¤ milky moon ¤

Hello fellow Delvers! And thank you Under A CPell, Wanbli, and Butterbean, for your concern about my ticket / work situation. Actually, an obscure rule may have come to my aid, and I am now rather more confident about being able to go on 9th - I'm holding my breath but I really, REALLY hope to be there!

I wonder if I could ask a teensy favour with regards to this thread? It woiuld be great if at least the text of any articles 'found on the web' could be pasted up here, as well as a link, just in case (a) the link dies at some future time, or (b) it doesn't work outside its home country. I don't seem to be able to get the the above linked LA Times article, maybe because my browser's not up to the jhob, or perhaps because I'm not in the USA. I did read the other recently referenced article - the one from the British newspaper The Guardian - and here's a paste of the text just in case it doesn't work outside the UK:



PHOTO #1

Tim Lewis
Sunday 18 October 2015 09.00 BST
Last modified on Sunday 18 October 2015 11.59 BST

In early August, out of nowhere really, Joanna Newsom announced that she was releasing a new album called Divers on 23 October. It would be her first record for five years – “half a decade” as some blogs would sensationally report it – and as a taster she presented a video for the song Sapokanikan, shot by Paul Thomas Anderson, the director of Magnolia and The Master. This was a big concession from Newsom, who is usually guarded about releases before they come out, and it allowed the army of her most dedicated admirers – “the delvers” as she calls them today – a head start in trying to figure out what the 33-year-old US musician had been up to in the long hiatus and what twisted, unexpected rabbit holes Divers might take them down.

Newsom is almost always described as “singular” and with good reason. She is a singer whose ethereal, warbling voice instantly confuses and sometimes angers those who hear it; her primary instrument is an orchestral harp. She writes songs that last 17 minutes and avant-garde albums that swoop and soar over multiple discs. And yet each of her records – Divers is her fourth – has sold many hundreds of thousands of copies. She is, no question, a superstar of independent rock music; one who can take five years on new work sure in the knowledge that her return will be an event. She is also, perhaps, an artist whose success refutes the idea that attention spans have dwindled and that complexity is a turn-off.

VIDEO #1

Newsom has almost a Moriarty-Holmes relationship with her most ardent fans: that of the old-time master criminal and the intellectual detective who understands him better than anyone. Or perhaps it’s more aptly compared to the link that joins the crossword setter and puzzle enthusiasts. Over the course of her career, Newsom’s lyrics have become ever more intricate and she accepts that a degree of obfuscation is almost expected from her now. Sapokanikan, for example, was the result of more than two months reading around on subjects from American history to the Romantics, then a couple of weeks working on the final lyrics.

“It’s very reassuring in a way to know that the elements I spent a long time embroidering into – or, in some cases, burying in – the lines will pretty much always get found by someone,” says Newsom when we meet in a shabby photographic studio in east London. “It’s a nice relationship, I would say. I don’t know how to put it without sounding corny, but I do feel there’s some sort of exchange that happens there.”

Newsom is in the UK for a couple of days when we meet, a brief stop before even more fleeting sojourns in Paris and Berlin, then back to the States. She’s clearly boggled with jetlag – she doesn’t sleep too well at the best of times – but she’s engaging and effervescent, with startling, mostly green eyes that appear to shimmer like the northern lights. Demure, with the impeccable posture of a lifelong harpist, she is dressed primly, like a fashion-conscious librarian, apart from the ring finger of her left hand on which is a rock that ships should steer clear of. She’s very serious about her work but not especially about herself, which is probably as it should be.

PHOTO #2

Sapokanikan – a jaunty, radio-friendly earworm that fuses waltz, ragtime and other musical styles – has proved to be especially rich and satisfying for the delvers, like stumbling across Sutton Hoo. The title of the song comes from the name of a Native American village that was situated in lower Manhattan, roughly where Greenwich Village is now, before the Dutch arrived. In simple terms, Newsom explains reluctantly, the lyrics are about “the history of a piece of land, the things that happen on the same basic plot of earth”, but her exploration of this idea led her to incorporate references to Shelley’s sonnet Ozymandias, the work of the Australian artist Arthur Streeton and a history of overpainting, and John Purroy Mitchel, the “Boy Mayor” of New York City from 1914-17.

I make the mistake of referring to the preparation that went into writing Sapokanikan as “research”. “I don’t know I’d describe what I’m doing leading up to that song as ‘research’,” she says. “For me, it’s more having a hunch and following through on the hunch. Having an almost religious faith in the fact that certain things are connected and I have to lasso them all into the same place. Research: that word feels so cold to me in a way. Because it’s all very compulsive and very emotion-driven.”

Within a day or two of Sapokanikan being released, the delvers had already posted detailed annotations of the song online. Newsom gives top marks to a music website called genius.com, which crowdsources the opinions of fans to unpick tracks. Bottom of the class is the NME blog, which brilliantly misheard one particular line: so, “Depart for the western front, where work might count” became “Depart for the western front, where I walk my cow”.

“‘Where I walk my cow’, yeah,” muses Newsom. “Well, that’s nice. That’s not right, but…” She laughs. “So off. So far off. But so confident! Me and my trusty cow.”

But there is one response to Sapokanikan which, when I read it back to Newsom, gives her more pleasure than any of the others. The most popular comment on YouTube that morning is: “I didn’t understand a word, but I fucking loved it.”

“Yeah!” she exclaims. “I’m overjoyed to hear that. It’s wonderful. They are songs, so the priority for me is that the melody is good and the instrumentation is exciting and interesting and new and that it resonates with people on that level. If they said they love it, then they are getting what they show up for. They show up for something and, whatever they show up for, they got that thing. I would never presume to think they need more from that song.

“There are lots of songs I don’t understand,” she continues. “Like I don’t frankly know what ‘I am the walrus’ means as an expression, but I’m not mad at the Beatles for not explaining. Think of it as nonsense if you like; I’m fine with that.”

Joanna Newsom’s music has always made a forthright appeal to both hearts and minds. Born in 1982 in northern California, she grew up in a forty-niner gold-mining town called Nevada City. The story is that at the age of four she asked her parents – both doctors and adept musicians, especially her mother who played piano, hammered dulcimer and autoharp – if she could learn the harp. The local teacher wouldn’t take on a student so young and suggested she take piano lessons instead. Newsom became a virtuoso on both instruments. Up to the age of 10 or 11, she went to Steiner Waldorf schools and it was here that she had to memorise translations of long, involved German poems about saints and wild animals – a handily transferable skill when you write songs as lyrically complex as Newsom’s.

VIDEO #2

Her debut album, The Milk-Eyed Mender, released in 2004, was mostly vocals and harp. Its follow-up in 2007, Ys – pronounced “ees”, named after a mythical city on the coast of Brittany that was swallowed by the sea – was more ambitious in form: just five tracks that each run between seven and 17 minutes. Ambitious in sound, too: her hypnotic, spooky soprano was backed up at times on the album by a symphony orchestra. Both records were critical and commercial successes – selling, respectively, 200,000 and 250,000 copies – though not universally admired. A comparison between Newsom’s voice and Lisa Simpson’s turned up more than once.

Such criticism didn’t really sting Newsom, but there were recurring themes in the articles that did. “A lot of the writing about my music is done through a lens of straight-up sexism and, in other cases, just a coding of feminising of things,” she says. “I’ve ranted about this in the past, so I don’t want to go into it too much again. But there’s a quality I might share with…” She goes silent for a few moments. “I’m trying to think of a male musician I’ve ever been compared to. Like early, early days: Devendra Banhart. He and I had some aesthetic similarities: the music was pulling in some ways to a similar place. But where for him people would use words like ‘eccentric’ or ‘psychedelic’ and for me they’d use ‘fairytales’ and ‘unicorns’.

“It’s an infantilising thing that happens,” she goes on. “The language is minimising and narrowing of possible narrative depth. It’s the opposite of delving, really. But this is ancient history. I’ve not paid as much attention as I used to, because it was so disturbing to me when I was younger.”

VIDEO #3

You do not have to read much about her to see that Newsom has a point: “naive”, “elfin” and “childlike” are recurring adjectives, especially in early estimations of her work. The snipes seem to tail off a little around the release of her third album, Have One on Me, in 2010, in part perhaps because it is a tough record to be flippant about: three discs, 18 songs, more than two hours of smart and wondrously fused pop, country, gospel and classical. The title track was inspired by Lola Montez, an itinerant Irish-born burlesque dancer in the 19th century who became mistress to the king of Bavaria and used her power to advance a liberal agenda. Newsom became interested in Montez because she had lived for two years in Grass Valley, where Newsom was born; mostly, though, she found herself identifying with her as a woman and a performer.

A couple of years ago, a friend of Newsom’s sent her a link to a feminist blog that had detailed discussions of her music and the commentary on it. “It was kind of a tonic to read it and know I’m not an insane person,” says Newsom. “It was rounding up examples and pointing out the sexist shit people continuously write. So, there was a little bit of ‘Thank you!’ But everyone has their own thing they have to deal with, that gets said about them in reviews, it’s fine. There’s great writing out there and writing that would ruin my day if I read it, I’m sure.”

PHOTO #3

These days Newsom just tries to avoid reading the coverage of her work and personal affairs. (The attention has been amplified dramatically since she began a relationship with Andy Samberg, a comedian, actor and one-third of the comic pop group the Lonely Island. They married in 2013.) “It can lead to a little bit of that existential panic that you get from staring at a mirror too long,” she says. “You end up feeling awful about yourself. Or weird. Bare minimum: like you’re on a weird drug. Worse-case scenario: like you’ve done terrible things with your life.”

Early on with the album that would become Divers, Newsom became aware that it would not be a straightforward assignment. “More than anything I’ve done in the past, I had a sense that it would take me a long time to make this record,” she says. “It was really just a case of hunkering down and being like” – she rubs her palms together – “‘Right, let’s do this four-year project!’” She says that although she feels more experienced, more confident certainly now, that didn’t make the process any easier. “No, this record seemed to be the hardest one. But it was the most fun as well.”

On cursory examination, Divers could be mistaken for a more conventional record than her previous releases: 11 tracks; a compact 52 minutes. But the complexity – the four years – becomes evident the more you listen. The lyrics often return to love lost and found, viewed from different historical perspectives. There’s an autobiographical slant – New York, where she lived with Samberg while he was still a cast member on Saturday Night Live, is referenced often; the couple now live in Los Angeles, reportedly in a house once rented by Charlie Chaplin – but the allusions are invariably oblique. Arrangements are supplied by, among others, the influential composer Nico Muhly and multi-instrumentalist David Longstreth of experimental indie band Dirty Projectors.

