It's easy to see why Adem Ilhan chose Conway Hall for his two-day festival. His songs are all about home in one way or another and the stage, with its wood panelling and lamps, looks like a living room - the kind that should feature a stag's head. If Adem's music had a scent, it would be woodsmoke and roast dinners. Homefires celebrates folk music 's leftfield contingent, from the Memory Band to Beth Orton. The crowd is younger and smoother-chinned than folk's old guard, but no less capable of keeping a reverential hush: during quieter songs, you can hear a trainer squeak.

Adem, with typical humility, is third on his own bill. His album was recorded on a laptop, so, on stage, his band must dart from xylophone to banjo to harmonium to autoharp. Delivered in a warm, reassuring croon, Adem's pretty, spine-tingling songs swell like pub singalongs, or sway like lullabies.

It is almost impossible to dislike Adem. Joanna Newsom is a different matter. Seated at her harp in a flowing, bright green dress, the San Francisco-based 22-year-old divides the room between infatuation and irritation, thanks to an indescribably odd singing style that even Bjork might consider mannered. But it is miraculous, too. Like Bjork, Newsom takes elaborate, childlike delight in every syllable, swooping down on it, elongating it, sending it spinning. The word "inflammatory" becomes something like "in-flammm-ah!-toor-ee". And she has a novelist's love of language. Pop doesn't usually have much use for words such as caravelle, dirigible, narwhal and malachite.

The longer Newsom plays, the more hypnotic her spell becomes. She performs a startlingly eloquent anti-war song that could as easily be about the American civil war as the Iraq conflict. And she sings a couplet that sums up Homefires' successful marriage of old and new: "This is an old song, these are old blues/ This is not my tune but it's mine to use."