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The Times, 2010-02-20 - The conversation: Joanna Newsom

PostPosted: 29 May 2010, 10:58
by milky moon
From The Times
February 20, 2010
The conversation: Joanna Newsom

She is a homebody who models for Armani, a harpist and possibly the best composer of her generation


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Sophie Heawood

As unlikely seating arrangements go, being splodged in between Quentin Tarantino and Joanna Newsom has got to be the unlikeliest. One is a film director who can’t rest until all his characters have blown each other’s brains out; the other a polyrhythmic (the simultaneous sounding of two or more independent rhythms) harp player who composes intricate, beautiful song cycles about constellations and peonies and chalk. But I’m in a restaurant in LA trying to interview the harpist when the director sits down at the next table, and he’s louder than us, telling his friends about the time he fictionalised Hitler. “So I woke up one day and wrote on this piece of paper, just kill him,” he barks. “Just f***ing kill him.” “Damn,” mutters Newsom, grinning conspiratorially at me. “He stole my line.”

As cute as a button in a huge pair of purple Dior sunglasses and a floral blouse, Newsom is clearly joking. Her new album, which we are here to discuss, contains no bloodbath, precious few totalitarians and scarcely a trace of her old singing voice. That voice put off some listeners who found it “ragged, rough, shrill, babyish — whatever the word was — and I’ve heard plenty of words,” she groans, eyes rolling. What the album does contain is more than two hours of exquisitely beautiful songs over three discs, performed with a new singing voice after the old one quite literally disappeared.

Newsom developed vocal cord nodes in spring 2009, and all that came out when she opened her mouth “was like the hiss on opening a Coke can”. For two months she went around with a notebook, forbidden from singing, speaking or even crying. “In fact crying was the absolutely worst thing I could do to my voice. So I was constantly telling myself, don’t feel, don’t feel, don’t feel.” On recovering, she mourned when she realised that her old voice was never coming back, though she says she must give “full disclosure” and admit that further vocal modifications have been deliberate.

And while she rose up at the same time as her singer-songwriter friend Devendra Banhart and others in the freak-folk music gang that the NME would describe cheerily as the “beardy-weirdies”, that scene has moved on. Perhaps it is just as well — now that the dust from 50 fringed ponchos has settled, Newsom will surely be recognised as one of the foremost composers of her generation. Her startling live performances have always been critically acclaimed, and this month a scholarly book about her body of work called Visions of Joanna Newsom (she gave it her blessing but did not collaborate) will be published. Essayists study her musicality, her storytelling, her rise through the blogosphere. Dave Eggers writes of how he hoped on first spellbound listen that she didn’t turn out to be pretty (alas for him, she did); the poet Jonathan Morton describes how she makes language shiver as “sharp rivers of harp and voice flood the clearing”.

And yet Newsom is only 28, a homebody who still lives near the upstate Californian goldrush town where she grew up and who sees her parents at least once a week. She loves nature and says her albums are all guided by an element. The last one, Ys, was about water, but this one is “earth and dirt, very grounded”. It also progresses through themes such as home and love. “Many kinds of love might be talked about on the record, like filial and romantic and friendship and divine. Or what makes a place home, whether home is that because we name it that, or whether there is homing force that is not within our control.” She says it’s a more direct album than its two predecessors — simpler harp arrangements, less figurative lyrics — but that directness must not be mistaken for a greater honesty. “It’s just a straighter path to the same truth.”

As a child there was no TV, no radio, no pop music. Her parents were doctors and musicians and “kind of idealists when it came to hoping they could protect us from bad influences, like violent movies, or stupid stuff”. Dad would drive Joanna and her brother and sister to school. “He was really busy so he would try to fit a lot of fathering into the time he had. He’d be shouting calculations and we’d have to answer as fast as we could. I have this memory of him getting me to try to spell eucalyptus, and I couldn’t, so we made up a little song to try to remember it. It’s still stuck in my head now.”

They were all taught piano but she asked for a harp at the age of 5, and got it a few years later. By her teens the pair were inseparable — friends would come to the house and she’d be there with her harp, writing songs. Her relationship with it now is comparable to “an artificial limb or a wheelchair. It’s almost part of me, but more to the point, it serves a purpose, and if it wasn’t there I would wonder what was supposed to fit in its place. I don’t know what I would be if I didn’t have ... that.”

She went to study composition at Mills College, California, but didn’t feel a kinship to the other students and their laptops when she was so deeply involved with old-fashioned mechanical things called musical instruments. She dropped out because she was already working on the harp recordings that would later make her a folk sensation. People marvelled at her elfin, otherworldly ways. “I don’t know, I didn’t feel super weird at school — but people have told me that they thought I was. And things I’ve said in interviews come back to haunt me, suggesting that I’m not part of the modern world, which isn’t true.”

Indeed, sitting here by the pool in Hollywood, where she orders Sazerac cocktails (rye and absinthe; she has to explain them to the waiter), she is happy to chat about fashion (Chloé’s spring collection) and the modelling she did for Armani. She is getting over her shyness about having her picture taken, filling the new album sleeve with photos of herself. It seems Joanna Newsom is not that weird any more.

