¤ milky moon ¤

words cannot come from this mouth to say what I just experienced...

and shall not until it is out (at least on NPR) and folks had their listen and start to share.

Jordan- perhaps it is time for that top level Divers forum like HOOM?
That way those who have listened can discuss without too many spoilers?

thanks!

you rock - thanks
now back to your dissertation!

NPR stream:

WARNING: CONTAINS LYRICS SPOILER!

http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospect ... na-newsom/

Have Another One on Me: The Return of Joanna Newsom
(Photo by Annabel Mehran)
MUSIC
OCTOBER 21, 2015
by STEVEN HYDEN

“I have never written about a unicorn.”

Joanna Newsom is laughing, but she’s not joking. Newsom truly wants people to understand that as one of the most accomplished musicians and sophisticated songwriters associated with indie rock in the early 21st century, she is not interested in a fantastical creature that has adorned countless middle school binders. Even after four albums — including her masterful new LP, Divers — spaced out over an 11-year career, Newsom believes that a lot of people still don’t get her.

“I’m not in any way, shape, or form singing fairy tales or nursery rhymes,” Newsom, 33, reiterates during a recent phone conversation. “It’s like people are so attached to that narrative about me that they’re expending valuable energy that they could be putting into so much other stuff — like listening to this record, or any record.”

I’ve just asked Newsom about the media coverage of her 2004 debut, The Milk-Eyed Mender, a beguiling collection of folk songs that established Newsom’s myriad idiosyncrasies: her singular voice, an untrained, warbly soprano that manages to sound guileless and ancient simultaneously; her Lyon & Healy orchestral harp, which Newsom plucks with a degree of proficiency that the New York Times later likened to Eddie Van Halen; her songwriting, drawn from a wide spectrum of styles deriving from West Africa, the Appalachian mountains, passed-down Celtic balladry, ’70s-era Laurel Canyon, and scores of other far-flung traditions; and her lyrics, a dense tapestry of historical references, obscure nouns, confessional asides, and more jokes than she gets credit for.

Newsom was only 22 when Mender came out — she started recording songs while attending Mills College in Oakland, where she studied musical composition. After playing some shows with her friend the singer-songwriter Devendra Banhart, Newsom was discovered by the well-regarded indie-folk artist Will Oldham, who invited her to open for him on tour after hearing her demos. A record deal with Oldham’s label, Chicago’s long-running indie Drag City, soon followed.

The music press didn’t know what to make of this young woman who played strange, wordy songs on an anachronistic instrument. Was she a genius? Or a collection of odd affectations? The Milk-Eyed Mender became one of 2004’s most acclaimed albums, but the way in which Newsom was described — as a “forest nymph,” “elfin,” or a “handmaiden of the harp” — either idealized or patronized her.

To be fair, Newsom hasn’t completely discouraged these sorts of classifications. For instance, the publicity photos for Divers depict Newsom as an ethereal figure in a flowing dress who commiserates with wildlife amid breathtaking oceanside vistas. It’s pretty Tolkienesque. But as a musician, Newsom remains the rarest of commodities: a true original who doesn’t sound like anybody else.

Early on, however, Newsom was swiftly lumped into an ad-hoc genre anyway: freak folk, a tag also applied to Banhart, the Decemberists, Sufjan Stevens, and other assorted beardos nominally influenced by far-out, psych-tinged ’60s rock and ’70s pastoral prog. Newsom immediately rejected the term — “I can say, as one of the key people who was considered part of that movement, that it did not exist,” she says now — and instead focused on cultivating her own musical world, which over time has separated her even further from whatever “indie” music is supposed to sound like in 2015.

When Newsom put out The Milk-Eyed Mender, there was a space in indie music for unabashed strangeness. Artists who went out of their way to construct obtuse, convoluted albums that took weeks, even months, to decipher could actually become stars. Newsom played to an audience that also embraced mind-bending LPs like Animal Collective’s Sung Tongs and the Fiery Furnaces’s Blueberry Boat. Incredibly, The Milk-Eyed Mender sold more than 200,000 copies in the U.S.

But now that sort of willful obscurity is regarded with suspicion, even scorn. And yet Newsom remains her own island. Divers is relatively accessible by her standards — verses generally meander toward fitfully catchy choruses, and her vocals have matured from the wayward squeak of her earlier records, exhibiting a fuller interpretive range and surprising soulfulness. But Divers hardly seems contemporary; rather, it aspires to exist outside of time.

(Video for Sapokanikan)

Perhaps this is why the media still doesn’t know what to do with Joanna Newsom: When the Paul Thomas Anderson–directed video for Divers’s first single, “Sapokanikan,” came out in August, Newsom once again was reduced to a “warbling wood nymph” stereotype.

“I was just sort of poking around to see if anybody liked [the video] and I had to stop reading immediately,” she says, no longer laughing. “It’s pretty sexist.”

♦♦♦

A native of Nevada City, a hippie enclave in Northern California that’s a haven for artists, New Age mystics, and anyone else eager to escape the grid, Newsom has a natural West Coast sunniness that doesn’t dim even when she’s annoyed. You can see why Anderson cast her in Inherent Vice as the film’s narrator, Sortilège — like the state she hails from, Newsom’s effervescence is undercut with a deeper, more mysterious vibe.

This quality also links Newsom with the most iconic singer-songwriters in modern music history. Like Dylan, Cohen, and Joni, Newsom has an intense cult of followers who pore over her songs obsessively in the hopes of “solving” them. Shortly after the “Sapokanikan” video appeared online, fans rushed to interpret the song’s tangled narrative, which references the Native American village that predates Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, where Newsom lived during part of Divers’s prolonged gestation.

Newsom concedes that “the capital-C City” plays a prominent role on Divers, as both an inspiration and a metaphor for how history is “layered on top of history, [and] on top of history,” resulting in a “sort of revisionist thing as told by the people who won.”

The songs percolated in Newsom’s brain long before she began to formally write, arrange, and record them. This process commenced not long after the tour cycle for Newsom’s previous LP, the sprawling triple-record set Have One on Me, wrapped five years ago. As time went on, nonmusical parts of Newsom’s life took precedence — she filmed Inherent Vice with Anderson in the summer of 2013, and then married longtime boyfriend Andy Samberg that fall — but all the while Divers loomed.

When talking about the making of Divers, Newsom strikes seemingly contradictory poses. She feels the album “kind of wrote itself,” in that she didn’t consciously set out to write a set of tunes suggesting that life coexists at all times with death. (This concept is illustrated most awesomely on my favorite track, “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne,” in which interstellar warriors bend the space-time continuum in order to battle a supernatural army.) It just sort of happened that way. Despite a seemingly casual writing process, Newsom ended up making “sort of a concept record,” she says.

Newsom declines to elaborate, preferring not to “spoil” Divers for listeners. Perhaps she is also protecting herself — back in Nevada City, a few of her more unhinged fans would occasionally show up uninvited at her house, which understandably upset her. Now Newsom is extra-careful when it comes to guarding details about her marriage or where she currently resides in Los Angeles.

What distinguishes Divers from Newsom’s past work is how many songs don’t appear to be coded, but are rather relatively straightforward statements about love and mortality. Take the title track, a lost-at-sea ode with a tearjerker chorus: “I don’t know if you loved me most, but you loved me last.” (Newsom sings it like she’s channeling Dusty Springfield.) The album ends with “Time, As a Symptom,” a stark piano dirge that builds to a symphonic crescendo as Newsom — backed by the full force of the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra — essentially states what the album is about:

So it would seem to be true:
When cruel birth debases, we forget.
When cruel death debases,
We believe it erases all the rest
That precedes.
But stand brave, life-liver,
Bleeding out your days
In the river of time
Stand brave:
Time moves both ways.

