As reported earlier, Tavi Gevinson officially added singer to her already-impressive résumé last night with her performance of Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” at the Standard East Village. She went on before a midnight screening of the animated short Cadaver (in which she also sings the song), for an audience of fashion bloggers and friends (including De Lune’s Claire Geist and the Winklevoss twins, who are buddies with director Jonah Ansell).
Before she took the stage, we had to ask: How does a teenager connect with such a world-weary piece of music?
“When I sang it, I think I appreciated that aspect of it from a distance, the wisdom. And now coming back to it about a year after we recorded the voices and the song for the film, it’s amazing how much more it, already, kind of touches me,” she said. ” But I do think it kind of exists outside of time maybe not independently of age, but I don’t think it’s necessarily important that you lived a long life and climbed mountains or whatever to understand it. ‘Cause a lot of it was just about looking for something.”
Gevinson’s voice, pretty and lilting, has been helped by more than six years of voice lessons. And she may have the opportunity to show off her vocal chops again soon. Ansell mentioned an expansion of the short into feature-length.
“We shared the film with Christopher Lloyd and Kathy Bates, and they loved it so much that they want to come back on for the feature,” he said.
Click through to see pictures from the night and listen to her performance below.