It is, however, Newsom’s own skills and idiosyncrasies that really impress on Divers. Sometimes these are showcased with classical rigour through voice and harp or piano; elsewhere they are given more exuberant expression, such as on Goose Eggs where she plays Wurlitzer and Baldwin Discoverer organs, a five-octave clavichord, electric harpsichord and Rhodes piano. “We recorded the album in this one dude’s private studio that he sometimes lets people record in,” says Newsom, referring to Vox Recording Studios in Hollywood. “He has this incredible collection of instruments and there were a lot of days where we would root around and stack some piles of keyboards. I’d describe a sound I was looking for and this really sweet engineer, Michael, would pull something out and say, ‘Try this!’”

The final mix, which on previous albums had taken two weeks, sprawled to six months on Divers. And Newsom was more involved in this stage than she had ever been before. “It was just this immersive, deliriously inspired experience,” she recalls. “I’m trying to think of a word that isn’t too idealistic, but it was very joyful. There was a real abandon. A complete emerging… Or immersing myself in it.” Newsom, who is usually very precise with her use of words, goes silent for a few seconds and then reboots: “Jetlag break! I was just completely occupied with the record in a different and new way.”

It sounds intense. Newsom even avoided listening to all other music in case it influenced hers. “It just happens, your brain absorbs shit without realising,” she says, “which has been hard for my husband because he’s a huge fan and loves music playing all the time. So it’s a negotiation.”

VIDEO #4

Newsom’s most prolonged distraction from making Divers came when she received a text from Paul Thomas Anderson, who is a friend, asking her to record herself reading sections from Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. Anderson was adapting the hallucinatory detective novel for the screen and he figured that Newsom’s lilting cadences might be right for a narrator for his film, which was released last year. She wound up appearing on camera, too, as Sortilège, the confidante to the perpetually befuddled Larry “Doc” Sportello, played by Joaquin Phoenix. Not bad for an acting debut.

“There was a point where Joaquin asked me if I had ever acted in anything before,” says Newsom, “and I said, ‘Not really. Certainly not on camera. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m so nervous.’ And he was like, ‘Oh, do you think any of us know what we’re doing? Right before I start a scene’ – I don’t want to misquote him here, but he said something along the lines of, ‘I always feel that I’ve never done this before.’”

Newsom – an avid Pynchon fan – clearly warmed to the experience of acting, but she isn’t giving up the day job just yet. “Since Inherent Vice, I’ve mostly been asked to audition or read for things and I have not done that, because it’s not a world that I really want to get into,” she says. “It just seems so… I’m too old for this shit. This is not a moment in my life where I want to start hustling. Seeing if they think I’m the right person for this HBO thing or whatever. It’s just a thing that, if it happens naturally, if it’s like the situation with Paul where he was like ‘I think Newsom’s the man for the job,’ then I’ll show up and do it.”

PHOTO #4

Should Newsom ever stop making music, she figures that she might make a more dramatic shift. “I’ve realised, there’s like a 40% chance that when I’m an older woman, I’ll become the weird, eccentric interior decorator. Look out for that! That’s my next chapter.”

Newsom is messing around, although maybe not. She talks with such knowledge and compulsion about Jean Royère tables, Swedish art deco, and the Vienna Secession movement that it’s difficult to tell. “I’ve developed a borderline unhealthy obsession with design and specifically furniture design,” she admits. “I will go very deep into the world of looking at furniture. It doesn’t serve much purpose other than the way someone would watch a lot of football. I’m a fan! I’m a furniture fan!”

Does she buy the pieces she spots? “I do not,” she replies, ruefully. “I can’t buy a Jean Royère table, it costs $100,000. Literally, not an exaggeration.” She does, however, relate with unrestrained glee finding a vintage Süe et Mare rug at auction. She identified it in a book she has, Art Deco and Modernist Carpets, verified the distinctive monogram in the corner, and bought it for around $200. Later she discovered that the same rug is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “I was losing my shit, because I was so sure that someone else would figure it out before me and buy it for what it was worth,” she says. “But no one did. That’s the last frontier of finding a deal: real auctions, not eBay, but actual auctions where you participate in real time.”

Furniture design and watching television – “You’ll be shocked but I’m very into Game of Thrones! That’s the scoop of the century” – serve, Newsom thinks, to create a buffer from the ornate, high-minded and consuming world of her music. “Oh, there’s definitely an hour of the day where I pour a goblet of pinot noir and watch Downton Abbey or whatever,” she says. “I compartmentalise a little bit. When I’m working, I’m not fun to be around; it’s just a specific part of my brain and then I live in other parts of my brain at the other times of the day.”

We have spent too long discussing the allure of French and Italian mid-century furniture and how True Detective lost its way. Newsom needs to get going – she has to be in Paris tonight. No wonder, I say, it takes her five years to make a record. “I know,” she laughs. “I’m going to make a bunch of people mad. They’ll be like, ‘Stop watching TV! Get off the internet!’”

Fortunately, with Divers, Newsom has given the “delvers” – and the people who just simply “fucking love” her music – plenty to be getting on with.

CAPTIONS
PHOTO #1 - a portrait - ‘I don’t know what “I am the walrus” means but I’m not mad at the Beatles for not explaiing’: .Joanna Newsom photographed in London. Photograph: Phil Fisk for the Observer]
VIDEO #1 - the usual screenshot linking to - Joanna Newsom "Sapokanikan" (Official Video) - The video for Joanna Newsom’s Sapokanikan, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.
PHOTO #2 - Divers, Newsom’s new album cover.
VIDEO #2 - screenshot / link - Good Intentions Paving Company - Joanna Newsom - Austin City Limits - Newsom performs Good Intentions Paving Company from her second album.
VIDEO #3 - screenshot / link - Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me (ACL) - Newsom performs Have One on Me.
PHOTO #3 - Joanna Newsom and Andy Samberg in Santa Monica, California, February 2015. photograph: Tommaso Boddi/Getty Images
VIDEO #4 - screenshot / link - Inherent Vice - "Paranoia" (HD) - Inherent Vice trailer. [this is narrated by Joanna]
PHOTO #4 - presumably a still from the Inherent Vice film - Joanna Newsom, left, with Joaquin Phoenix and Katherine Waterston in Inherent Vice, Newsom’s first film role. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

I just saw the video for "Divers" in the theater before a movie. Wow. Just. Wow.

