JOANNA NEWSOM
London ICA, 4th November 2004

"Never get so close to a poem that you forget the truth that lacks lyricism"
Joanna Newsom

Sometimes you see an act of music so rich that it shows up the poverty of everything else. Watching Joanna Newsom is like this. You forget that you’re supposed to be the proud owner of a physical body, because when she plays the harp and sings, your mouth hangs open, your tongue starts to moisten your collar, your eyes boggle towards the furthest reaches of their sockets and your heart swells ready to burst like an out-of-date yoghurt. The experience is so beautiful that you forget about needing to be beautiful yourself. Which is just as well, as Miss Newsom is also a singularly delicious spectacle on the outside, so there’s no point even trying.

Tonight at the ICA is the third time I’ve seen her, and while I don’t think anything will ever compare to my first sight of her performing in a tent in a Welsh field, that electric and precious feeling comes back the moment she walks on stage. From the first string she plucks, we are silent and transfixed; reverent at what we are about to behold. I turn to look behind me and see who’s here, but nobody looks back. Nobody can take their eyes off this 22-year-old American woman in a cowgirl dress and cowgirl boots, hugging her harp against herself as if it were her child, her cute button nose scrunched up in concentration.

It’s reassuring to see how many people are at this sold-out show – Damon Albarn included - but it’s also annoying, because Joanna’s one of those secret wonders you want to hug to your chest and say mine all mine, and keep safe from the harmful eyes of others. While her music is starry and uplifting, it’s also weird, and underpinned with a dark lining. Her singing voice can startle with its raw and balking puncture, its blunt, doorstop edges, and on record I didn’t get it. But when it’s right in front of you it’s so pure that it can't fail to charm if you let it. And we are all letting it. We are all getting far too close to the poem.

And poems she does make – her rhyming is as intricate as her rhythms, her words and music feeding into each other with total monogamy. She's said in interviews that her harp playing is influenced by also having studied the West African kora, a similarly stringed instrument, and the very different understanding of rhythm that its practitioners keep. What she does is different, just as the language she tells her fairy tales with is different – words such as ‘taciturn’ ‘poetaster’ and ‘narwhale’ shouldn’t land so smoothly amongst all that crystallised beauty, but they do.

She tells us that her father is here, hurrah, and that she will now play the B-side to her current single ‘Sprout and the Bean’, and suddenly I'm nudged back towards the real world, where people release singles and hope that other people will pay for them. It's the day after Bush’s re-election in her home country, and Ms Newsom says her dad has come far far away from the bad things that have been happening over there, and that this song, ‘What We Have Known’, was written after a conversation with him about some of those bad things. The audience doesn’t know what to make of this, and where we would usually cheer, we wait in awkward wonder – can our naïve princess really write about contemporary politics?

And then she plays it, a beautiful song I’ve heard several times before, and I realise that the refrain of "Ladies breathe, deep / against your whalebones / when your children come back made of stone" was never a reference to the days of the corset, but to the mothers waiting for their soldiers to return from war. It echoes the Vietnam protest song which implored mothers to pack their sons off to fight so they could be the first on the block to have their boy come home in a box, although the humour is different. We cheer and cheer and cheer, now that we understand.

It's the fidelity that gets me. We’ve all got so clever and postmodern of late that I’d started believing that being genuine was just another artifice, that Girls Aloud were of equal validity as anything else. That ‘purity’ was a mythological conservative notion, and polymory perhaps the only honest way for people to behave. And then I see Joanna Newsom, and polyrythmic she may be but she makes manifest the power of one-on-one, whether it’s woman and harp or woman and man; man and man or a surfer and their wave, riding it out together. If you ever get a chance to see her perform I would recommend it with all my faithful heart.

Words: Sophie Heawood
Photo: Amadeep Chana