Divers also seems musically pared back, with warm keyboard sounds and Newsom’s inviting voice pushed to the forefront. In reality, it’s as complicated as any of her previous albums.

One reason Divers took so long to make is that Newsom spent a couple of years cycling through different arrangers — including Nico Muhly, Ryan Francesconi, and David Longstreth of Dirty Projectors — and adding intricate overdubs. (Newsom herself plays more than a dozen keyboards, along with her harp.) The idea was to create a “very specific world” for each track, which required breaking down the songs with the arrangers and finding the right music to convey their essence.

“I basically say all the stuff I would never wanna say in an interview,” Newsom says of these collaborations, “because it would ruin the album for someone who wants to listen to it and have any personal relationship with it. I just spoil all the songs for anyone I’m working with because I want them to work with me to try to create a living, breathing world. It’s all such tricky stuff to talk about — words that seemed to have a very clear meaning when you’re speaking narratively start having a very unclear meaning when you’re speaking musically. We more or less know what sad is, but we don’t all agree on what sad sounds like. We know what ‘ominous’ means as a word, but we don’t all hear the same thing as ominous.”

This endless intellectualizing resulted in the most expressive music of Newsom’s career. The strength of Divers is that Newsom’s ambition and technical prowess aren’t as front-loaded as before. For all of their compositional brilliance, 2006’s Ys and 2010’s Have One on Me are unwieldy, exhausting listens. With Divers, Newsom still packs enough information to make the 10th listen as much of a discovery as the first. But the album feels airier and easier to digest — it’s a callback to the directness of The Milk-Eyed Mender, even if the sense of simplicity is an illusion fostered by Newsom’s clever song constructions.

“I’m a perfectionist about making records, and everything else that I do is pretty loosey-goosey,” she says. “I get really hyper-focused and particular and kind of micromanage-y and gripped by a specific set of needs and parameters and ideas that I stick to when I’m making a record. I’m not like that about anything else, really.”

If the debate on Newsom hasn’t already been called, Divers settles it: She’s a genius, or at least the closest thing contemporary music has to a genius. So, yeah, she has a right to be irritated when after spending a half-decade meticulously crafting fascinating, bizarre, and wholly unique pocket symphonies, she gets reduced to a cutesy woodland creature. Joanna Newsom doesn’t write about unicorns — she’s actually much weirder and more awe-inspiring.

I couldn't read the Newsweek article, it said that I had reached my limit of 5 free articles this month, which I can't believe is true... Perhaps someone who can read it will copy and paste?

Newsweek

Joanna Newsom’s High Dive
BY ZACH SCHONFELD / OCTOBER 21, 2015 6:34 AM EDT

“Wikipedia is amazing,” exclaims Joanna Newsom.

The harpist and songwriter likely won’t read the entry about herself, but she frequently dives down Wikipedia rabbit holes. “Reading something on Wikipedia will often send me off in a new direction,” she says. While living in New York’s Greenwich Village several years ago, for instance, Newsom found herself digging up historical nuggets on the neighborhood around Washington Square Park.

Unlike most of us, Newsom channels these procrastinatory-seeming Internet binges into song. Vivid, stunning songs of melancholy and longing, written for the harp or piano, with dizzying and self-referential verses rich with literary allusion. The song spurred by the Washington Square Park rabbit hole, “Sapokanikan” (a word I am very much afraid of mispronouncing in Newsom’s presence), is named after a Native American village located in what is now lower Manhattan. Built around a winding piano melody, the song tells of forgotten mayors and Tammany Hall, of the 19th-century sonnet “Ozymandias” and of history’s inevitable fade into obscurity.

When Newsom released “Sapokanikan” unexpectedly one morning in August, accompanied by a music video and the news that she would be releasing her first album in five and a half years, the Internet erupted, as if the folksinger had just climbed out of an unmarked grave. Within hours, fans—and NPR—set to work deciphering the song’s tangle of references. Newsom’s fan base is deep, devoted and (on a somewhat smaller scale) as obsessive as Radiohead’s or Bob Dylan’s a generation prior. There is even a collection of both personal and scholarly interpretations of her music titled Visions of Joanna Newsom and a modestly successful band named after her in Wales (Joanna Gruesome).


