The Happiest Day of Joanna Newsom’s Mom’s Life

Azeen Ghorayshi

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Joanna Newsom and Philip Glass? Sounds like a match made in heaven—or in San Francisco, where the two recently joined forces for a concert to benefit the Henry Miller Library, the small bookstore and community arts center tucked away in the redwoods overlooking the cliffs of Big Sur that’s become an icon of the California coast and its culture.

Neither artist is a stranger to high-powered collaborations: Glass has worked with everyone from Woody Allen to Brian Eno, while Newsom’s worked with the likes of Vashti Bunyan and The Roots. This particular combination, though, is particularly exciting: both Glass and Newsom utilize a rigorous classical training in service of creating new, occasionally bizarre, forms that’ve provided new points of entry to quasi-classical music for millions of fans while befuddling or outright alienating plenty of others.

Glass became famous for his minimalist, repetitive compositions and has written pioneering works for opera, film, and theater, while Newsom made a name for herself with her harp, inimitably high-pitched voice, and intricate, baroque, art-pop songs. Both are iconoclastic performers and polarizing figures, inspiring intense devotion or immense distaste. Tim Fain, the violinist who joined the two for the concert, is less well-known—though likely not for long, given his virtuosic talent and the company he keeps. 

In addition to playing as a trio and in various combinations of duos, each performer played solo pieces, largely from Glass’s enormous body of work—though Newsom also performed several of her own songs, including the new, unreleased “Divers” and the show closer “On a Good Day.” These artists have the chops to back up their forays into experimental ground—it’d been a long time since I’d been to a show with so much carefully honed skill on display, and I was awed by the sheer ability of each performer.

I won’t soon forget the elegant dexterity of Newsom’s fingers roaming across the strings of her harp, nor the spectacle of Fain playing the violin solo from Glass’ opera Einstein on the Beach, a precisely executed frenzy of such complexity it made me dizzy. In another highlight, Glass brought in a fourth collaborator of sorts with “Wichita Vortex Sutra, a work based on a 1966 Allen Ginsberg poem that juxtaposes Ginsberg’s notes on his travels through the American Midwest with images and reports of the Vietnam War. A recording of Ginsberg reading the poem played over a composition that started out calmly hymnal and became increasingly enraptured as the poet’s ecstatic voice rose and fell. 

About halfway through the show, Newsom said “I don’t want to embarrass Mr. Glass, but I think this is the happiest day of my mom’s life.” Judging by the rapt gazes that filled the theater and the multiple ovations at the show’s conclusion, the crowd concurred. If you’re likewise in agreement, keep an eye out: While this performance was a one-off benefit for the library, it seems that more joint shows are in the works.

Click here for more music features from Mother Jones.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate