joanna newsom

I saw Joanna Newsom at the Orange Peel in Asheville. I don't have the energy or ability to describe just how great she was, but I agree with this description by Erik Davis from a few years ago. You can read the rest (of his review of her album Ys) here.

"The performance I saw that night was preternatural: a young artist stretching beyond her art towards something even more essential, simultaneously in command of her craft and caught in the headlights of her own onrushing brilliance. The song cycle she played was to Mender what, I dunno, Astral Weeks is to Blowin’ Your Mind, or what Smile is to The Beach Boys Today! She sang of meteorites and bears and ringing bells, of her and him and you, and she played not for us, it seemed, nor for herself exactly, but for the very presences her music conjured. Her songs were not performed so much as drawn from herself like nets dredged from the sea, heavy with kelp and flotsam and minnows that flashed before darting back into the deep. When she
occasionally stumbled and lost her way, the material itself would pick her up again and carry her forward."