It’s a strange time to be Joanna Newsom. An indie icon, one of the most revered songwriters to emerge this side of the millennium, she’s spent five years in varying degrees of seclusion, dabbling in film and endlessly postponing fans’ wishes for a new record. Divers, the album she’s finally finished, arrives October 23 to rapt anticipation. It’s lighter in tone and shorter than the 2010 epic Have One on Me, and it’s the most instrumentally varied work she’s ever produced, with both keyboards and synths accompanying her long-favored harp. At 11 tracks in 52 minutes, Divers is the first Newsom album since her debut not to push the extremes of the album format (there are no nine-minute baroque epics or multiple discs) and the first music she’s put out since marrying actor and comedian Andy Samberg in 2013. A few numbers even sound...joyful?

For Newsom’s followers, it’s a monumental occasion. “I've had a Google Alert set up for this for 4 freaking years,” one fan tweeted when “Sapokanikan” was released, while another said he felt “broken from an excess of happiness.” Soon after the song appeared, Newsom’s father, a retired doctor in California, emailed his daughter a link to the lyric annotation site Genius.com, which had posted a full annotation of it.

Did they get it right?


“In terms of all the references, they got a lot of them,” Newsom says. “They didn't get them all, though!” she adds, cackling a bit mischievously.


IT’S A RAINY afternoon in September, and Newsom and I are chatting in the empty restaurant of the Four Seasons Hotel in Manhattan. The artist’s speaking voice is not much like her singing voice, though it has the same hint of untraceable twang.

Here is the part of the article where you’ll either appreciate some background on Newsom or be outraged by the notion that anyone might need such a primer. That neatly captures the polarized reception Newsom’s music has garnered since the start. Raised in the small town of Nevada City, California, and classically trained on piano and harp, Newsom released her first album, The Milk-Eyed Mender, at the age of 22 in 2004. The sparse and mesmerizing story-like songs drew praise, though her vocals—a high and gloriously unrestrained Appalachian wail—made her as divisive as any singer this side of Björk. “Childlike and pure, sometimes even squeaky when she hits the high notes, I've never heard anything like it before,” a reviewer for Tiny Mix Tapes reported at the time. Newsom was briefly grouped with the fleeting “freak folk” and “new weird America” movements of 2004 to 2006, but it soon became clear that her music was a genre unto itself.

For her second album, Ys (pronounced “ees”), she hired a full orchestra to bring to life dense parables about farm animals and fires, some stretching longer than 10 minutes. That album contained lyrics like “Awful atoll / O, incalculable indiscreetness and sorrow / Bawl, bellow,” and its cover image depicted Newsom as a medieval maiden, as if she were warning away any less-than-committed listeners.

Accessibility has never been a priority. Today, at the preference of herself and the Drag City record label, Newsom’s music is unavailable on Spotify, placing her in a lonely class of artists that includes Taylor Swift and Prince. (She’s not sorry about this. She says of Spotify: “It’s a business that's literally built from the ground up to circumvent labels having to pay artists.”) Spotify, of course, had barely emerged when Newsom last released an album. Have One on Me, a sprawling triple-disc set, might have seemed like another extreme gesture to ward off the unbelievers, but the songs—from the opening plea “Easy” to the devastating farewell “Does Not Suffice”—were the most affecting of her career, with uncharacteristically direct meditations on heartbreak and a voice that had deepened, following vocal warm-ups to prevent a recurrence of vocal cord nodules.

On Divers, that voice is back, but it’s what surrounds it that’s most immediately striking. With a vast pool of collaborating composers, including Dave Longstreth (Dirty Projectors) and classical composer Nico Muhly, and a wide range of often archaic instruments ranging from clavichords to Marxophones, Divers is Newsom’s most richly produced set yet.

Press materials promised an album of “sci-fi sea-shanties and cavalier ballads.” The nautical theme is clear—there’s an oceanic album cover and a title track about a pearl-hunting romance, with eerie harp arpeggios to capture the sense of drifting underwater. But it’s not the ocean that fascinates the songwriter. “It’s the line separating sea and sky,” she says. Newsom often talks about her work in airy, abstract terms. “I think most of the songs that take place on the ocean are very concerned with that line.”

The moody “You Will Not Take My Heart Alive,” for instance, opens with an image of “the line of the sea, seceding the coast.” Newsom has long puzzled over borders of both love and geography and how they might be traversed. “When you come and see me in California,” she sang on Have One on Me, “you cross the border of my heart.”

But the final track on Divers, “Time, as a Symptom,” brings Newsom back to shore, grappling with loss. “The moment of your greatest joy sustains,” she promises the listener, and suddenly the song swerves into a frenzied march of voices, strings and dove calls. The track’s gushing refrain calls out for the “nullifying, defeating, negating, repeating joy of life,” and the grief fades into the swell of interlocking vocal harmonies.

Those five and a half years might have been worth the wait, all for this song.


DIVERS IS NEWSOM’S most costly work to date (and that’s saying something, “cause I made a full orchestral record to [analog] tape at one point”) and, by a matter of seconds, her shortest. She spent nearly half her career working on it. Not that its relative brevity makes it seem slight—every lyric sounds dwelled upon, every moment carefully considered. Still, the plan was never to burrow down into a bunker somewhere in the Hollywood Hills and emerge half a decade later with an offering.

“I’m so glad no one told me when I started it how long this particular idea was going to take,” Newsom says. “I would have been really discouraged. As it was, I was bright-eyed, idealistic and really excited about this idea and forging ahead, and it just happened to take a really long time to finish.”

To hear Newsom describe the making of the album is to realize how meticulous her method is. (She even had her father consult birdwatchers to identify bird calls she wanted to use on the record.) Writing took one and a half, maybe two years, she says casually. Recording the basic tracks took a few months. Then the real laborious process: trying to convey to collaborators how the album sounded in her head. That took a year or two. “There was a lot of doubling back,” Newsom explains, “because this is the first record where I've worked with a different arranger or different set of musicians on pretty much every song.”

There were nonmusical holdups too. In 2013, Newsom married Samberg, her longtime boyfriend, in Big Sur, California. Then, in 2014, Newsom made her film debut, narrating and appearing briefly on screen as the mystic Sortilège in Paul Thomas Anderson’s mega-stoned Thomas Pynchon adaptation Inherent Vice.

This, it turns out, was very much unplanned. Newsom came to know director Paul Thomas Anderson through his longtime partner, actress Maya Rudolph, a friend of Samberg’s. At dinner one night, Newsom and Anderson started talking about the book and their mutual love for Pynchon, who was one of her favorite writers in her teens and early 20s.

“A few months later, he texted me and asked if I might be interested in trying an idea,” Newsom recalls. “He was fooling around with the idea of having the narration from the book be voiced by a character.” She didn’t believe she was really being considered for the role. “I think he said, ‘I'm trying an idea out. Would you mind recording these lines into your phone and sending them back?’ I didn't have a lot of information out the gate. I think I kind of figured that if he liked the idea, he was going to hire a professional actor to do the job.”

Then, after being asked to take part in a table read, another surprise: “I got a call from the wardrobe department at Warner Bros. asking for my measurements, and I was like, OK, I guess there's a chance I'm going to be on camera then. But Paul never asked me or told me.” Newsom ended up appearing in several scenes. The filming took just five days, but the narration process stretched on for months. Anderson kept rewriting the script slightly. Then Newsom got a cold and had to redo a number of great takes when her voice became hoarse without warning.

It was worth the aggravation, Newsom says. Making a movie was new; it was rejuvenating. Of the final cut, she raves, “I think it’s amazing.”

The album was largely recorded by the time she began filming, but it hadn’t been mixed. “I had a distinct feeling through the whole process of making this record that the thing that would give it its identity, the thing that would breathe life into the album, was going to be the mixing process,” Newsom explains. She doesn’t listen to any music while recording an album, until the mixing. Then she revisits her favorite albums for inspiration. “Right now, everything under the sun sounds like garbage to me,” Newsom admits of this process (though she does declare an affection for Kendrick Lamar’s recent To Pimp a Butterfly). “I get ear fatigue, and it's really nice to orient yourself to a complete record that sounds great.” For this album, her reference points for mixing were mostly from the early 1970s. She rattles off a list: Richard and Linda Thompson’s First Light, Mickey Newbury’s Looks Like Rain, Roy Harper’s Stormcock, Joni Mitchell’s Blue.

She pauses at the mention of Blue. “That record is astonishing. If you just look at it as a technical document, it’s incredible. The piano sound that she has on that record—there’s no piano that has sounded like that before or since.”

She sounds just like a Joanna Newsom obsessive talking about one of her songs.


NEWSOM KNOWS there’s a feverish cult surrounding her. She’s unconcerned with the details. She doesn’t Google herself, she says. “I don’t think it's a great idea for me to read reviews,” she says. Nor does she keep a social media presence or much of a public persona outside of the music. She is walled off from the incessant chatter, the daily distractions. When I mention a fashion Tumblr that exists solely to chronicle her outfits—vintage dresses, silver leather heels—she nods in recognition, but says she hasn’t looked at it. In February, Pitchfork ran a piece titled “The Atypical Fashion Cult of Joanna Newsom.” “I have been made aware of that as well,” she says. “It's sweet. It's awesome. But it's probably not the best idea for me to personally read it.”

Though her relationship with Samberg has garnered her Emmy appearances and mentions on Us Weekly, she guards her private life. Before we sat down for an interview, I was told she doesn’t want to discuss her marriage or her home. The record has much to say about love and loss and places in between, but it is not diaristic. Newsom refers to her songs as being sung by a “narrator,” voiced by something apart from herself. “Every single song is narrated by a slightly different entity on this record,” she explains. “They're all kind of about the same thing, but they are approaching that collection of themes from different angles.” Divers is the first Newsom album not to feature the artist on the cover in some fantastical garb, but “the cover still is representative of the narrator.”

I ask Newsom if she would articulate the themes. She refuses, as if I’ve asked a novelist for the CliffsNotes version. That’s a task for the cult, the devoted followers, who’ll get to the bottom of Divers like divers for pearls.

“It’s all there,” she says. “It’s all in the record. I feel like for me to summarize it is taking the fun away.”

Thank you, butterbean! I love your avatar, by the way!

http://www.thefader.com/2015/10/19/joan ... -interview

A Conversation With Joanna Newsom

With Divers, folk's biggest star proves again she's free and thriving in a world without likes.

Story by Alex Frank
Photography by Brian Vu

(new photo of Joanna and flowers, which had too many pixels to be able to post)

Since she began her closely watched career over 10 years ago, Joanna Newsom has remained independent in a way few other musicians have. She’s a stalwart for strange, specific folk in an era when even the most underground artists are flirting with pop. Her lyrics are winding and allegorical, her harp old-world, her voice piquant, her rhythms complex. Newsom’s albums—including Divers, her first in five years—move through time like an E.L. Doctorow novel, spinning grand inspirations from literature and history into music that feels personal even when there is uncertainty about what she is actually singing about. Written plainly on a piece of paper, her words read like a kind of Middle English that only she can translate.

In preparing to speak to her, I made the mistake of researching the endless annotations that fans have made for her lyrics online. “Baby Birch,” for example, an uncharacteristically sparse song from 2010’s Have One on Me, has been interpreted by close-readers as being about abortion. Newsom has never discussed it, and though the lyrics seem to point to that interpretation, they are just left of center enough that the bittersweet gift of ambiguity remains. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion, a smart Californian just like Newsom, once wrote. But what if, at least in music, the stories that give songs magic are the listener’s as much as the artist’s? If Newsom’s songs recall painful or happy memories from our own lives, isn’t that enough?

Newsom, who is 33 and married to comedian Andy Samberg, doesn’t always take herself as seriously as some of us do. She appeared on Portlandia in 2012, poking fun at the fact that she’s chosen to make her life’s work the harp, a ridiculously impractical instrument. She ventured further into acting this year, playing the burnout narrator of Paul Thomas Anderson’s hippie noir Inherent Vice. Late in the summer, we met in the lobby of the Gramercy Park Hotel, a stately stone hideaway in the middle of busy Manhattan. In conversation, she is light and funny and regular. She has never gone pop, never gone soft, never given up on being the cool, complicated weirdo she has been since the very beginning.

You seem to have a kind of independence that many people just do not.

Creatively, yes. I have plenty of limitations in other parts of my life. It’s just that there is one particular thing that is inviolable: I have a, if not religious, superstitious position when it comes to music and writing. It’s the one thing that is unscathed through all the shittiness. It was never a conscious choice to be free or uncompromising. It is, and was, the thing that’s worth doing for me. It’s worth my time.

You figured out how to only do the kind of music you wanted to do, and nothing else.

I got lucky. I’d be dead in the water if I hadn’t ended up on Drag City. It’s not like I spoke to 10 labels and picked the one that was the best fit for me. I ended up with this one label that in retrospect, 12 years down the line, is the only one I could’ve been with for so long. I made Milk-Eyed Mender [in 2004], and then they basically consented to fund this weird five-song record with full orchestra recorded with tape, which I think at that point had been their most expensive record, and they never questioned it. They never questioned me making a three-record album to follow that one. They never questioned how long it took me to make this record, how many steps, how many layers. And they don’t ever ask me to do anything that’s corny. No negativity to anyone who enjoys social media, but from a marketing strategy, a lot of people feel like they have to do it. Drag City doesn’t ask that of me, or to do anything that feels wrong.

Did you ever think about “selling out”?

No one was ever like, “Kid, we’re going to make you a star!” But there was a period of time when I was getting calls from major labels, and they were offering a number that they calculated to be impressive to someone like me. And they were right, it was impressive. But I also knew there was no reason they would offer that number unless they thought they could make it back off of me. I honestly think, if I had found myself on a label, especially in my early 20s, that was less supportive of my instincts and less principled, I totally might have ended up doing some corny shit. Because if someone in a position of authority and experience tells you, “This is what everyone does, this is how it’s done,” at that age, I would’ve believed them.

(Video for Sapokanikan)

“Nothing ages more badly than being cool.”—Joanna Newsom

How do you account for your continued success?

By many standards, what I have is not success. I’m perfectly happy with it, but if it was a company going public, I’d be doing very poorly. When people start to do things arbitrarily to grow that audience, and those choices are compromises, there’s a stink that their audience can smell, and it’s really hard to get off. I was really unnerved at the beginning of my career, when people who weren’t the best fit for my music were being steered toward it because it was a pop-cultural moment when that kind of music was being talked about.

Are you talking about the freak folk scene that you were lumped in with in the 2000s?

Yes, this odd media construction. It wasn’t offensive, it was just so not accurate. That was a weird hot seat that I was in that I didn’t really like. There was this narrative about me in the first five years that was like, “You love her or you hate her.” That was this synthetic thing—people were being forced to have an opinion. I’m much more comfortable now: put it out, and the people who are going to like it like it. There’s no zeitgeist-y thing telling them what to do. It’s definitely a relief to not even be remotely burdened by coolness. Nothing ages more badly than being cool. For me, there’s nothing to maintain. I can just continue doing what I do.

Do you like contemporary music?

