“Time” is the central theme of Joanna Newsom’s latest album, Divers, and it is almost six years to the day since she last serenaded us from this very Sydney Opera House stage.
On that balmy summer evening, Newsom was celebrating her 28th birthday (a cake was brought out mid-show), and, now freshly turned 34, the US indie singer and classical harpist, whose singular soprano is often derisively described as “childlike”, is showing no obvious signs of the passage of time.
It’s a dark and stormy Sydney night but Newsom bounds on to the stage all pure California sunshine, her hair cascading from a high ponytail, sporting the kind of grin you see on gameshow contestants who’ve just won $1m.
“I think this is the third time that I’ve played here,” she says of the habourside concert hall she describes as “one of the greatest music venues in the world”. “It never doesn’t feel magical.”
From the captivating opener Bridges and Balloons (“We sailed away on a winter’s day / With fate as malleable as clay”) to the sprawling 12-minute epic Emily, tonight Newsom never once fails to weave unadulterated magic.
She’s flanked by a talented four-piece band that includes her drummer brother Pete, but all eyes on this electrically charged evening remain on Newsom, who mostly sits at her gilded orchestral harp, her small hands like two flesh-coloured spiders climbing a vertical, glistening web.
Newsom is also a virtuoso on the piano, which she demonstrates on Anecdotes, flitting between grand piano and harp every couple of verses like a musical ambassador for the health risks of sedentary jobs.
For all her whimsy, Newsom is a true perfectionist. During Divers, when her harp lets loose a rogue burst of feedback, for a fraction of a second a look of sheer horror flashes across her face.
Her hardcore fans view her as some sort of perfect, supernatural being. I first saw Newsom perform in 2007, at an art deco theatre in Christchurch, New Zealand, that was so intimate, artist and audience alike used the same bathroom. While waiting in the loo line before the show, a soft American voice behind me expressed her urgency. I was about to stand my ground before realising it was Newsom herself. When I later recounted this story to a friend whose fandom stretches to an intricate Newsom-themed tattoo on his thigh, he was aghast. “I don’t believe you – a goddess like Joanna Newsom doesn’t have bodily functions!”
I’m pretty sure he was only half joking.
Similarly, the film director Paul Thomas Anderson, who cast Newsom as both narrator and actor in his 2014 feature Inherent Vice, once described her as having “one foot in an alternate universe”.
If Newsom’s music sounds unlike anything else it’s because, either through circumstance or choice, she has often been musically cloistered.
Growing up in small-town northern California with parents who denied her both TV and radio, Newsom had limited contact with popular culture, instead immersing herself in both mastering and composing for harp and piano. In the final stages of the five years it took her to write her fourth and latest album, Newsom avoided listening to other music lest it influence hers.
But time has clearly played a role in the evolution of Newsom’s sound, particularly in the octave-vaulting range of her voice. Tonight, a thrilling rendition of Peach, Plum, Pear – a standout track from her 2004 debut The Milk-Eyed Mender – transforms the song from a twee, shrill-voiced ditty into a tempestuous, operatic opus. The applause it elicits nearly lifts the Opera House sails.
Cosmia, with Pete’s subtle drum brush re-creating the sound of “wind on rushes”, and Time, As a Symptom – a song whose “joy of life” refrain builds to a dramatic, almost headbangingly intense finale – are other standouts.
Artwork by Kim Keever, whose photography graces the cover and liner notes of Divers, provides an appropriately fantastical backdrop for the show. A vision of looming glaciers, windswept pine trees and thunderous pink clouds, it’s at once foreboding and enchanting, as though a T-Rex or an elf would be equally at home scampering across it.
Newsom loathes her work being described with gender-specific or “infantilising” words like “elfin” or “fairytales”. But fittingly for this lyrical master, she does actually look as though she just stepped out of a storybook. And as time passes and the world grows more cynical with every year, fantasies like the ones Joanna Newsom weaves are what we cling to.