Pitchfork's Review of Divers - 8.5

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21097-divers/

I hope that more theaters will have screenings, I'd love to go see the real thing - drag city kind of hinted that more venues might be hosting the video in the future. The video and the studio version of this song have really shifted the tone for me - it seems ominous in a way it didn't before... anyone else feel that?

Hurrah for delving! She's mentioned a couple times in inteverviews how surprisingly quickly people deciphered the allusions in Sapokanikan, but don't you think that happened because people came to this site or andrew's lyrics site and availed themselves of the deciphering y'all did over time? Like the genius site is using "O Mercy! O God!" for that line we can't figure out, and that placeholder/guess came from here, so I'm guessing that's not all that came from here. Anyway, just wanted to pipe up in recognition of everyone here who delved starting in 2012 and found so much. (I only came late to the party and added a couple things and then some frustrated attempts at lyric deciphering!)

Here is the text of the LA Times article :

Joanna Newsom on plunging deep into history for 'Divers,' her first new album in five years

Photo of Joanna in purple dress
Harpist and singer-songwriter Joanna Newsom is photographed in advance of her new album, "Divers," in the Los Angeles Times studio in downtown Los Angeles. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

Randall Roberts Contact Reporter

October 16, 2015, 6:00 AM

Joanna Newsom will issue her fourth album, "Divers," on Friday, and since releasing her previous one in 2010 she's experienced a series of life changes.

Five years ago, she'd already collaborated with Van Dyke Parks and performed at Walt Disney Concert Hall but had yet to appear as narrator and actress in Paul Thomas Anderson's film "Inherent Vice." She'd jumped homes from Nevada City, Calif., to New York City, where she drew inspiration for "Divers" from the city's kaleidoscopic back story.

Newsom recently relocated to Los Angeles to make a home with her husband, comic actor Andy Samberg, reportedly at a place called Moorcrest. A grandly peculiar, mosaic-filled home in Hollywood Hills, its former occupants include movie star Mary Astor and actor-director Charlie Chaplin.

She spent four years working on "Divers," a work so lyrical and precisely rendered that Hollywood obligations and a Disney-esque mansion seem like passing concerns. Carrying its own cinematic grandeur, the album's 11 songs feature characters both historic and fictional, including Private Poorwill, King Tamanend and a military brigade called the 101st Lightborne Elite. The footnotable references and labyrinthine lines are presented in a package in which every syllable is sacred, each note filled with a sense of the possible. Focused listening is rewarded.

She described the setting of "Divers" as a "a place where history and humanity is concentrated and layered." It sounds like the city but jumps through time and space.

A harp and a voice

Combined, said Newsom, the overarching set of connections that built "Divers" asserted itself not long after she started writing for the album. "I started realizing that I was returning to the same collection of ideas over and over again, narratively, and I was approaching them in different ways," she said over lunch near Fountain Avenue and L. Ron Hubbard Drive.

"This song, I might be approaching the set of ideas in a fantastical way, and in that song, I might be approaching them in a very straightforward way. This one I might be approaching them from a first-person or autobiographical perspective, and this song I might be approaching them from a much more sort of zoomed-out, almost disembodied, omniscient narrative perspective.

"I started to feel that all the songs were connected in that way," she added. "Almost that they were all asking the same question."

At the musical center of "Divers" are Newsom's primary instruments, the harp and her soaring voice, which are augmented at various times with electric guitar, piano, drum kit, bouzouki, trombone, violin, musical saw or, in the case of "Time, As a Symptom," the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. Newsom expanded her own instrumentation to include the clavichord, harpsichord and Mellotron. In a new twist, she also added classic synthesizers and immersed herself with engineer Noah Georgeson in the art of mixing the album's many frequencies into a sonically cohesive whole. It was recorded by Georgeson and Steve Albini.

"I think I had the sense that this was an album that was going to become itself in the mix — that there were so many disparate elements and strange sort of piles of options that had accumulated, not all of which would have ended up being useful," she said.

This whirlwind of creative curiosity is partially what drew the contemporary composer-arranger Nico Muhly to collaborate with Newsom on the album's first song, called "Anecdotes." Noting what he called her fearlessness, Muhly (best known to the general public for his work on films including "Margaret" and "The Reader") described Newsom in an email as "a mistress of structure and of governing time; the listener feels on a journey with a responsible guide."

David Longstreth, best known for founding the avant-pop band Dirty Projectors, contributed orchestral arrangement to “Time, As a Sympton,” the album’s coda. Writing via email on the process of collaboration, he said: “Musically, she knew more or less exactly what she wanted in every measure of the song. So there was a fair amount of back-and-forth just making sure we got it to how she was hearing it. I haven't done a ton of stuff as an arranger for other peoples’ music — I wanted to do this because she is one of my favorite songwriters — so it was a new and unique process for me.”

Such precision is obvious throughout, but notably on the second song on "Divers," called "Sapokanikan," the original name for what is now Greenwich Village.