She is also extraordinarily deft with words, spoken as well as sung. I ask her a clumsy question about the rhythm of her lyrics having changed for this album, and she replies sweetly that “Yes, these songs did require a lot less vigilance in managing the patterns of syllabic emphases,” which is exactly what I was trying to say.

She doesn’t even see the old crowd. “I love Devendra and he was so good to me, taking me on tour, because he got big before I did, but I haven’t spoken to him in at least two years. I don’t think it was inaccurate to see commonalities, and there was definitely mutual appreciation, but I never felt part of a scene. I met Devendra because he was best friends with my boyfriend at the time.” After that boyfriend, the musician Noah Georgeson, she was in a long relationship with another musician, Bill Callahan. The pair were the Posh and Becks of the altfolk world. Now she is dating the Saturday Night Live comedian Andy Samberg, famous for his “dick-in-a-box” jokes.

None of this sounds very fragile. And the big myth about Joanna Newsom is that she is fragile. An extraordinary idea when you think how radical, how ballsy, her choices have been. Her albums conform to no prescribed ideas about how many songs they should contain (the last one had five, this one has 18, songs vary hugely in length — and let’s not forget they’re written on a harp). Does anybody else put superglue on their fingers to make sure the callouses don’t grow soft? Schlep around the world to lead a different symphonic orchestra in playing her songs every night with barely any rehearsal time, everywhere from the London Barbican to the Sydney Opera House? Playing a huge 12-pedalled harp is tough stuff. And who else, aged 18, would go alone to a wild place down by the river, arrange some stones into a circle, and then sit inside that circle and stay there for three days, fasting. (Her friends camped a few miles away and left her small amounts of rice and water while she slept.) It’s a determination like none I’ve ever encountered.

So I put it to her that, because she has a certain femininity, perhaps the casual observer mistakes it for fragility, when in fact her decisions are terribly strong. “Thank you,” she says, sounding terribly grateful. She says the femininity is something she’s never had a problem with. “That’s one of the few things in this world I don’t feel I have a troublesome relationship with. For me that’s natural and fun and part of the earthly physical world, which I like. But we live in a world that disembodies and abstracts the feminine.” As for the other side, “I don’t want to compound the fragility myth about me ... but I think other, people, in my, life, certainly, commented, that I seemed to have, a ... sometimes fragile relationship with reality.” She stops. “But I wouldn’t say that it’s felt like a problem for me but, you know, I forget to pay bills and I get my water shut off and I live in a rural area. And you know when your cable gets shut off they actually have to make an appointment to send out a technician to reinstall it and it’s really expensive and insanely annoying. And so that’s happened to me like four times now. The list of things like that is very, very long. And there’s nothing romantic or fantastical about being hapless, or borderline dysfunctional in terms of a lot of the things that make someone a good grown-up in the world.”

She also says she must confess that people who work with her find her stubborn to the point of being difficult. She can’t rest creatively until a song is exactly the way she imagined it. She can’t bend. On previous records she worked with the musicians Steve Albini and Van Dyke Parks, this time she worked with the composer and musician Ryan Francesconi and praises him endlessly for putting up with her. She doesn’t want to discuss her private life but she goes gooey over a baby in the restaurant to the point that I think I see a tear form in her eye, and she does say she may end up moving to New York. “Living in a city! It’s like observing alien life forms to me. I’ve never lived on less than an acre of land.” She’s never really grasped the concept of daytime. “I am nocturnal to the point of insomnia.” And does it freak you out when the dawn starts coming up? “The creeping dread?” she asks, like it’s the name of a mutual friend. “Oh yeah. And by the way, I live next door to roosters that start going at that time. So when you’re still awake, it’s the sonic, age-old message that you’re a complete f***-up.”

Surely that’s the last thing she is. A raging sonic success story more like.

Have One on Me is released on March 1 by Drag City records. Joanna Newsom plays the Royal Festival Hall, SE1, on May 11 and 12 (0844 847 9910, southbankcentre.co.uk).

Small talk

- On folk camp I used to go to folk music camp and it was all ‘bouzouki workshop near the fire circle’ and ‘hurdy-gurdy class by the dance hall’. The orchestra had a first oud instead of a first violin.

- On her mother My brother had an MC Hammer album that was riddled with silent patches because my mom had erased the dirty bits from the cassette. I really don’t know how she did it — that might be a lost art — but she had it mastered.

- On the musical Annie Deeply unfortunately, the song Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile, from Annie, has been lodged in my head for 20 years. It’s there permanently. No matter what’s happening it is softly playing in the back of my mind and one fifteenth of my mind is singing along. It is a nightmare.

- On insomnia I have all sorts of sleep issues. I’m groggy and intellectually impotent for 90 per cent of the day, and then everyone goes to bed and I’m like, wait a minute, I have all this stuff to say!

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