Many moons ago, Joanna Newsom flippantly referred to her own voice as “untrainable.” It’s a term that’s doggedly haunted her since - an albatross around her neck to which critics, unable to fully coalesce in their own words her soaring, mutable vocals, constantly refer. It is, she says, “one of my least favourite things I’ve ever said.”
Perhaps a more accurate descriptor for Newsom’s extraordinary voice would have been “unteachable.” In the eleven years since she released her debut album, The Milk-Eyed Mender, countless young musicians have attempted to do what she does - as is the case, of course, whenever a talent emerges marked enough to ripple the zeitgeist. And yet, no voice quite embodies that delicate balance of sweet and sinister, soft and brittle, like Newsom’s does. Tonight, in front of a sea of rapt fans, her vibrato envelops the room; it draws the air from it.
The harp, too, might be a delicate instrument in certain hands, but Newsom plays it with the same ferocity as a rockstar hammering out a raucous guitar riff. Her songs are odysseys - though the new material, from which she largely draws tonight, mostly comprises tracks of a ‘normal’ length, there remains a sense of sprawling, untamed grandeur. She stretches and squashes lyrics and phrases to fit a vocal riff - “Do you love me?” for example, in ‘Sapokanikan’, is sung to the same tune, and takes up the same musical space, as “Where all of the twenty-thousand attending your footfall.”
For all the cerebral mystique of her music (and there is plenty; within minutes of the first new offerings from Divers being revealed, fans had pored over its lyrics, attempting to break apart its intricate obliqueness) Newsom is strikingly unaffected on-stage.
“Every night, there’s a different song that I forget the lyrics of,” she shrugs after a barely-noticeable mid-song memory lapse, “Sorry!” Later, after a particularly long round of applause (the length of clapping, the audience clearly decides early on, should be directly proportional to the length of the song) she shrugs again, unsure quite where to put such fierce adulation.
And she is modest until the end. The setlist, which the band fashion into paper aeroplanes and launch into the audience as they leave, reads “If encored” above the final two songs - as if there was ever any doubt.
