Joanna Newsom at Neumos in Seattle
First impressions from a performance on this, her debut tour.
Joanna Newsom entered the stage and proceeded to tune a harp for ten minutes while glitchy electronic music played just a little too loud for conversation. She gives a nod to the sound guy, who sets her up on a chair with her harp and a microphone. A little fuss with microphone positioning and the background music drops out.
And she stands up from the harp. The harp is larger than you may expect; it is a little bit smaller than the guts of a baby grand piano stood up on end, large enough that she has to manouver around the back of it, being careful not to upset her microphone.
Around the other side and now standing between the audience and the harp, Joanna Newsom proceeds to start singing without a microphone to an audience stunned into silence. After a few stanzas—this is a hopping number with a good beat—the audience picks up steam, clapping out quarter notes. A smile lights her face, and a couple more minutes later the song is over.
Stationed back at her harp, we hear most of the songs from The Milk-Eyed Mender. These songs are excellent live. Her voice is surprisingly strong, belting out even the highest notes with ease.
At moments, during songs in the first person, she seems to be singing straight to her harp, like talking to a friend, or writing in a diary. This gives the performance a voyeuristic feeling, like we are seeing something we should not. The effect is amplified by her private way of enunciating words, which come out in an accent somewhere between baby talk and Bjork.
The songs all have perfect chord structures, often falling into patterns ending in an extended stay on the IV, letting the songs roll out as long as they need to accommodate her mythological or nautical or train-bound words. The flighty and syncopated action of her fingers over the harp's higher registers hides the simplicity of the underlying chord structures, which is distracting in just the right way to let the words really stand out. Not enough music does that.
The one song that stood out most live is the same one that stands out on the record: Swansea. Go ahead and listen to it. The room shared a collective shiver at the end of the song when she plays the three figures on the harp.
A lot of what she does with the harp sounds like Dave Knudson's guitar work with Minus The Bear. Funny comparison, that.