Joanna Newsom interview

[Albert Tatlock]

High priestess of baroque'n'roll

Joanna Newsom has created a work whose startling originality could, like Astral Weeks or Horses before, set a new musical standard for a generation. She tells Sean O'Hagan what drives her to write her epic, mesmerising songs

 

Sunday October 15, 2006, The Observer

 

The greeting on Joanna Newsom's answer machine is short and suitably strange. Her disembodied voice calls out the words, 'Hello, I'm gone', and leaves you hanging there on the line, not quite certain how to respond. The real question, of course, is how far gone?

On the strength of her extraordinary new album, the mysteriously titled Ys (pronounced 'ees'), let's just say Joanna Newsom is as out there as it gets at the moment. Imagine Emily Dickinson with a harp, and you're half way there. In contemporary pop, only Antony Hegarty comes close in terms of new territory.

 

Of her songwriting, Newsom says: 'Among the responsibilities of any writer is that, no matter what else, they know what they mean. So, even if no one else knows what you're talking about, you do. The listener can sense that, even if they don't get the literal meaning. The faith that they place in the clues and the connections and the secrets of the lyrics is of the utmost importance.'

 

 

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Newsom's songs are full to the brim with clues, connections and secrets, and their literal meaning tends to be elusive. She exists, like all eccentric geniuses, in a creative universe that abides by its own rules, a world away from the dull conformity of all those indie boys with guitars. Ys is one of those records that seems to have arrived, fully formed, out of nowhere, and with no precedent in popular music. In this, it calls to mind Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, Patti Smith's Horses, Robert Wyatt's Rock Bottom. It may not - who yet knows? - be as groundbreaking as any of these, but it is as beautifully confusing. I cannot remember the last time I was so astonished by a pop record.

'Sometimes I will hear a melody first, and it suggests a certain type of lyric,' Newsom says, her speaking voice sounding even more breathless and hoarse than her singing one. 'Then, maybe I'll sing out gibberish lyrics that feel right, that have the right kind of language. Then, I'll just wait and wait until the right words come.'

 

Her new songs, lengthy and baroque, require a certain amount of effort from the listener, not because they are difficult, but because they are so different. She composes them on a harp. Not a blues harp, but a big, lumbering, ornate classical harp of the kind beloved of the most fey practitioners of Irish trad-folk. Mary O'Hara, though, she ain't. Nor Alice Coltrane, for that matter. Joanna's harp is an instrument of hypnotic and mesmerisingly soothing beauty, a counterpoint to her singular voice.

 

That voice, it has to be said, irks some people. It goes where it pleases, and tends towards the breathless, the shrill and the warbly. She is not averse to the odd spot of caterwauling. You can see where the countless comparisons to Kate Bush and Bjork come from, but they just won't suffice. Newsom has a voice all her own, and it is exhilarating in its wayward intensity. She can sound like the birds that fill her songs, 'the meadowlark, the chim-choo-ree and the sparrow', all rolled into one. Or a little girl lost in the woods. Or a hell-hound. The novelist, Dave Eggers, a Newsom nut, came close to pinpointing the stark power of her voice when he wrote, 'Music like this can actually make you feel vulnerable, because it's vulnerable itself, it's bare and unflinching, which gives you the strength to be the same.'

 

Joanna Newsom is 24 years old. She lives where she grew up, in 'a gold rush town in the mountains of California' whose name and location I have been forsworn not to reveal. Like Kate Bush, one suspects, she's the kind of female singer who attracts odd, obsessive, mostly male fans in their droves, and understandably does not want them pitching up on her doorstep. Her family was steeped in music: her mother trained as a concert pianist and her sister, Emily, plays the cello. Joanna studied music and creative writing at the prestigious Mills College. The family are also well connected: her second cousin, Gavin Newsom, is the mayor of San Francisco, the guy who overthrew the state law forbidding gay marriage. Her boyfriend is Bill Callahan, aka singer-songwriter Smog, who is infamous for his dournesss and used to step out with another female enigma, Cat Power.

 

Newsom was 'discovered' a few years back by Will 'Bonnie Prince Billy' Oldham, a man of impeccable musical discernment and a similar eccentric bent, who heard her songs on a homemade tape. She toured with Oldham at his invitation, then signed to Drag City and put out a pair of EPs, Walnut Whales and Yarn and Glue, which are now as rare as hen's teeth. On her debut album, The Milk Eyed Mender, which featured just voice and harp, the song titles alone gave some indication of her esoteric folk terrain: 'Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie', 'En Gallop', 'The Spout & the Bean'.

 

In concert, Newsom sits astride her giant harp and mesmerises. Last year I watched her hold rapt the rain-dampened crowd at Wales's Green Man folk festival as she recited a poem to the moon, then launched into a 15-minute song the like of which none of us had heard before. Her new songs are of the same stock. Unlike The Milk Eyed Mender, which is wonderful in its own understated way, Ys is full-blown, epic, baroquely orchestral. Van Dyke Parks (a former Hollywood child actor who famously orchestrated Brian Wilson's lost classic Smile) has co-produced and arranged the strings; indie-mavericks Steve Albini and Jim O'Rourke have helped produce the album.

