In case you don’t immediately har har at Joanna Newsom’s tour being named the “Strings/Keys Incident,” let me let you in on the joke: It’s a harp/piano pun on the name of the longrunning jam band String Cheese Incident, favorites of crunchy music fans everywhere. While her music can be more playful than outright jokey, humor was the prevailing theme of night four of a seven-night run of solo shows Newsom is playing at Manhattan’s El Museo Del Barrio. With its walls covered with murals of elves and castles painted in 1921, the small theater is an ideal performance place for a magical yarn spinner like Joanna Newsom to perform.
When she stopped early in the show to tune her harp, she solicited questions from the audience. A jumble of voices shouted at once. She cracked a smile. “Come again?” When the questions became clear, she reveled in letting down seemingly 99.9 percent of the audience by telling them she is not a cat person. “Are you surprised?” she asked, a little viciously. Someone asked how much a harp weighed and upon getting an answer from her harp technician on the side of the stage—110 pounds—she declared it weighs one Joanna Newsom. When asked who her dream collaborators are, and if Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes is still among them, she said, “Forever.” And then a voice piped up a few seats to my right, “Hey!” It was Robin Pecknold, answering present on roll call.
The array of other VIPs in attendance gave the show a pleasantly surreal feel. The woman walking up the aisle in the middle of the show? That’s Jill Abramson, former editor of The New York Times. A couple seats to the left? Newsom’s husband Andy Samberg, who took in the show stoically, chatting friendly with his neighbor between songs. How must it feel to sit in that beautiful room and listen to songs most likely written about you? Beats me, Samberg’s poker face was solid all night, and I know because I kept looking.
After the Q&A and tuning were complete, Newsom played another 90 minutes straight. Without further musical embellishment, the focus was on her voice and words. Recorded, some of her lyrics can feel mystical, like she’s lifted lines from Paradise Lost. You may become enchanted, hanging on 10-cent words like “jacquard” and “palanquin,” but listening can feel like perpetually experiencing a complex poem for the first time, enthralling in its landscape if maybe hard to parse in its detail. Live, though, with the pace a little slower, the private garden opened its gates. While not as straight-up goofy as her audience chat, sly moments revealed themselves. When singing “Sawdust and Diamonds,” she repeated the “horse walks into a bar” joke “Why the long face?”. That lyric feels terribly sad in its recorded form, but it transforms here into what it is, nothing more nothing less, an ancient pun with a reliable punchline very much hitting.
Even when she wasn’t outright funny, she was at least punchy. “Easy,” a desperate plea from Have One on Me, felt more like a celebration live. She picked up the song’s pace and without the recorded version’s piano runs it hit a stomping tempo fit for a saloon. In the more shuffling moments, like on “Soft As Chalk” when she overpronounced the word “lawlessness,” she hit a little wobble side-to-side as it to signify that, yep, this song does indeed jam. A 360-degree entertainer, moving between the piano and harp, singing into a little bud mic with gusto, even when she professed serious exhaustion, she took on the feel of a vaudeville star, a ragtime pianist, Nina Simone, Little Richard, a natural member of a lineage of musicians that didn’t need anything other than a keyboard to bring music and all its possibilities to life. It was a classic and intimate form of entertainment. And it felt organic, rich, timeless, able to survive digital creep. It felt like the point of life, someone making something, some people enjoying it, happiness.
