- Katy Grannan for The New York Times
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By JODY ROSEN
Published: March 3, 2010
Joanna Newsom, a singer, songwriter and harpist who is one of indie music’s leading lights, first went to Lark Camp when she was around 12. (She has been a frequent attendee ever since.) It was there, as a young teenager in the mid-1990s, that Newsom had what she calls her transformative musical experience. The camp’s harp teacher, Diana Stork, recognized that Newsom was an unusually gifted young player. She was steeped in Celtic and classical harp repertory; she had begun to compose her own instrumental pieces. “Joanna had a great imagination, and a beautiful lyrical sense, a very nice sense of chordal accompaniment,” Stork says. “The one thing that I really thought I could share with her was polyrhythms.”
Stork showed Newsom a style adapted from the harplike West African kora — tricky polymetric patterns in which the player plucks out different rhythms with each hand. “That was when I started obsessing,” Newsom told me recently. At Lark Camp, she practiced the technique for hours on end. “Everybody would be lining up for dinner at night,” Stork recalls, “and Joanna would still be there, alone with her harp in the woods, playing and playing, trying to get it.”
A willowy girl strumming a harp in the forest gloaming: it’s a scene that sums up the Joanna Newsom mystique. From the moment she came to prominence, with the release of her 2004 debut album, “The Milk-Eyed Mender,” Newsom has been regarded as an exotic. The rock audience had never seen her like: a beautiful young woman, perched on a chair at the lip of a nightclub stage, plinking the 47 strings of a contraption 10 times as large as a Gibson Les Paul. The effect was heightened by Newsom’s brash singing voice — which has been likened to Kate Bush’s and Lisa Simpson’s — and by her extravagantly literary lyrics, which are packed with pastoral imagery, showy rhymes and archaisms.
Early publicity photos captured Newsom gazing into the murk on the edge of the woods, and her roots in Nevada City, a bucolic Northern California town with a reputation as a counterculture bastion, added to the aura. The music press quickly agreed on a cliché: Newsom was an earth child, an enchanted rustic, sprinkling pixie dust with each pluck of her harp strings.
But look again at the teenager with her harp in the Mendocino forest. Was she a wood sprite? Or was she woodshedding: a serious musician, diligently, obsessively, honing her skills?
“If there’s a musical idea you’re obsessing over, in order to work it out, you keep playing constantly, and you turn into a shredder,” Newsom told me when I met her recently in Nevada City. “Lark Camp was really about people jamming, sharing ideas and showing off. And that was really my way in — that chest-puffing, folk-camp-shredder mentality.”
Newsom and I were in the bar of National Hotel, a landmarked building on Nevada City’s hilly main drag. It was early January, and Newsom was doing a final series of rehearsals with her band before heading to Australia for the first leg of a tour to support her third album, a 3-CD opus titled “Have One on Me.” In person, Newsom comes off as neither an ethereal “hippie-dippy” nor a fearsome shredder. She is a trim, petite woman with large green eyes and waist-length light brown hair. She was wearing a gray dress, cinched with a big belt and an eyepopping necklace that she bought in New York — a dozen or so antique watch faces strung together on a gold chain. The necklace fit in nicely with the surroundings at the National Hotel, whose décor might be described as Funky Victoriana.
We met at the National at Newsom’s suggestion. She lives outside Nevada City, in a house that she bought a few years ago. Newsom is fiercely protective of her privacy. When I arrived in town it was unclear whether I would get to see Newsom’s home; permission was eventually granted, with a strong proviso from her publicist that I was not to describe the exterior in any way that might give an overly zealous fan clues to its location. Newsom is similarly guarded about her work. I told Newsom that her bandmate Ryan Francesconi, a composer and multi-instrumentalist who arranged the songs on “Have One on Me,” had e-mailed me the notes he took in preparation for scoring the album’s title track. She was visibly irked. “I’m kinda bummed about that,” she said. “I like listeners to form their own theories.”
There is no shortage of Joanna Newsom Theory. Newsom is among the most critically lionized American musicians to emerge in the past decade. (This year, Roan Press published “Visions of Joanna Newsom,” featuring essays by Dave Eggers and other admirers.) She is certainly one of the most singular. She’s a classically trained virtuoso on an instrument with little meaningful popular-music lineage. She writes sprawling songs, unhinged from verse-chorus pop form and crammed full-to-bursting with lyrics that owe more to John Donne and Anne Sexton than to any songwriting sources. All of this would seem to relegate Newsom to the high-art avant-garde hinterlands. Yet she is an indie-rock star: “The Milk-Eyed Mender” and “Ys” (pronounced “ees”), from 2007, sold 200,000 and 250,000 copies respectively, huge numbers for independent-label releases, especially in the anemic 21st-century record marketplace. But sales figures don’t tell the whole story; her popularity is a phenomenon of depth, not breadth. To the members of her cult, Newsom inspires the kind of exegetical fervor that Bob Dylan did in 1966 — fandom on the high-rock album-era model, with devotees who pore over the runes of lyric sheets like Talmudists.
What they find in Newsom’s songs, above all, is a place. Her work hovers between genres, traditions, eras — between folk and pop and art song, with hints of Celtic ballads and Charles Ives and West African griot music filtering through the tunes. But the where of her songs is unmistakable. Newsom is a landscape painter: from the start, her songs have overflowed with flora and fauna, with refracted fairytale visions of Nevada City and environs. She calls “Have One on Me,” which was released in late February, her “early ’70s California singer-songwriter album,” citing influences like Joni Mitchell’s “For the Roses” and Graham Nash’s “Songs for Beginners.” It’s also the record in which Newsom writes most explicitly about her home turf.
“This record deals a lot with the idea of home and hometown,” Newsom said. “People have described me as being so informed by the nature and the magic of this place. I think on this album I’m exploring that — I’m working through that idea. There’s a lot of mythologizing of Nevada City as this utopian magical hippieland.”
Nevada City, a town of about 3,000 in the Sierra foothills, 60 miles northeast of Sacramento, is one of those odd corners of rural America that, spiritually speaking, sits to the left of cities like San Francisco and New York. Founded in 1849 as a Gold Rush boomtown, it became, in the late 1960s and ’70s, a hot spot of a different sort — a magnet for artists, back-to-the-landers and other left-of-center refugees from the Bay Area and Los Angeles, lured by cheap real estate and the splendor of wooded ridges that rise above the Yuba River’s south fork. The minimalist composer Terry Riley moved to Nevada City; the Beat poet and Zen Buddhist Gary Snyder settled nearby. In 1968, Swami Kriyananda, a disciple of the Indian yogi Paramahansa Yogananda, founded the Ananda Village commune on several hundred forested acres a bit outside town.
Today, Nevada City’s Miner Forty-Niner past jostles up against the New Age present. The Nevada Theater, California’s oldest theater building, sits paces away from a shop called Soul Support, which advertises “Body and Soul Services” and wares including copper faeries and wands. When I told Newsom about a middle-aged woman I saw at a local cafe, dripping in heavy turquoise jewelry and talking loudly about reiki healing, she laughed. “There are a lot of amazing tantric cougars in this town,” she said.
Newsom fits a certain profile of a Nevada City native. She is a daughter of progressive-minded professionals who relocated here in 1981. Her parents, both doctors, moved to town from the Bay Area. (Her distant cousin Gavin Newsom is mayor of San Francisco.) She grew up with her older brother and younger sister in a big house in the hills, on rambling wooded acreage with views of vineyards and the snow-topped Sierra Buttes.
Newsom told me she was a “dreamy but melancholy” child, whose parents encouraged her ambitions and nurtured her iconoclasm. She doesn’t remember what drew her to the harp, but she started begging her parents for lessons at age 4 and began her studies a few years later. She also had a spiritual streak, which her parents likewise indulged. When she was 18, in the middle of her senior year of high school, she decided that she needed “some sort of ritual marker of the end of childhood.” Her plan was to camp in the open air for three days and nights, eating little, seeing no one, communing with the great outdoors. Newsom’s mother sanctioned her missing school and helped her daughter scout out a place by the Yuba, in the middle of 35 wild acres owned by family friends.
“I hesitate to speak about it because it sounds so corny, but one of my goals out there was to find a spirit-animal,” Newsom told me. “On the third day, I was kind of delirious. I’d only eaten a little rice. I’d just slept and looked at a river for three days. I was prepared to be visited by my spirit animal — I was just sitting there, saying some sort of prayer, inviting that presence into my life. And then I saw three white wolves charging down at me. I thought maybe I was hallucinating; but I was also prepared to die. But the wolves ran up and started licking my face. Then I remembered that the daughter of the woman who owned the property kept domesticated wolves.” A few hours later, Newsom hiked out of the woods and went home. Her mother had organized a celebratory dance party for Newsom and her girlfriends. She strung up lights and served four kinds of cake.
“A lot of people don’t want to leave because they feel so defined by being from here,” Newsom said. Many of Newsom’s family and her childhood friends still live in Nevada City. One evening, while we were eating dinner in an Italian restaurant, a hulking young man in a hooded sweatshirt and a Mohawk stopped at our table; he was Newsom’s second cousin. The friendly guy who served me at a cafe on Broad Street turned out to be Pete Newsom, Joanna’s brother, a drummer and keyboardist who has played in the singer-songwriter Devendra Banhart’s band. He has been pulling a few barista shifts while working on a solo project, an album of Michael Jackson-inspired dance music.
Newsom herself never really left home, except for the few years she spent at Mills College in Oakland, where she studied musical composition and creative writing before dropping out. It was there that her career as a recording artist began, more or less by accident. Newsom made some rough recordings of songs she had written for voice and harp and opened a few shows at Bay Area clubs for her friend Banhart. Bonnie (Prince) Billy — a k a the indie-folk star Will Oldham — heard Newsom’s demos and asked her to tour with him. Soon after, Oldham’s label, the Chicago-based indie stalwart Drag City, signed Newsom to a record deal.
