had some help on Sunday from the most unexpected source: Justin Bieber.
Newsom’s bus broke down on the way from her tour stop in Salt Lake City, and Bieber and his team, who’ll perform at the Pepsi Center tonight, gave them the parts they needed to make her Boulder Theater gig.
“Just keep that in mind when it comes time for the reckoning,” Newsom joked.
This aside — like her lyrical references to the non-magical realms of New York City (“Same Old Man”) and California (“In California”), headset microphone and marriage to Andy Samberg — was jarring in the scheme of Newsom’s music. Besides the hulking harp and piano Newsom switched nimbly between through the evening, her players brought an antique store worth of instruments to carry the of her latest and greatest album, “Divers,” to wondrous light.
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Despite her pixyish voice, Newsom is, of course, 100% of the modern world. But between the first piano plunks and final string flourishes of a song like “Anecdotes,” nothing was certain. The song, like so much of “Divers,” deals in the flow and eddies of time, a theme Newsom teased on Sunday night by swinging its tempos even farther afield than its studio version.
Looking around the theater, the 34-year-old’s rare tour presence seemed to have shaken much of the crowd out of time. A millennial-heavy crowd (for a harp show, remember) packed the house to capacity. Many used the opportunity to interpret the styles of their grandmothers and grandfathers. A young woman sat sipping white wine in a red dress by the bar, two feathers poked primly in her hair. For the men, it was vest night.
It’s hard to say how much of this was due to the (perfectly Boulder) Tulip Fairy & Elf festival that had just swept through the town earlier that day, a happenstance that could border on genius if it was intentionally aligned with the show.
Regardless of garb, Newsom earned an entranced rapport with the crowd. Neither she nor opener Robin Pecknold saw many camera phones — not even as Pecknold relented from his flamenco-tinged solo set for a run through Fleet Foxes’
Granted, it was hard enough to keep the threads of Newsom’s hypnotic reveries straight without trying to line up a selfie. Somewhere between a recital, a peek into an operatic orchestral pit and a rock show — an electric guitar and drum kit lent the set some grit — Newsom’s concerts should come with a lyric sheet and a rose.
Like a picture of a famous old painting, it would have been pointless to try to share the impact of her arrangements or the charge of the room (and its odd bacon smell) with anyone who wasn’t there. For two and a half elusive hours, time spent focusing on anything else felt wrong and wasted. Because, as Newsom herself would attest, . For a Joanna Newsom concert, at least that much is true.
