Karen O emerged from behind a red curtain at midnight into the club of New York’s McKittrick Hotel bar, a red-lit room shrouded in fog, to a deathly silent audience. She was dressed like a Blue Velvet dream, and the glowing room, pierced with bright red lights, matched her jazz-singer vibe.
This svelte, polished performer is the same woman who earned her rock credentials shrieking songs of the post-punk revival in grungy New York clubs with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, waiting through 12 measures of the guitar riff from the raunchy track Black Tongue until she burst onto the stage at a full run, spraying beer into the crowd like some glorious gold-lamé fountain.
But tonight, in this 200-capacity venue, you could hear a pin drop between songs.
O’s show at the McKittrick was the first of several upcoming “intimate shows”, taking her from New York to California, London and Berlin. The tour is in celebration of her first solo album, Crush Songs, which the 35-year-old recorded at 27 – an age when she “crushed a lot”.
The album is as lo-fi as it gets. It’s stripped-down and bare and squeaky and rough around the edges, and fans might feel after listening that they haven’t been given quite enough from the consummate rock star. Performed live, though, the songs were fuller and more refined, made whole with help from dreamy acoustic and electric guitars and plenty of cooing backing vocals.
It was, in many ways, a night that laid out starkly the contrast of her past and present. A night for the audience to take stock of her career as a solo performer and, perhaps, for O to reflect on how her life has changed since writing these songs. Her husband, music video director Barnaby Clay, sat close by in the VIP section, as did Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner (“my musical soulmate”), who was in the front row and occasionally jumped onstage to play.
The mood of the show was quiet and reflective, but was lightest during King, an offbeat ode to Michael Jackson that earned laughs from the audience (“Is he walking on the moon?”). She dedicated Hideaway, from the Where the Wild Things soundtrack, to her husband. During Body, she would point and smile at him in the crowd during the line “If you love somebody,” perhaps not anticipating the juxtaposition of the next line: “There will always be someone else.” She could barely sing for blushing.
At the end of Body, which contains Crush Songs’ only foray into her trademark brand of scream-singing, she tried to put the whole microphone in her mouth, the way she used to do during screamo concert favorite Art Star with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs — it didn’t quite work, and she, and the audience, collapsed into laughter.
O didn’t end up revisiting the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, opting instead to play only her own songs. The two she chose to finish the hour-long set were together a perfect merging of her two worlds. She transitioned seamlessly from Singalong, the rough closing track of Crush Songs which she said was written and recorded in a New York City hotel room with two friends (“We were very drunk”), to The Moon Song, from the Spike Jonze film Her, for which she was nominated for an Oscar last year.
After that, she was back to blushing. “Uh, that’s our set!” she concluded with a huge smile on her face, her awkward 27-year-old self again.
