Re: Found on the Net ?
Posted:
02 Oct 2015, 15:53by Steve
Thank you, Jeannie, for pointing us to a really interesting article. Whether it's because I'm not in the US, or not a subscriber to the New York Times, or not using the recommended browser, it took a few goes before it loaded, so - in case anyone else has the same problem (or in case it gets removed) - I'm pasting the text here in the hope that the (c) people don't ask for its removal...
The New York Times
Music
By JON PARELES OCT. 1, 2015
Joanna Newsom’s first new collection since 2010 is due on Oct. 23.
When she thinks about her most dedicated fans, Joanna Newsom knows exactly what her duties are. Her songs, she said on a recent visit to New York City, have “layers, layers, layers” — layers of historical and literary allusion in the lyrics, layers of delicate intricacy in the music. Now, on the verge of releasing her fourth studio album, she is pushed further by her appreciative listeners. “I definitely can’t write an easy song,” she said. “There is a group of people who are showing up with absolute, complete faith that there’s something worth digging for in the lyrics. And if I don’t put it in there, it’s like breaking a contract.”
Ms. Newsom’s “Divers” (Drag City), due Oct. 23, is her first new collection since 2010, and it carries her singular music even further, adding new convolutions of counterpoint while also staying more succinct. “It felt natural to make the songs shorter in form, to break it up in bite-sized pieces,” Ms. Newsom said. In August, she released one track, “Sapokanikan,” and her fans’ rapid response astonished her. “It’s crazy,” she said in September. “I thought maybe a year after ‘Sapokanikan’ came out, all the references would start to get established and become common knowledge. But a few days after it came out, someone sent me a link and they had already figured out so much.”
The music in “Sapokanikan” hints at antique American styles while it evades them, fluctuating amid ragtime, waltz and parlor song. Melodies arrive from the stratosphere in Ms. Newsom’s guileless, quizzical soprano. The lyrics, meanwhile, are packed with philosophical musings and historical nuggets. For starters, Sapokanikan was the name of a Lenape (Native American) village in southwest Manhattan, where Greenwich Village is now — one of the many bits of New York City lore that are threaded through the verses.
Its video clip, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, shows Ms. Newsom singing her way through Greenwich Village as (actual) New Yorkers ignore her. Online, her fans have been seeking to match the lyrics with locations, though Mr. Anderson, in a telephone interview, said those correlations aren’t necessarily there. He cast Ms. Newsom in his 2014 adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s “Inherent Vice.” He chose her to play Sortilège, the movie’s narrator and the novel’s casually insightful mystic, because, he said, a narrator knows more than the characters. “That’s actually Joanna to me as a person. I don’t think she flaunts it, and it’s not obnoxious, but I always think she knows a little more than the rest of us.”
He added: “She’s more pragmatic than you might think. But there is a part of her that has one foot in an alternate universe.”
Ms. Newsom, 33, made her New York visit as a stopover between Europe and her home in Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband, the actor Andy Samberg. She was jet-lagged but bright-eyed, dressed for a 90-degree afternoon in a tangerine-colored cropped top and a vintage cotton skirt in yellow and orange with an Italian-geography themed print. She still has the sunny friendliness of the small-town California where she grew up; she has a polysyllabic vocabulary but no pretensions. Her twinkling laugh regularly punctuated the interview.
When Ms. Newsom emerged nationally in 2004 with “The Milk-Eyed Mender,” her first album for the independent label Drag City, she drew equal measures of fascination and incredulity. Her main instrument is a full-sized orchestral harp and through the albums, her songs have channeled Appalachia, West Africa, Japan, vaudeville, French Impressionism, Minimalism, Renaissance madrigals and Laurel Canyon singer-songwriters. The untrained but deliberate squeaks and warbles in her voice and her pure disregard for established idioms — more like distance than active rejection — initially deceived some listeners into thinking she was a naïf, when in fact she’s a meticulous musical architect.
One reason that “Divers” took five years to complete was that Ms. Newsom worked for the first time with multiple arrangers, among them David Longstreth of Dirty Projectors and the composer Nico Muhly, who has had operas commissioned by the Metropolitan and written arrangements for Björk and Sufjan Stevens.
“There’s a lot of information in her music, her lyrics, her playing, her singing,” Mr. Muhly wrote in an email. “She makes small songs and huge, sprawling songs, but all stemming from a single source. I think she has a lot of technical bravery both in the studio and live — as in, she’s not afraid to set herself up to do a crazily virtuosic pattern on the harp at the same time as a bit of tightrope vocal acrobatics.”
Ms. Newsom strives to build a world within every song. “There’s a certain level of layering and double-meaning-burying that I do,” she said. “Catching that stuff is not prerequisite to understanding what the song is about. Sometimes it’s stuff that I do because for me, it gives life to the song.
“I feel like whether or not people are catching it overtly, they’re breathing the air and feeling the ground under their feet,” she added. “And as they’re listening to the song, they’re believing in the realness of the world that song occupies. I feel like the realness is derived from these details everywhere — that every word in the song is serving some substantive purpose. For these super sleuths it’s actually serving a narrative purpose — which is what the song does for me, but isn’t necessarily what I expected it to do for anyone else.”
