelhouse playing, she comes closest to the early work of Tom Waits. Songs like "Soft As Chalk" or "Good Intentions Paving Company" bear a striking resemblance, at times, to tunes from Waits albums Blue Valentine or Heart Of A Saturday Night. On these same tunes, Newsom veers from her traditionally fantasy-based lyrics to the confessional songwriting favored by modern indie troubadours. Indeed, she shows quite the confessional streak herself on "Easy" or the aforementioned "Soft As Chalk." By playing Milk-Eyed Mender's "Inflammatory Writ" within a portion of the set that mostly consisted of more recent, more straightforward tunes, she allowed for a new way of hearing that song, presenting one of that album's only non-harp compositions in a completely different context than it originally appeared. Suddenly, elements of the song's construction that I'd never noticed before--it's in waltz time!--jumped right out at me, and made clear that she's always had the potential within her sound for the songs that sounded so new and different upon initial listens to Have One On Me.
Back when Joanna Newsom first came into the public eye, her publicity images featured her standing in snow-covered fields, or wearing hats apparently fashioned from the heads of animals. Mixed with her unusual voice and choice of instrumentation, these depictions were enough to create the image in many people's minds of a woman who came from a cultural background far from typical, who had no place in modern society and did not share enough of a mutual worldview with any of her listeners to be able to write songs that we could relate to. Instead, her music was presented as a dispatch from some alien cultural background that none of us were aware of. At least at first; I think the point soon came where Newsom realized that this was not how she wanted to be seen, and as early as the publicity interviews for Milk-Eyed Mender, she was telling stories about the death of her dog and how that inspired her song "Sadie," as if trying very hard to make clear that, contrary to popular belief, she was just like the rest of us. And yet, the image stuck, and she was characterized constantly in internet discussions as an elf, a gelfling, a wood nymph--never a real person, who played real music. And meanwhile, as everyone is stereotyping her as an otherworldly creature who plays completely alien music, she's made a habit of subtly playing against type and writing emotionally open songs with direct personal relevance, in styles recognizably drawn from rock music's standard canon.
"Good Intentions Paving Company," which is the big single off Have One On Me if anything is, is the clearest example of a case where Ms. Newsom does all of these things, putting together a single song that goes against every stereotype that's built up around her. Whatever they say she is, that's what "Good Intentions Paving Company" proves she is not. She and her band played it third-to-last in their main set on Saturday night, with Joanna making a joke out of a standard rock-show cliche before launching into it: "If anyone brought a trombone with them," she said, "feel free to play along with this next one." The crowd laughed, then recognized the opening notes and cheered loudly. Regardless of how unlike her earlier work this song may be, it's clearly a favorite amongst her fans. The entire band seemed to have a blast playing it, too. The song's lyrics are about a relationship that is complicated and running into trouble, but the narrator clearly still has strong feelings and wants to try and make it work out even if the circumstances aren't ideal. Toward the middle, the song goes into an extended bridge in which Joanna plays the same part over and over, and even though the backing instruments are mostly quiet during this section, the conjunction of the repeated piano figures and the steadily intensifying lyrics and vocals build up quite a bit of tension, until a longing, emotional climax is released, and suddenly the entire song turns to a jazzy, upbeat trombone solo. This final section went on for several minutes live, with Joanna clearly enjoying the hell out of herself as she for once got a chance to move out of the spotlight and just play her part as Andy Strain's excellent soloing captivated the crowd. The lyrics to "Good Intentions Paving Company" may not be the most upbeat, but this final instrumental section was the feel-good moment of the night, and even in the back of the room we could all tell that Joanna was grinning from ear to ear.
