The Joanna Newsom show Sunday at the Mercy Lounge was equal parts lovely and wonderful and ridiculous and funny. The lovely and wonderful parts are, of course, the bits where Newsom and her band were involved (we more or less missed the entire opening act since the show was listed as starting at 9 but he was already playing by the time we got there at 8:30). It is a new experience for me, watching a person play a big harp that costs probably half my mortgage. And I sort of lucked out because the show started with me being able to see absolutely nothing and then some vocal audience member pleaded with everyone to sit so everyone else could see. The crowd was in an obliging mood so we sat there in close quarters — it was sold out — with our knees to our chests or crossed and cramped. And we could all see the peculiar business of a peculiar girl playing a peculiar instrument. It was mesmerizing.
And then the ridiculous and funny bits happened, off stage and directly in front of Nick and me. These two dudes who, while the crowd had stood through the first song or so, had smoked a huge spliff, spilled their fucking beers when they made the transition from standing to sitting. And suddenly some prime sitting real estate was covered in PBR, and there was some mad scrambling and a dude offering his jacket for someone to sit on on top of the beer puddle (a very nice gesture, considering the assery involved), and finally one of the stoned dudes having the brilliant but delayed insight to go get towels from the bar to sop up the beer. I snatched up stray beers from the floor that were in danger of being tipped over while these two champs got their shit together.
Several passes with several towels later, the floor was clean enough to be sat on and I finally stopped laughing at the utter idiocy of it all, and could focus on the show again. Until I heard the dull thunk of a can of liquid hitting the motherfucking floor, and realized that the dude in front of me HAD KNOCKED OVER HIS FUCKING BEER AGAIN and it was rushing like a goddamned river at my pantsless ass (I was wearing a skirt). His companion merely looked at him and hissed. “You son of a bitch.” I lost my shit. Silently, I hope. Silly, silly laughter and looks of incredulity exchanged with Nick. At some point I was holding two beers and he was holding one and none of them were ours. We were just trying to prevent these klutzy motherfuckers from soaking our asses in beer. I swear. Who gets THAT stoned and drunk at a harp player’s concert?
The dude whose friend had spilled the beer the second time just got up to stand in the back of the room rather than sit in the beer puddle, which I thought was a good call. His clumsy-ass friend didn’t move a muscle to clean up anything, either time. I couldn’t stop laughing. Fuck, people are dumb.
(Two other observational-y things about the show: Kids these days sure are young. And this particular subset of hipster youths smelled effing great.
But then back to the show. Newsom seems so … normal. And kinda silly and nice. And she’s got a great little touring band traveling with her that added some depth beyond what you might normally expect with a singer-songwriter. There were some fabulous trombone parts and some unconventional percussion happening. She played three songs I was really hoping to hear (“Soft as Chalk,” “Book of Right On” and “Baby Birch”) as well as at least one off of Ys that I hadn’t heard because I don’t have that album. Her one and only encore song was “Baby Birch,” which just tugs and rips at my insides every time I hear it, but if I had been in charge of sound, I would have dialed back the guitar part about a thousand percent. Still, it was just transcendent. I loved actually seeing the harp parts being played. It’s kind of incomprehensible how much is going on in those songs, and still how quiet they can be.
Here’s a bit of awful video. You can’t see anything but the sound quality is surprisingly good.
“Soft as Chalk” by Joanna Newsom from Lindsey Turner on Vimeo.
Update: So the opener was the lead singer of Fleet Foxes? Totally missed that (in part maybe because his name was never written anywhere that I saw pre-show). Now I will never get my hipster card laminated! Anyway, here’s the Nashville Cream review.