Sunday, December 13

Dan Smalls presents Joanna Newsom live in Asbury Hall with special guests Alela Diane & Ryan Francesconi

Tickets: $30 advance, $35 day of show at go on sale Friday, October 9 at 10am at Ticketweb.com Babeville Box Office (M-F 11a-5p), or charge by phone 866-777-8932
General Admission seated

7pm Doors 8pm Show

…further along and down the road apiece from where she took her leave of us, Joanna Newsom plays on. Breathe deep and equalize your today-ears to the new world of Divers…

Good heavens — five years go by — what can one do? Dive, listener, knowing that your next hour will be filled with diversions aplenty: a wheeling circuit of sci-fi sea-shanties and cavalier ballads, narrated from parts unknown; a family of polysemic song-sets; a paranomasaic Liederkreis of harmonic sympathies and knotted  hierarchies; a fanfare of brazen puns and martial lullabies, blazing in sorrow and horseplay and love, in turns symphonic and spare, joined by Mellotrons and Marxophones and Moogs, clavichords and celestas—and of course the harp, thrumming its threnodies of circadian invasions and avian irruptions and strange loops of Shepard-toned resonant-frequencies and something called goddamned Simulacreage…
The music of Divers is a wonder of considered arrangements — a taut line, threaded with the pearls of passed and passing times…a round, a chant, an incantation…a ray of light diverted eleven ways, into eleven songs that striate, in chromatic collusion,  their simultaneous arc…a span that takes in lifetimes, but is immaculately sequenced for telescoped brevity. The music speeds with dissociative dread over  montaged cityscapes; it hoofs with delight among the collaged quotations and  sepia-toned codices of Popular Song; it ambles its carefree citational course through the public domain and down into the dustier corners of municipal parks, to lionize  infamous airmen and anonymous Dutch Masters, to mourn pearl divers and Poorwills,
and to elegize the ineluctable tragedy of relativity — a tragedy of parochial time, anecdotal time, dubious time…

At the center of the mythos and the maelstrom is the woman. Divers reminds us that Newsom is a melodist, above all — an acolyte of melody and beauty in form, a  crackerjack of emotional truth conveyed with undiluted immediacy. “The Things I Say” seems a naked admission, after the epic swales of war and peace that precede it, and yet this sudden moment of piano and voice falls seamlessly into the flow,  buffeted by the haunting winds of a musical saw and time-slipping reversal at the finish.

…so that, at the aortic confluence of such a complexity of strings and wires, winking beneath the lacquered layers of instrumental nacre, biding quietly between the ranges of rhapsodic  arrangement—including those by Nico Muhly, Ryan Francesconi, Dave Longstreth, Dan Cantrell,  and Newsom herself — there lies an intimacy seldom achieved, and simply heard. Divers dives  forth with a pure love and respect for the traditions and mysteries of man, such that we can feel the surge of life itself passing over our bones as we hear the songs and sounds, the players —  among them Kevin Barker, Peter Newsom, Neal Morgan, and the City of Prague Philharmonic  Orchestra — and the arrangements; as basic maths are reviewed to uncover heights of joy and  sorrow, all traced in triumphal arches and supernumerary rainbows through eternal amber,  gleaming in analog entrapment — with that VOICE riding high atop; the vast embodiments and  boundless refinements of her singing suffused amid the tidal intake and outtake of cellulose acetate — recorded with snow-bright, high-noonverity by Steve Albini and Noah Georgeson,  mixed in phantasmagoric, deep-seasaturation by Noah and Joanna, and loosed, on October 23rd by Drag City Records. We have reached Peak Newsom. Divers is coming, to incline into your many and varied lifelines, for now and then and the rest of the moments that will always return in  your lifetimes again.