NATIONAL SAWDUST LOG: Video Premiere: Padma Newsome
NATIONAL SAWDUST LOG: Video Premiere: Padma Newsome
BY STEVE SMITH
“If you’re eager to get your week off to a beautiful start, look no further: Padma Newsome has a new album, The Vanity of Trees, out this Friday, Nov. 16, on New Amsterdam Records, and National Sawdust Log has the privilege of sharing the premiere of the album’s first video.
Newsome, as most Log readers will know, is an Australian composer, multi-instrumentalist, and vocalist. He’s most familiar to American listeners for his work alongside Bryce Dessner, Raechel Elliott, Thomas Kozumplik, and others in the divinely indefinable group Clogs, as well as his orchestrations for Dessner’s other band, The National. If you’re a new-music lover who follows New Amsterdam closely, you’ll also recall that Newsome provided one of the three distinctive voices Sarah Kirkland Snider employed for her ravishing song cycle Unremembered.
The Vanity of Trees, according to the label, is “a sonic essay inspired by the landscape of Padma Newsome’s home of the past 14 years, Mallacoota, Australia. The small town of about 1,000 people sits along an inlet of the Tasman Sea in the far eastern corner of Victoria, along the edge of wild sea and forest.” A sense of that wild beauty is conveyed aptly in the video for the punningly titled “Trees to Meet You,” filmed by Susannah Keebler.”