(Joanna Newsom calls Spotify "a villainous cabal" and "a garbage system")

Musically, the piece mixes Brecht with the Baroque, hinting at "Hejira"-era Joni Mitchell. Opening with a gentle, timeless tangle of piano and snare drum, the song defiantly avoids the contemporary, dotting through decades with each measure as lyrics reference Tammany Hall, hunters of the future and a mysterious woman named Florry Walker. It approaches bombast but retreats, moves into a drunken waltz and spins in circles as Newsom harmonizes with herself before finishing in a different musical environment entirely after just over five minutes. It's all very studied and cosmopolitan, which makes sense.

"New York was useful as sort of a case study for some of the things that I wanted to talk about," said Newsom. "There's a lot of binary stuff on the record — pulling." She describes what she called "obvious boldface" themes like "time, space, life, death, but a lot of the songs are occupying or trying to cross the border between those two opposing forces, and I feel like the idea of the city, which in some songs is named — New York — and in others songs is not named, is sort of a character."

'Weird and genius'

Newsom, 33, sublimely articulate about her tastes and approaches, was born and raised in Nevada City, one of three children in a family whose distant relation is Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom. She knew she wanted to be a professional musician at an early age and gravitated toward the most unwieldy of instruments, the harp, while also studying piano. After studying composition at Mills College in Northern California and recording two early EPs, the artist signed to the respected Chicago label Drag City, which over the years has been home to iconoclastic artists including Will Oldham, Jennifer Herrema and Pavement. Her 2004 first album, "The Milk-Eyed Mender," marked the arrival of a similarly inventive and equally uncommercial voice.

Longstreth said he first heard Newsom’s music when a friend burned him a copy of early versions of songs that became “The Milk-Eyed Mender.”

“I was in college, living in this weird house off-campus with some friends, and we blasted it a lot in that house," said Longstreth. "The melodies, the stories, the rhymes, the chord progressions: she was speaking our language for sure. I think it was one of the reasons I left school the next semester. I was like, "[what] am I doing here if someone is already out there making music like this, on this level??"

He added that he and Dirty Projectors member Amber Coffman absorbed “Ys” during a 2006 journey through the Southwest. “Amber and I were driving a Dodge Caravan full of gear across the west Texas desert, and I remember the two of us listening to it over and over for two nights, no one else out on the highway and the stars just impossibly big.”

It was around this time that Muhly first saw Newsom perform, at the Bowery Ballroom in New York. "My roommate and I had arrived early, and Joanna wheeled her harp out and started singing 'Bridges and Balloons,'" he recalled. "We were mesmerized and basically dumbstruck about how great and weird and genius the whole thing was."

Detractors tend to focus more on that weirdness. Those looking for Beatles-esque verse-chorus-verse resolution, for example, are in for some trouble. Her lyrics seem written not only to be sung but also to work on the page, and she's more than willing to sacrifice singalong ease for expository conceits. Lines are stitched together with an expert's hand, then brought to life through a confident voice that can reach and hold notes one moment and squawk the next.

Newsom moved further from pop structures on her second album, "Ys," an angular, challenging work produced and arranged in collaboration with Parks that confirmed her promise. Its success carried her away from smoky clubs into concert halls, including a memorable performance at Disney Hall in 2007.

"Divers" is no less challenging than either "Ys" or 2010's "Have One on Me." But it is, said Newsom, the most thematically linked album she's done, even if narrative strands are hardly chronological. Rather, Newsom describes the work as "a sort of narrative loop."

"Each song is running a leg of the relay and then passing the baton to the next song, but they're all ultimately circumnavigating something."

Unlocking the album's secrets, like all of Newsom's work, requires intentional listening. She returns, though, to the notion of time, the ways in which it interacts with a plot of land and the people who inhabit it. In typically descriptive language she calls these souls "stuck together and squashed together, living and dying and making noise and smelling weird and falling in love, creating beauty and fighting with each other and all that. It's so saturated there."

The same could be said for the immersive "Divers."

randall.roberts@latimes.com

Copyright © 2015, Los Angeles Times
UPDATE
9:30 a.m. This story was updated with comments from Newsom collaborator David Longstreth.

The article was originally published at 6 a.m.

(This article is related to: Entertainment Nico Muhly Walt Disney Concert Hall Spotify Andy Samberg Randall Roberts Bonnie Prince Billy)

It's probably a blue dress with purplish lighting?

What are you talking about? It's clearly white and gold.

Thank you for the article, Under A CPell, and for the video link, Butterbean.
I watched half of the video, and although it was clearly filmed from a mobile phone in a cinema, I found it did a remarkable job of enriching the experience of listening to the song. Then came a phone call and a hasty visit to work, and when I returned a few hours layer, only the first 3:40 would play, and I see the original has been taken down at Drag City's request. Not surprised really, but I hope sometime to be able to see the climactic second half... Maybe it will come out on some future CD single, like Sprout And The Bean did way back in 2004.