Ms. Newsom said “Divers” is her most unified album. “It’s a very dangerous word, but I think it’s maybe the closest I’ve come to a concept record, God help us,” she said. After writing the first few songs, including “Divers” and “Sapokanikan,” she mapped out a sequence of harmonies for the rest of the album. Then the lyrics took on extra duty: “They had to have their own little narrative arc but they also had to fit into the sequence,” she said.
“I had the oddest feeling,” she added. “Like the songs were waiting for me fully formed, in terms of the lyrics at least. It felt like it was all swarming overhead and I was just plucking it and slotting it into place.”
Ms. Newsom and I visited the Waterhouse & Dodd Gallery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for a close view of photographs by Kim Keever, whose artwork accompanies “Divers”; it’s also at the center of the coming video clip for the album’s title song. One photo at the gallery, akin to the album cover, looked like a rocky, uninhabited landscape below luminous multicolored clouds.
“I like the fact that it’s not clear whether they represent a period of time before humans, or a period of time after humans, the post-apocalyptic thing, or whether they represent just a part of the world where there are no humans, or whether they represent an iteration of Earth within the multiverse where humans never evolved to exist,” Ms. Newsom said. “And I like that the landscapes are viewed from a great distance in most cases, which is an image that comes up for me a lot in these songs, viewing things from above, speeding over landscapes.”
Actually, Mr. Keever’s photographs document vanishingly brief events. He builds the miniature landscape and immerses it in a 200-gallon aquarium that is filled with water and dramatically lit. From a platform above the aquarium he pushes dyes into the water as the camera catches the swirling, evanescent shapes and colors. There are only a few moments before the water becomes a muddled brown.
“His work is about time in a lot of ways,” Ms. Newsom observed. “He’s depicting these concrete landscapes, scenes we associate with permanence. They’re rock-solid and massive and much bigger than us. But they’re also these works that start disintegrating instantly — they’re so time-sensitive and time-dependent.”
Time is a constant concern on “Divers”: historical time, space-time, the human life span, and the rise and fall of romances, cities and cultures. “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne” imagines soldiers who can traverse time as easily as space, leading to “a war between us and our ghosts.” (Ms. Newsom said she came up with “101st Lightborne” as a sci-fi extrapolation of airborne; only recently did she learn that Xbox gamers also have a clan called the 101st Lightborne. “I need to use Google more,” she said with a sigh.)
She is wary of explaining too much about her songs. “The people who do listen to them really like to have an opportunity to unpack them on their own,” she said.
But she would allow that the songs on “Divers” are “all kind of love songs.” And, beyond that, “Every theme on the record has this funny binary thing happening with it,” she said. “It finds its opposite and pulls against it, sometimes across the lines of two different songs and sometimes over a single lyric. Opposing forces are pulling the whole thing very tight the whole time.”
There may be personal lore, too. Ms. Newsom lived on and off in Greenwich Village while writing the album, before moving back to California. The second song she released to preview the album is “Leaving the City”; New York is repeatedly mentioned through the album. “The opposite of mortality might be something concentrated and distilled like a city, a collection of people,” she said. “Enough people have said that New York is a magical city that I don’t feel guilty saying that it’s not for me. Cities that feel like cities are not for me.”
The album concludes with “Time, as a Symptom,” which opens with birdcalls and Ms. Newsom alone, singing to stark piano chords. “Love is not a symptom of time/Time is just a symptom of love,” she declares. And then, suddenly, the song turns ecstatic: An orchestra appears, her voice multiplies, the lyrics splinter from sentences to incantations: “transcend!” The birdcalls persist: It’s the sound of a mourning dove, with notes that Ms. Newsom realized she had put in her melody. She had to consult bird-watchers and Cornell’s online birdsong archive to learn what it was.
“I just knew it was the birdcall I’d been hearing all my life, at the end of the day, since I was a little child,” she said. “It feels like a sort of quiet, happy lonesomeness of things ending in the fullness of time.”
Correction: October 2, 2015
An earlier version of this article, using information from Joanna Newsom’s label, Drag City, referred incorrectly to the number of albums she has released. Ms. Newsom is about to release her fourth studio album, “Divers,” not her sixth. Before her first album, “The Milk-Eyed Mender” in 2004, Ms. Newsom did make two collections of home recordings, but she does not consider them albums.
A version of this article appears in print on October 4, 2015, on page AR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Clinging to Her Every Word.
Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
PHOTOS:
1. Joanna Newsom’s first new collection since 2010 is due on Oct. 23. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times
2. Ms. Newsom, singing pop, during a performance in 2010 at Town Hall in Manhattan. Credit Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
3. Ms. Newsom, left, with Joaquin Phoenix and Katherine Waterston in the 2014 film "Inherent Vice." Credit Warner Bros. Pictures
4. Ms. Newsom at the Drink in Brooklyn last month. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times
5. Ms. Newsom with her husband, Andy Samberg, at the Emmy Awards last month. Credit Frazer Harrison/Getty Images
Re: Found on the Net ?
Posted:
16 Oct 2015, 09:06by Steve
Thank you, Wanbli, for the explanation. And everyone for the various articles - I do enjoy the "immersion" that comes before the release, and for that reason I'm not going to seek out any of the leaks / clips.
Actually I am having a disturbing situation at the moment as I may have to miss the London show that I booked on the day it was announced, owing to work
And I am guessing it's going to be too late to get them for any of the other shows in England
I wonder what that will be like ... No further information for the venue in my hometown (yay!) so far.