By Kimberly Chun

ALONG CAME A spider, who sat down beside her and frightened Joanna Newsom into a crazed frenzy of arachnid squashing.

Photo of Joanna Newsom by Lori Spears

Newsom wanted to go to Cuba but was overruled by her more athletic parents and siblings. "I got strong eventually," Newsom recalls, "but for a little while it was like tipping over my canoe, and there was a thing where always it was me who got the weird, crazy, huge bug on her." And then there was the dreaded crawfish-size lobster spider, which seemed to take a particular liking to Newsom. "It just gallops at you across the water, almost like it's a draft horse or something. It's this huge thing, and there are ripples coming out of its feet wherever it hits the water, and it wants to be on the dry land, so if you're kayaking by, it's like, 'Oh! Land!' and then it locks eyes with you and just charges! So I had an ongoing battle basically with the lobster spider the entire trip."

The last straw, the final claw of the wild, occurred when they stopped for lunch one day. She groans, remembering, "Aaah-uhhh. I don't like to kill spiders because I fear them, you know. I feel like they have this incredible, powerful energy, and I don't want to get bad spider karma. But in this case I was hitting them with my oar, I was panicking because there were so many of them, and [gentle tour guide] Nano was reaching out and gingerly picking up these fat, hairy spiders and putting them on the trees overhead, trying to teach me a lesson about how spiders were our friends."

Little creatures

It didn't work – this ain't no fairy tale. But perhaps if Newsom had brought out her "beat-up and rattly and old" harp and sang a song from her much celebrated Drag City debut, The Milk-Eyed Mender, where she empathizes with a bug's will to just keep eating ("Swansea" 's "How I would love to gnaw / Gnaw on your bones so white / And watch as the freight trains paw / Paw at the wild, wild night"), she'd have tamed those hairy lobster spiders through charm and pluck, much as she has indie rock audiences around the world.

Friends and tourmates such as Devendra Banhart are putty in her hands. "I keep a picture of her harp everywhere I go," he says, "on tour and in my studio where I draw and do my things because I think it's the most powerful and inspiring image for me. She's a total genius and the most important living musician right now."

Music critics believed too, boosting the Nevada City native and, until a recent bout of touring, San Francisco resident to the top of their 2004 best-of lists, making her sold-out stand at Noise Pop something of a victorious homecoming. Hail the conquering harpist, only two years along from her first Noise Pop show, and one of her first period, opening for Cat Power in 2003.

Newsom's light years from that early appearance, looking waifish in a princess gown and singing more tentatively in that voice – that voice! – while fingering her strings. The music – the product of a childhood spent composing songs and steeped in folk, bluegrass, contemporary classical, and traditional music from Africa and other parts – never flagged, but her vocals polarized listeners who either loved or hated it. Was it a childlike affectation? Was it for real?

"I didn't realize that my voice was something that reminded people of children," she murmurs as we walk up a thickly vined hill. "When I sang in choir when I was little, people would always say it was a witchy, old-lady voice, like they teased me and said I sounded like their grandma. It's funny – when I was a little kid, everyone thought I sounded like an old lady, and now ..."

Yet listening to The Milk-Eyed Mender and to the 23-year-old herself, you realize Newsom has many voices: self-assured and cerebral when the topic is her now discarded music composition studies at Mills College, countrified when she affirms your thought with a "Sho'!" and sweetly old-world – the sound closest to her singing voice – when she grabs your hand in both of hers.

"There's no affectation in the way she sings – it's really just how she sings," explains Noah Georgeson, another Nevada City-reared musician and Newsom's onetime boyfriend, who produced and recorded The Milk-Eyed Mender. "I don't know why people compare her voice to Björk's – it just seems like a lazy and artistically ignorant thing to say." Instead he compares her vocals to those on the early Alan Lomax recordings of Appalachian folk music (a project Newsom's hero, composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, participated in), and to Karen Dalton's. "There's a quality when certain notes hit – there's just this raggedly piercing quality that saws through whatever else is happening sonically. I just have a visual image of it sawing through the center of this musical landscape and becoming the focus suddenly."