Here's a new NPR review that seems pretty amazing, but really pretty spoilery, so I had to stop reading it partway through! Which is the reason I'm not pasting it here right now, Steve, cause I'm not sure if people would want that? Feel free to disagree and paste it though, anyone. http://www.npr.org/2015/10/19/449323861 ... r-the-ages

Jordan

LEAKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKk
and i'm on my way to work. well. shit. gonna be a long 8 hours

INTERVIEW
Q&A: Joanna Newsom On Moving Rocks, Annotating Lyrics, And Playing The Hits
T. Cole Rachel | 9:14 am

CREDIT: Annabel Mehran

Given the nature of her work — the intricate arrangements; the complicated, often byzantine lyrics; the harp; that extraordinarily wild voice — it’s not surprising that Joanna Newsom has managed to engender such a devoted fan base. She is the very definition of a “singular” artist — someone whose work is totally unmistakable as belonging to anyone else. Over the course of three increasingly challenging full-length releases, Newsom has risen from the ranks of twee freak-folkster to something resembling a kind of rarefied rock stardom (or as close as one can come to such a thing in the world of indie rock). Her last record, 2010’s Have One On Me, was a three-disc behemoth of beautifully knotty songs about love and friendship and the occasional jackrabbit, which was somehow still less challenging than 2006’s Ys, her Van Dyke Parks-arranged extravaganza that boasted songs that regularly twirled past the 10-minute mark and pushed Newsom’s love of winding narratives to dizzying new levels. This being said, Newsom’s music, while always fascinating, is admittedly not for everyone. Her work should ostensibly be the kind of material destined only to guarantee lifetime status as a cult figure, but for whatever reasons — her uncanny charisma and profound talent among them — people have been willing to follow Joanna Newsom wherever she has seen fit to go. Her new album, Divers, should only deepen her fan base. The record is no less ornate than previous efforts, but with only 11 tracks, it’s a much more digestible affair. The production is predictably lush (including contributions from Nico Muhly and Dave Longstreth), and the songs still sprawl in a million fascinating directions, roaming across narratives involving everything from pearl divers and goose eggs to ancient tobacco settlements. However, there is a clarity of vision and a heightened melodicism at play on Divers that makes the record slightly easier to tackle than her last two releases, even though the repeated listens and slow process of unpacking is often what makes Joanna Newsome records so fascinating.

I met up with Newsom in NYC to talk about her new record, her process, and — ultimately — the strange business of talking about one’s art. For someone who gets frequently portrayed (somewhat maddeningly and derisively, in my opinion) as a kind of whimsical elf woman and/or a quirky eccentric who, as one friend recently mentioned, “one imagines living in an enchanted forest somewhere in Narnia,” Newsom is remarkably unfussy when it comes to talking about her music. She is, however, not remotely interested in dispelling any mystery her work might hold for her fans. “I feel like people in general would prefer to have their own experiences getting into the songs,” she says. “The way the songs are written — the references and the double meanings, those sorts of things — for me, those give life to the music. Those are for me. Those make the air breathable and the ground solid underfoot. They create a realness and a substance in the songs, but they’re not what the songs are necessarily about.”

(Video screen for: Joanna Newsom "Leaving The City" (Official Audio))

STEREOGUM: I know you’ve just started doing the press for this record. How is that experience for you? I know a lot of artists find it more than a little painful.

NEWSOM: What’s painful for me is the photo stuff. I really hate doing photo shoots. I just wish every photo shoot I do could be with my friend Annabel. She’s done my press shots and she also did some of the album artwork, and I feel very safe with her. It becomes kind of a fun collaborative thing with her, but I have so much anxiety about it normally. If there were some way to get away with not doing it, then I wouldn’t, but there are a lot of publications that say, “We will only do this article if you do a photo shoot with us. We need exclusive photos that we take.” And you know, I want to get that sweet, sweet press. Move some units, you know? [laughs]

STEREOGUM: After finishing the touring cycle for Have One On Me, did you take a break before starting on new music, or are you someone who is always working?

NEWSOM: Typically I have taken time at the end after a long tour cycle. With this record I didn’t. Basically as soon as things calmed down after touring Have One on Me — actually before touring had even really stopped — I started writing this album and I really felt pushed toward something. The early stuff didn’t feel speculative. It just started to happen. I definitely didn’t think it was going to take me five years. I was blissfully ignorant of how long it would take, but I had a very strong idea early on what I wanted it to be, and it just took so long to happen.

STEREOGUM: Your work is often driven by these very complicated narratives. How does the process usually work for you? Does the music and the story kind of evolve simultaneously, or do you begin with these stories that you want to tell and allow the music to evolve around them?

NEWSOM: In general, the thing that comes to me first is the bare-bones version of the melody and chord progression. Basically, if the song was stuck in your head and you are humming it to yourself, the thing you would hum: That’s usually what comes to me first. I think I usually know what the song is about at that point, but I don’t really have the lyrics for it, I don’t have structure for it, and usually I don’t have a sense of narrative progression. Although, sometimes I do. Sometimes I see the beginning, the middle, and the end; I just don’t have words for it yet. The next thing — and usually kind of last of all — is the refinement of the instrumental parts. It might be very plinky-plonky at first: chord, chord, chord, chord, and then by the end it has some harmonic interest and rhythmic thing happening.

STEREOGUM: Has that process changed a lot over the years or has it always sort of been that way?

NEWSOM: I think it’s changed a lot of times. I always feel a little guilty when answering questions about process because I’m sort of always guessing. I don’t remember writing most of my songs for the first 15 to 20 percent of the process. By the place where my memory kicks in, the song has had a fair amount of development by that point.

STEREOGUM: I think that’s a good thing.

NEWSOM: Sure! It’s weird though. Normally, in other walks of life, if you have long stretches of time that you black out about and can’t remember, it’s not healthy.

STEREOGUM: I think in creative processes, being able to work in a way where you’re totally un-self-aware and are sort of just lost in the process, that’s usually when something good is happening and you’re not constantly pausing to second-guess things. You’re in it.