Throughout the evening, the construction of the set inspired recontextualization of Ms. Newsom's musical output. Hearing a song from her first LP right before or right after a much newer song sometimes shed new light on both compositions. By following "Good Intentions Paving Company" with a performance of "Monkey And Bear," from Ys, Joanna and her band created yet another of these moments. The long, epic structure of "Monkey And Bear," plus its original orchestral background and its lyrical tale of anthropomorphized animals in a Renaissance fantasy setting, makes it a classic example of the way Joanna Newsom's music fit in with the reductive analysis that built up around her in the first few years of her career. However, hearing it right after hearing "Good Intentions Paving Company" led me to notice quite a few similarities between the two very different songs that I'd never caught before, and to think that maybe there never was much substance to the stereotypes that surrounded discussion of her work. Towards the end of "Monkey And Bear," there's a bridge that repeats over and over, with Joanna starting on a high note and slowly walking down through the scale to end up on the same note with which she began, but an octave lower. As she and her band repeated this section, moving the song's narrative quickly along, they played louder and louder, building the intensity of the piece until eventually they were playing quite loudly. For a show that had been quiet enough, through most of its duration, for whispers and rustles to be clearly audible, it was unusual to have the volume rise to this extent. It just made the moment more effective, though.
The main set of the evening ended with "Peach Plum Pear," another tune from Milk-Eyed Mender. The album version was played on a harpsichord, but the new full-band arrangement had her playing it on harp. More importantly, a great deal of the song's melody was played by Francesconi on what I believe to have been a tambura, with Peart and Seeret playing pizzicato on their violins and Strain adding trombone accents throughout. This version was very different from the original, but if anything, it felt more affecting, with the layers of melody established by several different stringed instruments providing a fuller bed of sound for Newsom's plaintive vocals to be buoyed upon. The ending of the song stretched out for several minutes, but never felt self-indulgent at all. If anything, we all wanted it to go on longer, as was proven by the loud, extensive standing ovation the band received as the song ended. They left the stage as if the show was over, but no one in the crowd was willing to accept that. Oftentimes, I feel like crowd demands for encores have become standardized, with musicians writing the expected encore performance into their set lists and every single crowd expecting that performance as their due, rather than saving it for occasions when a performance has really merited such an outcry. This was one night, though, when it seemed only right and proper for the crowd to demand more songs. After the kind of playing we'd just seen, it would have seemed more like an insult to the artist not to demand an encore. Fortunately, Joanna Newsom seemed just as excited to keep playing as we were to have her do so, and she came dashing back onto the stage by herself after a moment or two to regale us with a solo performance of "'81," from Have One On Me. It's not my favorite of her new songs, by any means, but she did a good version of it, and thankfully, it was really just a prelude to the true high point of the entire performance.
After "'81" was finished, the rest of the band rejoined Joanna onstage for what would be their final song. Ms. Newsom moved to piano and they launched into "Does Not Suffice," which also ends Have One On Me. That album, being three entire CDs and about two and a half hours in length, has been hard for me to completely absorb, and "Does Not Suffice" is one of several songs on it that, at the time of the show, I still hadn't really gotten to know. It's a slow, sad ballad, most of which is played only by Joanna, with her singing melancholy lyrics about the dissolution of a relationship. It narrates the process of breaking up with someone and moving out of their house, and all of the emotions that go along with that process. The combination of the downbeat music and depressing lyrics made it an incredibly bleak listening experience, especially considering how much sheer talent she put into the performance of it. The part of it that was most crushing--and most beautiful--was the way the song ended. After Joanna sang the song's last line, "Everywhere I tried to love you is yours again, and only yours," the rest of the band finally joined with Ms. Newsom, at first carrying the song's melody with her. But soon the violins replaced the initial melody with high, keening notes, and then Joanna followed them, banging on the highest notes of the piano with both hands as Neal Morgan played thunderous rolls on his tom-toms and the entire song dissolved into an atonal wave of noise, which built, crested, and broke across the entire room before slowly spiraling down until Newsom was just playing an occasional high note on piano and Morgan was pounding his toms intermittently. Finally the song trickled out completely, all pretense of melody gone, the song having dissolved into a fractured, broken emotional state just as the relationship chronicled in its lyrics had. Stunned, the audience took a few seconds after all sound from the stage had stopped before we realized that the song was over. As the houselights came up, we turned and shuffled out of the room, most of us remaining quiet as we did so. We had just seen something that could scarcely be summed up in words. What was there to say?