MAKING NEW FRIENDS WITH NAI PALM

STORY_BY: CHARLOTTE ZAGER

The lead singer of Hiatus Kaiyote takes baby’s all right by storm, bringing the room all together.

“Did you also come here alone?!”

Two 20-something-year-old girls laughed and nodded their heads simultaneously. People were filing into the venue and the air was still cool and odorless.

Somehow, this short snippet of conversation seemed to foreshadow the subsequent energy of the concert. On June 23rd at 11:00pm, Baby’s All Right in Williamsburg was at its 280 person capacity, alive with the calm spirit of couples in love and the 20-something-year-old girls who came here alone. They didn’t share much in common except for the fact that they all knew Nai Palm’s electric voice (and guitar) impressively well.

Those who’ve been to the venue know it’s an intimate experience. It’s standing room only, and this standing room space is narrow and deep. The actual stage, on the other hand, is very shallow—there’s not much physical depth for a performer to fall back into. The back wall of the stage is decorated by the iconic Baby’s All Right colorful grid of glowing bulbs, and the setup blasts light at the performer while pressing them close to the audience. It would be natural for the performer to look over the heads of the crowd, to create a comfortable distance. But Nai Palm didn’t do this. Instead, she leaned into the closeness and got to know her fans a little better.

Naomi Saalfield, otherwise known as Nai Palm, is the Australian jazz-funk singer and guitarist of the band Hiatus Kaiyote. This time, however, she was playing solo—just her and the sharp edges of her triangular guitar. As she hopped on stage, her green hair, thick eyeliner, intricate gallery of patchwork tattoos, and beaming smile immediately grasped the eyes of her audience. She opened her set with “Atari,” a six-minute slingshot into her soul-filled sound. Before the song, she told us that it was inspired by her brother’s Atari gaming console, a sacred relic he did not allow her access to. She encouraged us to share our Ataris with our own siblings. She later redacted this suggestion, because maybe then we wouldn’t get songs like “Atari.”

To put it lightly, the crowd was high-energy. As Nai Palm reached high into her vocal range, the audience matched her energy, reaching higher into their own, cheering loudly, oohing and ahhing. At some point near the middle of the set, she stopped and thanked the audience for their excitement. “I love playing shows in America because you guys give all of yourselves to the music.”

-A brief pause-

“We’ll take it!” someone shouted back. Nai Palm—the face of American Nationalism?

She played her guitar like Jimi Hendrix, lifting it up high and meeting it eye-to-eye, ear-to-ear. Perhaps this has something to do with the genre; the guitar needs to come up for more dexterous access to the fretboard. The guitar is an active participant–an invisible yet unmistakable bandmate. Nai’s playing was tricky; her hand moved at a relaxed pace but her fingers moved so fast and so strongly that you could barely see the changes. You could hear them, though, no doubt. For Palm, music is therapeutic. As we got deeper into the set, we could feel a healing energy emanate from her exhale–you could see it working its magic on her too, as her smile grew wider and wider.

A Nai Palm show is a party—hosted equally by her and the audience. People laughed, shouted, and sang along at full volume. At one point, she even brought a fan up onstage, saying they sounded like a “baby Chaka Khan.” Towards the end of the set, during the song “Molasses,” the crowd was not just singing, but shouting along. Partiers panned their iPhone cameras from Nai to the actual audience, trying to capture the community that was being created in real time. The air was hot now. It smelled like beer and body odor and nobody seemed to mind.

Before her song “Atoll,” she mentioned that it was inspired by a quote by Rumi, the famous 13th-century Sufi poet. You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens. She doubled down on the sentiment by singing the very first line: “When the damn thing breaks, I’ll be there to take you home.”

By the end of the night, the 20-something-year-old girls who came alone were now a friend group, the supposed couples were now very obviously couples, and the rest of the crowd was scream-singing like a bunch of baby Chaka Khans—some hearts breaking, some already broken, but in this moment, all of them open.

BITCHFORK (MAGAZINE)

BITCHFORK
(MAGAZINE)