NEWSOM: I think that’s right. I think probably it’s not a coincidence that my memory tends to kick in at the same point where the work goes from intuitive and sort of compulsive into more refinement level: editing, compositional detail, etc.

STEREOGUM: Was Divers a particularly difficult record to make?

NEWSOM: That’s a hard question to answer, because I think of difficulty as sort of an unpleasant and joyless sensation. And that’s the opposite of how the record felt. It was a lot of work, it was a lot of hard work, but it was also like good, honest work. Like, if you have a pile of rocks that you want to move to a different spot in the yard, you move them rock by rock …

STEREOGUM: That’s a funny analogy. It was like moving rocks?

NEWSOM: Well, you know, you’re out in the sun and you’re humming to yourself and you know exactly where each rock needs to go, but it takes some time, and they’re heavy, and sometimes you have to call a friend and borrow a wheelbarrow. Maybe one particular friend you have is super good at moving rocks a certain way, so you get that friend to come in and move a couple of rocks, put their own spin on the rock-moving. Then you have to climb up on the roof, look at the rocks from a distance, make sure they look stable and they aren’t going to fall. The whole thing is, you know what you’re doing: You’re moving rocks. There wasn’t like a moment where I existentially forgot what I was doing or questioned the importance of the rock-moving.

STEREOGUM: After listening to this record, I went and watched some YouTube videos of how people learn to play harp. It’s so complicated. It’s unbelievable to me that anybody ever learns how to do it.

NEWSOM: It feels really weird when I’m rusty, when I don’t have calluses. When it’s been long enough that I lose my calluses, that makes me feel really sad and guilty. It’s much more comfortable to feel like I’m in shape.

STEREOGUM: You once very notably referred to you voice as being essentially “untrainable” …

NEWSOM: That’s one of my least favorite things I’ve ever said. The innocence or ignorance of youth or whatever.

STEREOGUM: I remembered that quote while listening to this record, I guess because I really don’t think that’s a true statement about your voice. Particularly on this record, your voice sounds very controlled and very strong in a way that it didn’t used to.

NEWSOM: I think when I called my voice “untrainable” — which was, like, 107 years ago, when I made my first record — I think it was kind of a defensive thing to say. I think it was probably after having been told by like 8,000 journalists that they thought my voice was confrontational. They thought I was willfully trying to comment on popular conventions of vocal beauty, and like there was something kind of punk rock about it, and I think at that point I was trying to say, “Well, I can’t help it. I can’t sing another way. I can’t train myself to sing another way.” But “untrainable” was the wrong word to use, because after I made that first record, I started touring a lot, and in a non-formal sense, I started training it. When you use your voice at two-hour concerts every single night, it shapes and changes it.

Then I did it again with Ys — my voice was different on that record. Then I toured again for a few more years, and I was playing two-hour shows every night for months on end, and then I got vocal-cord nodes right before recording Have One On Me and decided to go to a vocal coach in order to try to prevent that from happening again. I learned some warm-ups that are geared toward not getting vocal-cord nodes. Then I toured that record for a couple of years, and in the course of touring, I was doing these vocal warmups every single night before a show. I do my vocal warmups every time I rehearse, every time I record, before anything. That is a kind of training.

STEREOGUM: It’s amazing what a huge difference it makes.

NEWSOM: I think I gained over an octave. If you add top and bottom range, I think just from doing vocal warmups every night, I think I gained an octave and a half in total. At least maybe five or six whole steps in either direction.

STEREOGUM: When you finish a record, there’s that period of time when it’s totally done, but before everybody else in the world gets to hear it. Do you ever have a moment when you look at the finished record and see that you were working out things — maybe certain themes and ideas — that you didn’t even realize were there?

NEWSOM: I’ve had that with albums in the past. I’m curious if I’ll have that with this one, because the path for this one felt so clear in a weird way, especially narratively. I felt pretty clear on what I wanted to say with the songs. You’re right, there is an element of looking back in the music, but I think more specifically with this record, I’m looking at time.

STEREOGUM: Do you anticipate doing a lot of touring for the record?

NEWSOM: Yeah, I think I’m slowly moved in that direction. I’m trying to figure out how to tour in a way that is more sustainable and doesn’t make me so crazy that I get turned off touring and stop touring forever.

STEREOGUM: Touring is hard, but it shouldn’t feel like torture.

NEWSOM: It’s hard to do, and it’s kind of expensive to do — that’s the tricky thing. So I have to figure out how to tour the way I want to tour and not be paying for the privilege of doing that. It’s a puzzle I haven’t quite solved yet, but I know I can’t go back to the way I toured around Ys, where I was doing nine-week leg after nine-week leg. Every aspect of everything I owned was just permeated with the scent of bus.

STEREOGUM: It’s also much less of a novelty when you’re not in your early 20s anymore and doing it for the first time.

NEWSOM: That’s true. I also think there might be some people that are just naturally better attuned to the fast pace of travel. I like a form of travel; I like the kind of travel where you rent a house in a city and stay there for a month and get to know that area. Long before I was a professional musician, even when I was younger, I did not like traveling in a fast pace.

I’ve always been kind of a homebody, so touring is hard. I have band members who are awesome at it. They get up in the morning, they rent bikes, they go to museums. Meanwhile, I will be in my curtained-off crypt on the bus until 1:30 in the afternoon, when someone will slip a coffee cup through the curtain and be like, “Please get up. You need to get up or else you will be so sad.” [laughs]

STEREOGUM: I find it heartening to see how many people really love what you do. It’s great to see music that is ostensibly kind of challenging and a little weird actually be successful out in the world. Are you ever surprised that your work resonates in such a strong way with people?

