Strings of Life
A fearless innovator takes her songs of experience Down Under
Sydney Opera House,
Australia, 2016
None of pop music’s great artists would – or could – have been designed by a focus group or a think-tank or a team of scientists. Not David Bowie, not Kate Bush, Stevie Wonder, Kanye West or Bjork. All have been deemed too weird, at points; obnoxious, unlistenable or niche. And yet their work has rehewn the very fabric of music and redefined its boundaries (or lack thereof).
Joanna Newsom is certainly part of this gang of pop’s great renegades, and her newest album, Divers, is her deepest, darkest and most difficult offering yet. Difficult because it deals in the kinds of slippery concepts that philosophers have wrestled with for centuries; among them, the pain of deeply loving someone in the knowledge that death is inevitable. How do we live with that? Making art is certainly a good start.
The delight of seeing Joanna Newsom performing live is that as an artist and a person, she won’t fit any design; she’s not “that woman who…” She is complex and unpredictable. Also, kind of a goof.
Tonight, Newsom strides onstage at the Sydney Opera House wearing a huge grin and giant red platform shoes; her hair is in a high ponytail and she has on a microphone headset. She resembles, for a very strange moment, Madonna on her Blonde Ambition tour.
“Hi guys!” she says, beaming. “What have you been up to these past five years?” There is a pause. “You can tell me later.” Two thousand fans giggle a welcome. This evening’s concert is part of the Sydney Festival’s 40th anniversary season, a month-long arts bacchanal of such diverse talents as Kate Tempest, Arthur Russell’s Instrumentals’ crew, superstar South African DJs and the Flaming Lips. This is actually Newsom’s third time playing this storied Australian venue, but, she says, “it never doesn’t feel magical and special.”
The Opera House, of course, is one of the great architectural wonders of the world, an otherworldly engineering marvel overlooking Sydney harbour, which at once resembles birds’ wings, shells and sails in the wind. Get right up close to its white surface and you’ll see it’s made up of over a million tiny ceramic tiles, glittering in the light. If there’s any more appropriate setting for Joanna Newsom’s music, we’d be impressed to know it.
Sitting astride a golden harp, Newsom launches straight into one of her early songs, Bridges and Balloons, almost by way of a warm-up. Over the course of her set, she’ll switch between the harp, a Steinway grand piano and a red Nord keyboard, moving assuredly between each (hence the headset). Newsom’s band tonight comprises her brother Pete on drums, regular collaborator Ryan Francesconi plus two violinists and backing singers. While each musician is a multi-instrumentalist, it’s still a pleasingly minimal set-up, and one which gives space and air to Divers’ densely-written songs.
Anecdotes is the album’s opener, and tonight it feels like the concert’s real beginning. “Sending the first scouts over / Back from the place before the dawn,” sings Newsom, with the confidence and zest of a kid telling you a story from firmly inside her imagination.
On Divers’ title track, Newsom’s hands seem to shimmer across the harp’s strings as its notes unspool before your ears; the sound is beyond delicate, like lace made from dew drops. One can’t quite grasp it any more than one can catch a bubble, and the impossibility of holding it underlines the profound point of Divers – that we cannot keep what is most precious to us. Music – particularly this music – is the only place we can seek refuge from the ravages of time.
Light relief follows in the form of The Waltz of the 101st Lightborne, a careening romp which has Newsom so carried away that she starts singing too early on the last refrain (she laughs). When she plays Have One on Me, from her 2010 album of the same name (her most direct, “pop” work to date), the audience responds with extended applause.
Seating herself at the synthesizer for the mellow, swinging song Goose Eggs, Newsom takes a stretch, smiles broadly and says, “Now we’re cookin’ on gas!” Then, “Petrol!” She is both relaxed and serious about what she’s doing. Further treasures tonight include the single Sapokanikan (a hit, relatively speaking, which ends with the refrain, “Look and despair”), Ys vignette Cosmia, and The Milk Eyed Mender’s Peach, Plum, Pear.
The set’s real breathtaker, though, is its last song Time, As A Symptom. Newsom sits at the piano, and mournfully starts to sing her consideration of life’s great conundrum: “Stand brave, life-liver” she coos, “Bleeding out your days in the river of time.” The notion that lasting love presents a harder problem of attachment than a breakup is not one that is often explored in popular music, and the song picks up force as its singer calls for fortitude – “Joy of life!” – her insistence equal parts hope and desperation. The band kicks in and rumbles to a grooving crescendo, Newsom singing, trance-like: “White star, white ship / Nightjar, transmit / transcend!” The song is Divers’ finale, and there, as tonight, it ends suddenly, on the lone syllable “trans–”. As has been observed of Divers, that “trans” makes a perfect loop with the album’s first song, which begins with the word, “Sending”. Transcending.
A standing ovation follows, and Newsom runs back onstage for an encore, now wearing a wrist-support. That comes as no surprise, given the heavy-lifting she’s been doing, metaphysically and otherwise, all evening.