SUNDAY BITES… WITH A HARP

Don’t feel left in a limbo after my last entry. I shall be back tomorrow schlepping along that promised recipe for the soup you can make with a homemade chicken stock. In the meantime, it’s Sunday. Also, it’s about 12 hours after a concert we attended with Jason last night. A concert that cannot be left unmentioned.

I hope you’re already in the know, and thus seek out everything Joanna Newsom related. However, if reading the name causes no reaction within your skeletal structure whatsoever, boy, do you have some catching up to do.

Joanna Newsom is a fairy, a little forest creature that, if you were to look very close, you’d discover she has pointy ears and tiny, translucent wings under the veil of her wheat-colored hair. She’s a child and a wizard in one body, a witch and a poet, an old soul trapped within a body of this 28-year old girl. She’s The Lady With A Harp.

She played at the Orpheum last night to a room full of the admirers of her talent, with a number of celebrities of various caliber scattered among the audience. I spotted SNL’s Andy Samberg and Maya Rudolph (not together), Busy Philipps of Dawson’s Creek, along with some other familiar faces I was not able attach a name to. Let me tell you what happened, and what you can expect to experience while listening to joanna Newsom’s music. For the sake of this presentation, we’ll pretend you are there right now…

You, the spectator, sit and make yourself comfortable, watch her come on stage and bow gracefully, then introduce all the musicians that will accompany her tonight. She positions herself by her instrument–the harp–takes a breath and begins to sing…

A crystal ball of a voice is uttered into the air, and suddenly an emotion hits you straight in your chest. You loose your breath for a moment, and the wall of your stomach begins to tremble like a membrane. The emotion rolls over upon itself and lifts inside your body upwards, through your throat that instantly shuts down, and into your skull. It keeps growing as it levitates within and looks for an outlet as you can’t contain it any longer. The emotion swells up, crystal clear like water with a touch of salt, and such impregnated glides over your eyeballs only to roll out through your eyes to the outside world. Your stomach still trembles as an autumn leaf on a tree that readies itself for winter. You struggle to take a breath, and the emotion keeps building inside, and travels the same distance up to your brain only to look for a release through your tears again.

The emotion is thy reaction to the beauty of her music.

Let me share with you one of my favorite Newsom’s songs called “Good Intentions Paving Company” (thank you, Youtube). Listening to this, for me, is like going on a field trip around the world. First, I hop on a stunning stallion and ride through medieval forests and meadows with grass waist-high. Then, Falkor, the luck dragon from The Neverending Story, pulls me up on its neck and off we fly into the skies and float above the clouds and play with their mate–wind–like children. Suddenly, we slow down, and as Falkor sets me gently on a bed of wild flowers I’m surrounded by a circle of fantastical characters. We hold hands and swing sideways creating a wave of energy that begins to spin faster and faster, and then takes me up into the air again, and I’m floating like a balloon, free and completely exhausted, but happy… Affinity.

That’s my trip.