On Saturday afternoon, I met the singer-songwriter Dawn Landes at a bar in Carroll Gardens, where she had invited me to watch the Kentucky Derby with a few of her friends. We ordered a round of juleps and killed time until the race. Landes wore a salmon-colored dress, fur-lined leather boots, and a woven Derby hat with a brown-and-purple feather tucked into its pink ribbon. She has a bright voice that topples often into laughter and that has graced four full-length albums, and two E.P.s. Thirty-three years old, she’s shared stages with the likes of Justin Townes Earle, Feist, and Suzanne Vega, has scored two feature films, and is working on a musical, about a woman from Kentucky who rows solo across the Atlantic.
Landes ordered a hot brown, a Louisville delicacy, and the sauce-smothered pile of fried eggs, turkey, bacon, and French toast thunked onto the bar. “People in Louisville like to eat,” she said, adding that she needed the calories, having run a half marathon earlier that day. A second round of juleps materialized, and Landes, a regular Derby attendee since moving to Louisville from Indiana as child, picked our horse: Vicar’s in Trouble, jockeyed by Rosie Napravnik, vying to become the Derby’s first female winner. Landes’s friend Bernie placed a bet via his iPhone. “I think I met him!” Landes said, pointing out a jockey dressed in green. “He gave me his goggles.”
This was when she sang, a few years ago, at Churchill Downs, one in a string of unconventional venues she’s played—from a bullfighting ring in Barcelona to a bus trawling the streets of Paris. It was 6:20 P.M. In a few hours, she would sing at the New York City Ballet, for a staging of “Two Hearts,” a star-studded collaboration between the composer Nico Muhly and the choreographer Benjamin Millepied, with costumes designed by the Mulleavy sisters, of Rodarte. “Come on, come on,” she said, bouncing on her toes, as the horses were led into the gate. “I gotta get to the ballet!” A little over two minutes later, bets were lost, and we headed for the train.
Landes likes to warm up her voice by talking, and she spent the train ride telling me about “Two Hearts,” idly humming scales and arpeggios in between sentences. Muhly had called her in 2011—they had met, ten years earlier, working for Philip Glass—with the idea to write a ballet based on a traditional murder ballad called “Lord Thomas and Fair Ellende.” “It’s basically an old epic poem about a bad love triangle that’s been told again and again, from Scotland to England, before coming to the Appalachians in the seventeen-hundreds,” Landes explained. In the story, a young lord spurns his intended brown-haired bride for a landless girl that he loves. Enraged, the bride murders her rival. The lord decapitates her, kicks her head against a wall, and then stabs himself in the heart. After their burial, a rose and briar sprout from the true lovers’ graves and conjoin in a heart-shaped knot.
It’s an archaic form, and many permutations of the song exist. Landes gleaned the lyrics for her version from twelve favorites, and worked to channel a rendition from close to home—a recording that Jean Ritchie, from Viper, Kentucky, made for a Smithsonian Folkways project in 1960. “After the première, an old man, a painter, in his eighties came up and told me I reminded him of his old lover—and it turned out he was talking about Jean,” she said. “She’s still alive, back in Kentucky. I wonder if she still thinks about him.”
At Lincoln Center, we raced the rain and lost, hustling past matte black benches where ballerinas perched for furtive cigarettes, and entered the David Koch Theatre through the stage door. It was like a middle school: grey tiled, fluorescent lit, labyrinthine. I got lost a lot. Instrument cases hung on the walls and sweat-soaked leotards fluttered with renewed life as they dried over a row of fans. Dancers in multicolored warm-ups, which they shed piecemeal as curtain inched closer, stretched on barres in the wings. “Ladies and gentlemen, ten minutes until call,” a speaker said.
On the pit level, Landes complimented a man with long, stringy hair on his festive tie. “Thank you,” he said, producing a replacement black bow tie. “It’s a shame they won’t let me wear it.” The N.Y.C.B. has opened its doors periodically to popular artists—a Sufjan Stevens-scored ballet was on the matinee bill—but a folk singer remains a rarity in the pit. She’s the only amplified performer in the room, and she tends to vary her phrasing and emphasis, which has led to some hiccups. One violist, she told me as we wound through a grove of music stands and gleaming, dormant instruments, complained to the director about the scent of her hairspray.
“I told him there was no way I was singing without hairspray,” she said, placing a set of bejewelled high-heeled shoes on the conductor’s podium. “And I get scoffs for singing barefoot.” We paused to admire a celesta, a resonant glockenspiel played like a spinet, which would feature prominently in the piece—“Nico loves these,” Landes said. As we exited, a jovially bothered oboist threatened to photograph her, barefoot in the pit, to use as blackmail.
“Blackmail me? I’m proud of my feet,” Landes said. “It just feels better to sing this type of song with no shoes on.” Instruments came alive and the pit filled, Landes and the conductor entering last. “Anyway, I can’t run up the stairs to take my bow with those things on.”
Twenty minutes into the ballet, a series of sharp string jabs cued the ballad, which accompanied a final, sombre pas de deux:
Landes’s voice is quiet, flush with breath, almost conversational, but powerfully anchored, and it filled the room. She droned on the straightaways and slipped with practiced ease into the creek-like tumbles of the folk idiom between phrases. “I love Dawn’s voice because it’s expressive and specific without being manipulative,” Muhly told me.
Muhly’s score manages to hew close to the tune’s sparse progression while arranging itself into startling valences—angry swells, low, sad groans, and dissonant shimmers. Landes patted a steady waltz on her thigh to keep time, the orchestra cartwheeled through Muhly’s protean time signatures, and together they made the old song new again.
As the curtain fell, Landes slipped out the pit door and up the stairs, shoes in hand. She hurried into her heels in the wings, the dancers beckoned her into the light, and she took the stage to deliver a bow with an exaggerated right-arm flourish. I complimented her bow. “I did ballet for twelve years,” she said, waving me off. “I know how to bow. I wanted to take a curtain selfie, too, but the conductor said it was a bad idea.”
Photograph: Benjamin Lozovsky/LozoPhoto