Newsom's music was the focus of a reclusive girlhood spent in an equally music-minded family. Her sudden hankering for a harp at age three would have been obliged if a music teacher would have taken her on so young. Later she attended Mendocino's Lark in the Morning folk music camp every year for a decade with her mother, a classically trained pianist and hammer dulcimer player and the leader of a drum circle that often practiced at their house, lodged amid the maples, pines, and fir of the sweetly quaint, gold rush town of Nevada City.

At the camp, Newsom recalls, "there was an amazing harpist there who introduced me to some West African harp figures, totally disorienting to me at the time, which influenced just about everything I've written since then." She began to pay attention to bluegrass music and to appropriate fingerpicking guitar style in her songs.

She wasn't alone in her musical obsessions. Musicians and artists such as Terry Riley, Jonathan Richman, and Supertramp's Roger Hodgson also gravitated to the leafy Nevada City, whose downtown of white-trimmed, ornate Victorian-era homes and brick storefronts has drawn laid-back hippie families and communes, which peacefully coexist with more-conservative retirees. Among their offspring are musicians like Hunter of AFI, Spencer Seim of Hella, Rob Kieswetter, a.k.a. Bobby Birdman, and Riley's son, Gyan.

Newsom met Georgeson at Mills, where he was working on an MFA in music and she was toiling on her B.A. in composition before switching to creative writing because "there were ideas that were really important to me that seemed sort of out of the conversation, like dated and passé, sort of the conventional idea of melody. I felt that people at that school probably would not as a whole have agreed with me that music is something that comes with your heart and that is a physical thing and a fundamental thing. I think a lot of people approached it so cerebrally, that it was completely divorced from feeling."

Composition professors such as Fred Frith remember her being "absolutely fabulous" in her audition. "She was firmly established in her identity and way of working," Frith says, but Newsom was ready to move on, though her writing was morphing into more songlike forms.

"I was playing around a lot with rhyming, and even with stories – there was a kind of density to the lines that were, I think, really cumbersome," she explains as she poses in front of a monstrous palm. "It became really difficult to digest, and it was a criticism I kept getting, a really valid one, because they were these dense almost-unreadable pieces of writing. They wanted so badly to be songs that they were twistin' themselves all out of shape trying to do it."

The under-21 Newsom had been playing tambourine and keyboards with Georgeson's band the Pleased, in order to get into clubs and then to tour Europe, but her own music called, and about two years ago she began recording, starting with Walnut Whales, a CD-R that won over Will Oldham and led him to ask her to accompany him on tour. Shows opening for Banhart soon led to the writing of Mender, a process she describes as a natural response to life. "To me, it's like organizing emotional and sensory information in my life," she says. "It's, like, you poke a sea anemone, and it reacts to it. Songs for me are a response to stimulus – they just come out of me when the world just pokes!"

Seed of an album

Georgeson and Newsom recorded the album in fall 2003 in their Castro home, taking care to mic the harp as if its octaves were various instruments and quintupling Newsom's voice on songs such as "Sprout and the Bean" for heightened effect.

It apparently worked, and now the performer who once imagined herself to be always "composing in the shadows" has found herself dragging ladylike parlor instruments to stages all around the world. Traveling with a harp "can feel like a burden," she confesses, "until I'm playing it."

"There's absolutely nothing special about my harp. I would get a new one if I could afford it," she says. "But my relationship to it is that, when I'm playing, it feels like an extension of my body, and it feels like breathing, and my own blood is moving through it and then back at me. I bet that's how most musicians feel about their instruments, though."

Rootlessness bothers her more than the baggage. Since last July, when she gave up her S.F. apartment, her belongings have been stowed with her parents in Nevada City and she sleeps on friends' couches in the city. She's dreaming, though, of finding a place of her own in Los Angeles's rock 'n' roll nature spot, Topanga Canyon. "I'm definitely homeless, though I shouldn't use that word because I have a roof over my head at night, but I'm kind of rootless, and I don't feel like there's a real place to call my own right now," she sweetly complains as we drive back to her friend's flat.

"I hate it! It turns out I'm not a good gypsy at all," she whispers, then laughs as the light flickers from the sky.

Joanna Newsom plays with Nicolai Dunger and Drew O'Doherty Feb. 25, 8 p.m., and with Dunger, Nedelle, and Okay Feb. 26, 4 p.m., Swedish American Hall, 2174 Market, S.F. Feb. 25 is sold out; Feb. 26 advance tickets are sold out. (415) 861-5016.