"You sort of have to get close in this place, whether you want it or not," Anna Ternheim
said as she carefully swiveled around the edge of the tiny stage at
Joe's Pub on Monday night, maneuvering herself behind the piano. "I
really like that," she added. Ternheim, a Swedish singer-songwriter now
based in the East Village, has played more spacious rooms than Joe's Pub—both
here in the U.S., where she's opened for Lykke Li, El Perro del Mar and
Kristin Hersh, and back in Europe, where Ternheim racked up Swedish
Grammy awards for each of her first two albums.

Turned out the close quarters and intimacy of Joe's Pub ideally
suited Ternheim's lithe, penetrating voice, moody storytelling and
stripped-down instrumentation. She mostly concentrated on songs from Leaving on a Mayday, her third European release, which will be issued by Verve Forecast as her second U.S. full-length on August 11. (Last year's arresting Halfway to Fivepoints, Ternheim's American debut CD, culled tracks from her two previous European releases, along with a few odds and ends.)

Not surprisingly, Leaving on a Mayday will strike most American listeners as Ternheim's most focused creation. Produced by Björn Yttling (of Peter Björn and John),
the album wraps Ternheim's direct, memorable melodies in rich, resonant
settings well suited to her vignettes of love, loss and loneliness.
It's a far cry from the dance-pop escapism peddled by most of her
Scandipop contemporaries: Ternheim has been likened to Beth Orton and
even Joni Mitchell, but her closest stylistic forebear is probably
Suzanne Vega, especially the clear, cool sound of Vega's first two
albums.

Still, Ternheim's an original in the shaping. Here, she often held
an audience spellbound with little more than her voice and acoustic
guitar or piano. For a number of songs from the new album, she was
joined by Leo Svensson, a Swedish cellist who doubled on glockenspiel
(in a stark arrangement of "What Have I Done," the disc's
orchestral-disco opening track) and musical saw (on the aching "My
Heart Still Beats for You"). Svensson also joined three local
singer-songwriters—Sharon Van Etten, Cat Martino and Clare Manchon (of Clare and the Reasons)—in luminous harmonies in several songs, and drummer Nils Tornqvist added stark tom-tom beats to a few more.

Near set's end, Ternheim moved her microphone off to the side and
brought Van Etten, Martino and Manchon up for an all-acoustic rendition
of "Summer Rain," ending in rapt silence. A gripping end to a soggy
night's show? Not quite. "I feel weird not saying thank you, good night
or whatever, so I'm gonna play one more song," Ternheim said. Mustering
her forces, she played one of the most memorable cuts from the domestic
version of Halfway to Fivepoints: a cover of Fleetwood Mac's
"Little Lies" that wrung more melancholy and poignance from the song
than even its famously damaged originators could muster.

[Posted this afternoon on The Volume]