Time Out NY, 2010-03-18 - Joanna Newsom plays the Town Hall
Posted: 29 May 2010, 11:31http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/mus ... -interview
Joanna Newsom plays the Town Hall
We hang out with the celebrity harpist and fashion muse.
Time Out New York / Issue 755 : Mar 18–24, 2010
By Sophie Harris
DREAM WEAVER Joanna Newsom’s sprawling new album finds her in a languorous mode.
Photograph: Annabel Mehran
“I’m always flying on planes by myself, seated next to some kindly 60-year-old who starts asking me what my whole deal is,” Joanna Newsom says. “And unfortunately, I’ve started lying—like, ‘I’m a secretary.…’” The singer, harpist and sometime fashion muse is settled in a West Village café, cheerily talking about the occupational hazards of her chosen career path—which this week finds her playing a long-sold-out date at the Town Hall in support of her new triple album, Have One on Me.
It’s not that Newsom wants to hide, exactly. “But it’s explaining that’s just incredibly awkward,” she says. “Like when people will ask me what my music sounds like: It’s like a bare lightbulb shining in my eyeball. I usually say something that I don’t even believe. Like, I used to go on eBay, and it would kill me to type in the keywords required to find the clothes I wanted—it would be like, ‘God help me, Stevie Nicks’…‘You know not what you do, gypsy.’ It was like reaching for some godforsaken word, these words that you know someone will get. And on a lot of levels, it’s just pompous.”
We’ll keep it simple. Have One on Me is Newsom’s easiest, sweetest album yet. Her voice is soft and supple, a far cry from the widemouthed sounds of her debut, The Milk-Eyed Mender, and the album’s arrangements are breezy in comparison with Van Dyke Parks’s dense orchestrations on Ys. And we’ll leave lofty dissections of her work to a newly published book, Visions of Joanna Newsom, which includes an essay by novelist Dave Eggers and various academic pieces, plus a rather odd article written by an old school pal, describing Newsom’s childhood in Nevada.
“It was incredibly sweet and an honor that anyone would want to write that stuff, but for me, reading some of that is like the final frontier of hall-of-mirrors,” Newsom says. It’s getting harder and harder for the singer to avoid reading about herself, however. Her celebrity has spread from indie blogs to broadsheets and lately, gossip magazines; her blossoming relationship with Saturday Night Live star Andy Samberg was trumpeted with the publication of a pic of the pair at a hockey game. “Among the worst faces I’ve made in my life, ever,” Newsom declares, face a-scrunch to demonstrate. “I got a lot of texts and saw the photo and got so sad. I think I was so focused on how bad the photo was that I didn’t think about the larger implications, the weirdness. So maybe it’s great that I’m horrible in the photo.”
Given the strangeness and grating tones that sometimes surface in her music, it seems surprising that Newsom should admit to worrying about others’ opinions. “I’m very self-conscious and worried about not wanting to be ugly,” she admits, “but for some reason that self-censorship hasn’t bled into the music making. Wanting to make a record a certain way becomes almost a biological imperative, in the sense that the urge to do things that support that concept or vision is stronger than the urge to be polite or pleasant. It’s like if you were really, really hungry and you were trying to have a conversation, but in the back of your head you’re like, I need food right now. It’s kind of like that.”
Artistically, there’s no question that Newsom’s gift is extraordinary, whether her music appeals or not. In a sense, the real revelation is that in person, Newsom is so grounded. She’s laugh-out-loud funny, quoting Monty Python as she tells a story about getting drunk for the first time, with a sixth-grade friend. Her speech is as graceful as it is goofy: Discussing the fact that her fans know all her lyrics, and sometimes prompt her with them when she draws a blank at shows, she says: “Fixating on those things can create tumescent patches of toxic thinking in your mind. Pretty soon you’re like, I’m pretty great! It’s funnier to just laugh at it and be like, Wow, I’m a dumb-ass! I forgot an entire section of my song. Aren’t people nice?”
And just in case you get carried away thinking that hey, she’s actually pretty normal, she’ll slip in some little romanticism that might just set your heart on wings; she says that touring and traveling alone is not a natural thing for her: “I always want to tug someone’s sleeve and be like, ‘Look at that moon!’?” It can be hard to know what to do with that feeling, can’t it? She pauses for a moment, then says, “I imagine that’s what music is about.”