NEWSOM: Yeah, I mean … we’ll see! This is a new record, so it’s possible people might not like it as much. I don’t want to be like, I’m just so surprised that people like it and buy it! It’s such an amazing thing! … and then I sell five records. I know a lot of it has to do with my shows. It does seem like a miracle that the thing I’m most interested in spending my time working on is also something that some people want to listen to and that some people have nice things to say about. That’s amazing. That makes me very, very lucky. It’s rare.

STEREOGUM: I know very few people that actually make a living doing something they love.

NEWSOM: I try not to read reviews or look at stuff about myself online if at all possible, but after the “Sapokanikan” video came out, I saw something that I think my dad sent me: That website Genius had already annotated the lyrics to the song, and it was maybe only hours after the video was out. A lot of the material elements of the song — meaning the things that could be deciphered or could be researched — had been thoroughly found at that point. As of the last time I saw it, there were still a few little things that hadn’t been figured out, so I was like, “Haha! You haven’t got that yet!” But they had gotten so much of it. Obviously that stuff is not all the song is about, but it was such an interesting feeling. I’m just bringing this up in response to you asking if I’m ever surprised. It really felt like a miracle in that moment, because this is a thing that has been secret and kind of precious to me — where no one has heard it for five years — and within hours, I put it out in the world and there were people out there deciphering it. There might be literally only six people having this conversation in the whole world, but that’s still pretty amazing. That’s such an incredible feeling.

(Video screen for: Joanna Newsom "Sapokanikan" (Official Video))

STEREOGUM: Without giving too much away, was there a kind of theme or idea behind Divers, some guiding principle, perhaps, that ties all of these narratives together? Or a reason that, for you, all of these stories make sense being clustered together?

NEWSOM: In the most general sense, while trying not to give too much away … and by the way, when I say, “give too much away” I don’t mean that there’s some deep secret that needs to be dug up to understand the songs.

STEREOGUM: It’s not like there has to be a right answer. It should mean whatever it means to you — you being the listener.

NEWSOM: Exactly. To whatever extent there is stuff — again just referring to the material level — can you imagine if I had come out with “Sapokanikan” before that annotation thing we were talking about had come out, and if I was just like, “So this song references this, this, this, and that.” Those five or six people who wrote up that annotation, they would’ve been bummed that I just handed that to them.

STEREOGUM: The unpacking and deciphering is part of the pleasure.

NEWSOM: I feel like people in general would prefer to have their own experiences getting into the songs. And some people, by the way, don’t care about that side of things at all, and that is just fine. The way the songs are written — the references and the double meanings, those sorts of things — for me, those give life to the music. Those are for me. Those make the air breathable and the ground solid underfoot. They create a realness and a substance in the songs, but they’re not what the songs are necessarily about.

I would say all the songs on this record either ask the same question, or attempt to make the same case, or are lamenting the same thing or celebrating the same thing or railing against the same thing. I think that, taken as a set or cycle, they are each sort of like relay racers passing the baton on from one to the other. They are circumnavigating the perimeter of the idea that is the central narrative of the album. So each of the songs is representative of one stretch of the landscape. Then you can sort of see that what they’ve traced is the central thing. So there are all these sorts of set pieces. They’re not really what the album is about; they’re just things that appear again and again and again: a sort of context.

STEREOGUM: You have a pretty deep catalog now. When you think about your earliest songs, have your feelings about that material changed? Does it feel odd to revisit them?

NEWSOM: A few of them are kind of weird for me to play now. A few of them … well, I feel really far from the person who wrote them. Other ones, I can kind of find my way back into, even if I’m not the same person I was then. I can kind of sink into it a little bit. Instrumentally, especially, I just feel it in my muscle memory, and playing the songs kind of brings me back there. They shift around over time — not only my relationships with the songs, but the way the songs sound. Sometimes I’ll add instruments or mess with the arrangements to keep it interesting.

I like playing those old songs, though. I like playing all of it. I like playing what people want to hear. I definitely don’t have that position of, “Oh, don’t make me play the hits!” or whatever my equivalent of “hits” might be. I like playing the stuff people want to hear. It’s fun to see people be excited.

//

Joanna Newsom’s Divers is out 10/23 via Drag City.

Can she really have forgotten that she played Sapokanikan live 3 years ago?

Maybe she didn't know that anyone recorded it? Though I'm not sure how that could be assumed about almost any public show nowadays. It does seem like she largely stays away from the online world of people talking about her work, so maybe she was just unaware that it had gone on youtube? Probably looking at this website would be pretty much too weird in some ways, but I sort of wish she could do it just to see the process of people trying to decipher the lyrics and unpack the allusions of Sapokanikan! Since she keeps mentioning in interviews that the listeners' delving brings her a certain amount of joy!

Reading these articles and interviews is really racking up the tension ahead of 23rd! Ive decided to order the vinyl (and cassette ... I know, I know) from Drag City, but to get the actual CD that I will play from my local record shop - both because I think they need my support (and lots of others) and so I can choose an unblemished copy. I am sure that qualifies me for some sort of übernerdship award. Also, apart from the two official pre-releases (oh and half of the illegally recorded cinematic video, as mentioned earlier), I'm not going to seek out any leaks or whatever, and just enjoy the album straight through with the good headphones and the curtains closed, probably on the evening I get it. Of course, there's the chance that my local place won;t get it in on the day of release ... which would be annoying: I'd then probably have to avoid MM for a day or two until I get it.