Chris Duffey A prodigy with pluck: Joanna Newsom    Joanna Newsom plays shows throughout the Bay Area. For more information, go to www.walnutwhales.com From the Week of Wednesday, March 12, 2003   Music Heartaches by the Number Bringing on the heartaches: David Cantwell has country's number. Planet Clair Twistin' in His Grave Annie's Big Daddy, Hank Ballard, kicked the bucket. Critic's Choice Critic's Choice for the week of March 12-18, 2003 Driving Jews, a band of bones, a bad-ass bluesman, a Finnish soprano, Latin horns, bongos on the beach, and a pack of well-read musicians. Crate-Digger New and Reissued Vinyl Electronic, rare groove, and beyond Hearsay Sister Rosetta Tharpe Spirituals in Rhythm The Aislers Set How I Learned to Write Backwards Blak Stallion; Mista Who? The Hoe Tales; Something Like a Pimp Otto Von Schirach Chopped Zombie Fungus

Inside, it's thick and hot. Sweater weather plus one hundred people equals sauna. But everyone is palpably excited, and with good cause. Devendra Banhart is headlining, and the gypsy folk minstrel is currently basking -- or wallowing -- in next-big-thing hype. The place is packed and it's especially uncomfortable up near the stage, where the devoted have managed to wrangle seats on the floor, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip.

To make matters worse, it seems that three bands are opening for Banhart, instead of the one that was scheduled. Three. No doubt rough-around-the-edges bands whose earnest sets may come off as endearing will nonetheless put butts to sleep and challenge the crowd's collective attention span. As the house music dims and people chatter and sip their first or second beer of the evening, the opening act takes the stage.

And it looks like -- oh, God -- she's going to play the harp.

But before this girl who no one knows sits down next to her harp, she stands at the foot of the stage. Dressed in a white blouse, tight-fitting jeans, and a pair of cowboy boots, she closes her eyes, claps a sturdy rhythm, and begins to sing a cappella.

"Do you know what this is?/This is the panopticon," she projects in an amplified whisper.

The crowd is still murmuring rudely as she gets into it. A group of goth-hippie types in the front are sprawled out and giving each other massages; others in the back clink glasses and tell nervous jokes. But in exactly two minutes they will all be dead silent, transfixed. And they will stay that way for the rest of the set.

"Who are you?" asks a rapt audience member as the girl sits down behind her harp upon finishing her opener.

"I'm Joanna," says she with the vim of a pixie. Then she sits down and plucks the first few notes of a song. Suddenly the venue's conditions -- jungle heat, pretzel legs, etc. -- take on a sort of lotus-position quality. The crowd jockeys for a view as if it was watching a fight, only all are silent, and the energy of a hundred sweaty bodies is directed toward this one girl, Joanna Newsom, who is melting us all like candles.

They say that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. If you were dancing about this music, it'd be one of those ballet/gymnastic ribbon-on-the-end-of-a-stick-type dances they do in the Olympics. You know when you're a little kid and your parents take you to the beach and at some point you're just like "Fuck it" and you take off all your clothes and just run around naked at the crowded beach? That's Joanna Newsom; that's the kind of music she plays, with her fingers plucking out melodies and counter-melodies and her vocal cords nimbly tweeting out words like "Cassiopeia" and "Clam crab cockle cowry." Combining playful albeit heart-wrenchingly poetic lyrics with jarringly original compositions (prog-folk?), Newsom is sharing a worldview that feels both totally absent and desperately necessary. It has something to do with whimsy and hope, and the way we cope with the imposing demands of our lives. And it has something to do with innocence, with feeling unhinged and free again, like children spinning naked on a beach.

So who is Joanna Newsom? She is a spry, charming girl in her early twenties. Her light auburn hair frames a dainty face, a pair of deep blue eyes, and a delightful amount of residual baby fat. If you happened to pick up the September 2002 issue of The Face, which featured a bands-to-watch-type story on her other band, SF retro-rockers the Pleased, in which she plays keyboards, then you might have caught a picture of her. In that shot, bathed in pink light and styled to look like Madonna circa "Cherish," the harpist looks more like a harpy. But The Face got it wrong. When she arrives for an interview at Children's Fairyland in Oakland, she's carrying a box of cupcakes and smiling like a Care Bear.

Newsom chose this location because her bus drives past it every day on its way to her college, which she inexplicably prefers not to disclose. Not surprisingly, she's been forever curious about the place. Children's Fairyland sits right in the middle of Lake Merritt park. Hidden behind tall trees, it's home to Willy the Whale, Fred the Frog, and dozens of things designed for kids -- puppet shows and slides and donkeys and pirate ships. According to C.J. Hirschfield, executive director of the park, Walt Disney used to kick it here, and it was here that he got the idea for his utopia. "Disneyland is just Fairyland on steroids," she proudly says.