 

'Bill suggested Van Dyke, and the record company contacted him. It was such a long shot,' she says, laughing. 'I thought everyone was just humouring me.' She was on a road trip when the reclusive Parks got in touch, she met him in Los Angeles and ended up playing him her new songs in a motel room. He got the picture.

 

'It's one big story, really,' she says, when I ask her where these songs came from. 'You can sense that, I hope, from the pacing and the structure. It's a whole lot of small stories that add up to a bigger one. I don't really want to say anything further because I think the listener should be free to make of it what they will, but it's a story that concerns mortality and loss, and a loose set of emotional responses to that loss.'

 

This much is evident from the first song, 'Emily', a 12-minute ode to her younger sister. It seems to be about the almost sacred bond between the two sisters, and is filled with coded allusions to their childhood world. 'You taught me the names of the stars overhead/ That I wrote down in my ledger,' Newsom sings against swerving strings. 'Though all I knew of that rote universe/ Were those Pleiades loosed in December.'

 

Shared secrets and experiences are suggested but never spelt out. Heartbreak is alluded to, and the drift into lovesickness. 'You came and laid a cold compress on the mess I'm in,' she whispers. 'Threw the window wide and cried, amen, amen, amen.' I can't help but think of the Brontes here, as the child sisters gaze out their window at 'mountains kneeling, felten and grey'.

 

In the course of this one song, the music and lyrics shift from reflective to intense to almost druggily drowsy. It is Newsom's way with words that really startles, the oddness and richness of her imagery, which is closer to the nature poetry of William Wordsworth or John Clare than to any musical contemporary. As she pines for her absent sister, peonies 'nod in the breeze' and ants 'with hydrocephalitic listlessness mop up their brow', while 'butterflies and birds collide at hot, ungodly hours'. Heady stuff.

 

There are only five songs on Ys, the title a mysterious reference to the mythical submerged Breton city of the same name. The longest track, 'Only Skin', clocks in at over 16 minutes, the shortest, 'Cosmia', just over seven. The length of the songs and the baroque nature of the arrangements, not to mention the medieval-style painting of Newsom on the inner sleeve, might suggest she has entered prog-folk territory. Indeed, there are a few slightly torturous interludes. I am still not sure what to make of 'Monkey & Bear', a tale of escape from a circus narrated in the voice of the monkey.

 

'I didn't think of the songs as being epic or strange,' she says. 'But I knew very early on that they would be long. The ideas kind of demanded that. The story that is cumulatively told would not have been accommodated by shorter songs, and I think it would have been vulgar to try and do that.'

 

Could she elaborate on this over-arching story? I have tried and failed to discern it. 'Well, last time round, everything I said was taken really literally and I don't want that to happen again. I'll just say that I think of it as a very pastoral record, really. It's farmlands and harvests and livestock. It's an album about loss, but much of the imagery has to do with fecundity.'

 

So, there you go. Make of that what you will. Or simply soak up the songs for what they are: mysterious, multi-layered, elusive. The album, needless to say, is a grower. It requires the kind of patience and attentiveness that pop music seldom asks of us these days. I tell her that, in some way that I can't quite explain, Ys puts me in mind of Robert Wyatt's Rock Bottom, another album about loss and survival. She suddenly perks up. 'Oh, that's so good that you said that. I was listening to that record and to a lot of music by Henry Cow, too. I like the feel of those records, the tone, the submerged feel.'

 

When I ask who her influences are, though, she becomes evasive again. 'Well, I could tell you that Hemingway is one of my favourite authors, and Nabokov too, and that I aspire towards the tone and style of Hemingway's writing. But, then, I really don't write anything like Hemingway. I've started to realise that I'm actually not sure who or what my influences are. Maybe,' she says, laughing, 'I just totally have my own style. I mean, a lot of people do.'

 

Not that many, I think, but you can now add Joanna Newsom to that select few. Whatever you think of her strange and startling new music, one thing is for certain: you will not hear anything else remotely like it in contemporary music. For that alone, she should be cherished.

[TheMaker]

Oh, enough. Anybody who'd compare this cunt to Van Morrison or Patti Smith in their prime shouldn't be writing for a living. Christ.

[Fritz]

Thanks for the post, Andrew.

 

As for the second post...I don't know what your intended tone was but the result is pretty clear. Surely the moment you refer to someone as a "cunt" (and I'm assuming it's simply because you don't like her music) is when you and your comments lose all credibility.

[imsjry]

I loved her last CD, but this one I find impossible to sit through. The strings just kill it for me. The whole thing just doesn't work, IMO. These songs would be much better they were just her and the harp. Very disappointing release...

[embiggen]

As for the second post...I don't know what your intended tone was but the result is pretty clear. Surely the moment you refer to someone as a "cunt" (and I'm assuming it's simply because you don't like her music) is when you and your comments lose all credibility.

 

indeed.

 

does anyone have her live cover of 'Little Wing' that was posted here a while back?

[solace]

I loved her last CD, but this one I find impossible to sit through. The strings just kill it for me. The whole thing just doesn't work, IMO. These songs would be much better they were just her and the harp. Very disappointing release...

and i'm the opposite...

 

i found her voice absolutely wretched and it honestly made me nauseous to listen to. one of the top 5 worst singers i've ever heard...

 

this new one however, her voice only cracks a couple of times throughout the record, and the Lisa Simpson inflection is almost all gone.

 

Van Dyke Park's arrangements sound stunning.