Of what’s popular, I think I like rap more than most indie, I’ll tell you that. I don’t have a problem with music that’s written with a synthetic or electronic instrument. But I do certainly hate the complete garbage that is most EDM music. Couldn’t be worse if it went out of its way to try.

(another new photo I couldn't post)

Is your writing process serious or fun?

What is fun for me to do with language is deadly serious for me as well. I tend to start with melody and chords, which take a while to resolve into calcified arrangements. Basic melody, basic chords—those are born from some feeling or narrative idea or both. I have the prompt for the lyrics before I have the lyrics.

Some songs, I work with placeholder lyrics for months until I find the exact wording. With certain songs, there are requirements that the lyrics have to fit. For “Leaving the City,” on Divers, the choruses have three different patterns that are interlacing. Those lyrics are somewhat simple, but they took me a really long time. They had to tell a story, but they had to incorporate these syntactic parameters. There was a straight-up chart I drew. I had to have certain rhymes that were there because they emphasized the downbeat of a contrary meter that was overlaid on the primary dominant meter of the song. Then there were contrapuntal syllabic emphases. Then there were the basic rhymes at the end of each line, which were anchor rhymes. And I needed that to happen in a way that said what we wanted to say.

That sounds like a lot of work. Is the sheer labor of your music part of why people search for so much meaning within it?

People know I put a lot into it. And if I leave 8,000 bread crumbs around my door, I can’t blame anyone for knocking on it.

Does heavy interpretation do a disservice to the music?

I love that there are people who listen at that level. It helps slightly soften the blow of the existential horror—it’s an incredibly creatively validating thing. But there’s not a wrong or a right way. I’m not comfortable with the idea that anyone needs to “get” the songs to get the songs. I don’t want to clomp all over that with my heavy-booted definitive statement on what it was supposed to be.

What did you want to say on Divers?

If I could say it all the way, I wouldn’t have bothered making a record. I will say that there’s a thematic core of the album—every song on the record is asking some version of the same question.

The whole record is personal, but a lot of what is most personal is conveyed through pure fiction or, sometimes, even science fiction—literally sci-fi. With “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne,” I’m contrasting this British Isles sea shanty with a narrative in which I’m talking about colonizing alternate iterations of the terrestrial position in the multiverse. Colonizing time sideways, front and back, traveling in four directions through time. The subject matter is some of the heaviest and occasionally saddest I’ve ever explored. It’s linked to mortality and the idea of getting older. Time runs through every single song. But it was also the most fun to make. There’s no way to know someone except to know them.

Has building this entire aesthetic universe been a form of escapism from the modern world for you?

It’s not that contrarian. It hasn’t been that much work to not be on Twitter or Instagram. All you have to do is not do it. I’m not wearing a burlap sack, walking in the wilderness, talking to animals. I’m in the world. I just do everything real slow, and I don’t have enough hours in the day to do that stuff and still get anything done. It would’ve taken me ten years instead of five to get this album done.

No problem! and thanks! I love Mr. Tumnus & Chris Van Allsburg

Joanna Newsom was photographed at Hoxton Street studios in London

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign ... tober-2015

Joanna on Later With Joolz Holland, now on UK BBC2 tv

UPDATE: She performed Leaving The City.

Oh, I posted that in the All Alive section !

Apologies, Under A CPell (& admins) - all alive is the right place for it. It's just that I put the tv on, and happened to see Later was on, and happened to click the info, and lo & belold guess who was on! I wanted to post it up asap, and then the phone rang, so I was multitaskinmg ... and doing neither very well.

I certainly didn't mean it as criticism, just wanted to point out the synchronicity. The more of these kind of messages, the merrier, I think!

CeeLo Green, Zombies, The Arcs, Low, JN from Jools Holland

So apparently she's going to be interviewed by Larry King? I didn't know he was still doing interviews! Came across this link on Twitter - where one can submit questions:




What an unexpected (to me) venue!

Now ain't that some shit! (Ain't that some shit!)