On the surface, Fairyland is a weatherworn sculpture garden for juveniles, but Newsom doesn't see that. She adores the little yawning bunny rabbits and the tall, rusting, multicolored metal sculpture (of flowers?) that looks like something out of a Lewis Carroll opium binge. Her favorite piece is the little bench fashioned out of a choo-choo train that sits neglected off in a corner, like the Velveteen Rabbit itself.

"I think every song I write is just attempting to bring back this moment that I had when I was probably a year old," the singer relates in her delicate, soft-spoken voice. "I had a dream about a huge cat and a huge dog wearing party hats, holding a big glass bowl of jelly beans and looking at each other in the eyes and being really silent. And they were standing at the top of these stairs and I swear that the stairs -- and I know this sounds ridiculous -- but in my dream, I woke up and I thought that I had seen eternity. I thought that I had actually visually seen what it looked like for something to not to end, you know?"

She says these things with a certain amount of apprehension, and rightfully so. Most adults simply don't understand ideas such as this anymore. Even Newsom herself struggles with staying in touch with that sensibility.

"As I get older and I think about [the dream], I feel like I'm more and more remotely distanced from what it meant," she says. "I think if I got sad about that, then that's the adult reaction. But if I feel kind of crafty, like, 'Okay, what am I gonna do to get this back, to get at it, poke at it, just sort of see it again?' I think that that's how I prefer to approach it because that's not the adult thing to do."

Most of what Newsom does is not the adult thing to do. Take her music and stage presence, for example. At a recent gig opening for Cat Power in San Francisco -- by the way, Newsom has only been playing solo shows for three months -- the singer and harpist wore a frilly blue dress, the kind a kid would see in a thrift store and insist on wearing to a birthday party. Understandably nervous, she twinkled through her challenging songs and even screwed up a few times (you try playing two contrapuntal melody lines with each hand while nimbly singing at the same time). When this happened, she'd blow her bangs up or wiggle her nose a bit and recover the song. It was like watching a junior high recital, only this wasn't a twelve-year-old stumbling through "Für Elise." One audience member commented after the set that it was like experiencing the unmitigated genius of a prodigy.

The reason that writing about music is like dancing about architecture is that you simply cannot catch the fairy of affecting music in the net of words. The way Newsom's consonants clang off one another like marbles, the way her voice dances majestically with her harp, as if the two sounds were joined in a waltz under the largest chandelier in the largest ballroom you've ever seen, the way she plays all this beauty down with her simple, unassuming delivery -- you really can't relate that magic with words. It is, as Van Morrison so simply referred to it, the language of the heart. Newsom speaks this language, has her own little accent too, a kind of Venus twang. If you listen carefully, you can hear the sounds of honesty and innocence and perhaps even remember what it was like when you heard them all the time, whether in a story that was read to you or a song you may have heard on the radio as you were driven to daycare.

Sitting on a bench in Children's Fairyland, as a flock of geese fly by overhead -- a flock of geese that Newsome pauses to wave at, say hello to, then say goodbye to -- the tiny girl inside the grownup's body is trying to get at something so simple yet so difficult to communicate.

"When I was a little kid," she says, "we used to drive back and forth to [Nevada City] and I used to look at the houses that we passed and I never fell asleep on the drive home, although the kids in the car all fell asleep. I just sort of watched the houses as we'd drive by and watch the windows. Sometimes you'd see people moving behind them, and sometimes they'd just be sitting across from one another at the table.

"I was really little then and I think that little kids know something," she continues. "I think they're a lot braver than we give them credit for, because they're willing to look straight at a thing that's big and sad and beautiful, that is too much for us to look at when we're a little older. And I guess when I write songs, I'm trying to write them from the place in myself that's childlike. But not childlike simplistic, childlike in the opposite way, that kind of bigness of awareness that kids have. Like, the part of them where they're watching the window and they're not gonna tell their mom and dad and they're not gonna tell the other kids, but like, they just saw a moment between two people sitting at a table and they know something about that moment and they're going to remember it until the day that they die."

When she finishes talking, the words evaporate like a marriage proposal written across a blue sky. Moments of silence go by, interrupted by the sounds of kids playing in the background. Newsom has a confused, earnest look on her face. She really wants people to comprehend what she's talking about, and ultimately it's clear to her that words are not going to do the trick. But luckily there's the music and the cracking, almost desperate sound of her voice when she sings lyrics such as, "There are some mornings when the sky looks like a road/There are some dragons who were built to have and hold/And some machines are dropped from great heights lovingly/And some great bellies ache with many bumblebees."

Yeah, somewhere in there is a very special point. For those of us who've forgotten how to understand it, Joanna Newsom is helping us to remember.

eastbayexpress.com | originally published: March 12, 2003

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Printer friendly version of this story Email Garrett Kamps More stories by Garrett Kamps Send a letter to the editor