Joanna Newsom plays the Town Hall
We hang out with the celebrity harpist and fashion muse.
Time Out New York / Issue 755 : Mar 18–24, 2010
By Sophie Harris
- 755.mu.x491.joannanewsom1.open.jpg (13.82 KiB) Viewed 4995 times
DREAM WEAVER Joanna Newsom’s sprawling new album finds her in a languorous mode.
Photograph: Annabel Mehran
“I’m always flying on planes by myself, seated next to some kindly 60-year-old who starts asking me what my whole deal is,” Joanna Newsom says. “And unfortunately, I’ve started lying—like, ‘I’m a secretary.…’” The singer, harpist and sometime fashion muse is settled in a West Village café, cheerily talking about the occupational hazards of her chosen career path—which this week finds her playing a long-sold-out date at the Town Hall in support of her new triple album, Have One on Me.
It’s not that Newsom wants to hide, exactly. “But it’s explaining that’s just incredibly awkward,” she says. “Like when people will ask me what my music sounds like: It’s like a bare lightbulb shining in my eyeball. I usually say something that I don’t even believe. Like, I used to go on eBay, and it would kill me to type in the keywords required to find the clothes I wanted—it would be like, ‘God help me, Stevie Nicks’…‘You know not what you do, gypsy.’ It was like reaching for some godforsaken word, these words that you know someone will get. And on a lot of levels, it’s just pompous.”
We’ll keep it simple. Have One on Me is Newsom’s easiest, sweetest album yet. Her voice is soft and supple, a far cry from the widemouthed sounds of her debut, The Milk-Eyed Mender, and the album’s arrangements are breezy in comparison with Van Dyke Parks’s dense orchestrations on Ys. And we’ll leave lofty dissections of her work to a newly published book, Visions of Joanna Newsom, which includes an essay by novelist Dave Eggers and various academic pieces, plus a rather odd article written by an old school pal, describing Newsom’s childhood in Nevada.
“It was incredibly sweet and an honor that anyone would want to write that stuff, but for me, reading some of that is like the final frontier of hall-of-mirrors,” Newsom says. It’s getting harder and harder for the singer to avoid reading about herself, however. Her celebrity has spread from indie blogs to broadsheets and lately, gossip magazines; her blossoming relationship with Saturday Night Live star Andy Samberg was trumpeted with the publication of a pic of the pair at a hockey game. “Among the worst faces I’ve made in my life, ever,” Newsom declares, face a-scrunch to demonstrate. “I got a lot of texts and saw the photo and got so sad. I think I was so focused on how bad the photo was that I didn’t think about the larger implications, the weirdness. So maybe it’s great that I’m horrible in the photo.”
Given the strangeness and grating tones that sometimes surface in her music, it seems surprising that Newsom should admit to worrying about others’ opinions. “I’m very self-conscious and worried about not wanting to be ugly,” she admits, “but for some reason that self-censorship hasn’t bled into the music making. Wanting to make a record a certain way becomes almost a biological imperative, in the sense that the urge to do things that support that concept or vision is stronger than the urge to be polite or pleasant. It’s like if you were really, really hungry and you were trying to have a conversation, but in the back of your head you’re like, I need food right now. It’s kind of like that.”
Artistically, there’s no question that Newsom’s gift is extraordinary, whether her music appeals or not. In a sense, the real revelation is that in person, Newsom is so grounded. She’s laugh-out-loud funny, quoting Monty Python as she tells a story about getting drunk for the first time, with a sixth-grade friend. Her speech is as graceful as it is goofy: Discussing the fact that her fans know all her lyrics, and sometimes prompt her with them when she draws a blank at shows, she says: “Fixating on those things can create tumescent patches of toxic thinking in your mind. Pretty soon you’re like, I’m pretty great! It’s funnier to just laugh at it and be like, Wow, I’m a dumb-ass! I forgot an entire section of my song. Aren’t people nice?”
And just in case you get carried away thinking that hey, she’s actually pretty normal, she’ll slip in some little romanticism that might just set your heart on wings; she says that touring and traveling alone is not a natural thing for her: “I always want to tug someone’s sleeve and be like, ‘Look at that moon!’?” It can be hard to know what to do with that feeling, can’t it? She pauses for a moment, then says, “I imagine that’s what music is about.”