Critics branded her music “freak folk,” lumping her with Banhart and other upstarts whose psychedelic leanings and flowing tresses harked back to the woollier folk rock of the late 1960s. Newsom was called an “elfin princess,” a “faerie queen,” a “weird waif,” an “innocent flower,” a “childlike chanteuse.” There was a time when the media chatter drove Newsom to distraction. In a 2006 interview with the arts-and-culture magazine Stop Smiling, she said, “I have friends in my hometown, and a few in other places, but I’m not part of some epic, bracelet-clanking, eyes-rolled-back, blasé, nihilistic scenester cult.”
Today, Newsom told me, she regrets letting the press coverage get under her skin. “I was fresh out of women’s college and I was bummed at everyone saying that my songs were innocent and nursery-rhyme-like,” she told me. “When people would put me and Devendra Banhart in the same sentence, they were coding his eccentricities as world-weary and ‘witchy’ and coding my eccentricities as childlike and naïve. I felt like it minimized my intelligence. But I think in my defensiveness I disavowed some realities that I should not have disavowed. I think that there’s always going to be an element of my experience of the world — as much as I feel this as a deficiency — that is unprotected, unbuffered.”
Newsom’s songs, full of roiling emotions and jumpy harmonies, do feel unbuffered. But innocent and childlike? Those qualities are not foreign to indie rock, which over the past decade has been gripped in certain quarters by childhood nostalgia and a cult of the twee. But the vigor and intensity of Newsom’s music sets it apart. As a musician — in pure “chops” terms — Newsom has more in common with people like Eddie Van Halen and Wynton Marsalis than with indie stars like Banhart and the Decemberists. “I still don’t think most people realize quite how great a musician she is,” says Neal Morgan, who drums in Newsom’s touring band. Her style blends the luminous arpeggios of the classical- and folk-harp traditions with African syncopation — crisp, snappy, interlocking rhythms. (Newsom has virilized the harp, bringing a funky pulse to a dowdy drawing-room instrument.) To see Newsom perform a song like “Sawdust and Diamonds,” a 10-minute-long ballad from “Ys,” is to witness a display of virtuosity that verges on a circus sideshow stunt. Newsom picks out a bass part with her left hand and plays melody lines and chords with her right, while working the harp’s pedals with her feet and delivering 121 lines of phantasmagorical verse in a tune that madly flutters and swoops around the beat.
Ryan Francesconi transcribed many of the vocal and harp parts while working on “Have One on Me.” “Her phrasing with the vocal is really hard to write down,” he told me. “The rhythms are so subtle — so subtly off the beat all the time. And that’s a really interesting thing, because her harp is very precise, yet the vocal floats on top, and has a really separate feeling. The things she can do independently while playing the harp are humbling.”
“The Milk-Eyed Mender,” Newsom’s mostly voice-and-harp debut, was an almost ferociously spunky and bright-sided collection of songs. It is also shredder-chest-puffing par excellence — as showoffy as any rap record and as drunk on rhyme. The critics who cast Newsom as flower child were not listening hard to an album full of surreal wit (“And the hexes heat covertly/Like a slow low-flying turkey/Like a Texan drying jerky”) and punch lines (“I killed my dinner with karate—/Kick ’em in the face, taste the body”). But amid the whimsy was wisdom. In “Sadie,” a ballad with a distinct Appalachian flavor, Newsom sings lines that could speak for thousands of musicians who’ve drawn on the deep well of American folk music: “This is an old song/These are old blues/This is not my tune/But it’s mine to use.”
With “Ys,” Newsom seemed to loose herself from any recognizable tradition. In form and in feeling, “Ys” is epic. The album’s five tracks range in length from 7 to 17 minutes, with melodies that weave and dart through lurching harmonic shifts, bolstered by arrangements for a full symphony orchestra. The songs move between private confessions and cosmic parables. There’s an eerie fable about a bear and monkey, meditations on astronomy, elegies for the dead and stormy love songs. Newsom’s lyrics are flamboyantly, at times self-parodyingly, poetic: thick with adjectives and highfalutin language (“gibbering wave,” “hydrocephalitic listlessness,” “insatiable shadow”), archaisms (“thee,” “fain”), and tongue-twisting couplets not generally found in 21st-century pop songs, or in the 21st century, period. “Ys” was, in short, an artistic undertaking of the sort that risks total pratfalling humiliation. That Newsom would try it in the first place is sheer chutzpah; that she pulled it off (at least for some) is a triumph of inventiveness and craft and smarts. But “Ys” also has an ineffable quality that is Newsom’s hallmark: a beauty, flowing through her voice and tunes and most ostentatious poetic flights, rooted in mysteriousness — in music that, on some level, feels as vast and unknowable as, well, a sea full of gibbering waves.
Newsom has told interviewers that “Ys” was a kind of allegory — that its songs were elaborately coded narratives based on events in her personal life, including the death of a childhood friend and an illness in her family. “I was in a pretty bananas place,” Newsom says now of that time, deliberately keeping things vague. “And a lot of that had to do with some really sad stuff that was going on in my life. And also some really ecstatic stuff that was going in my life.”
Newsom lives in a small house, set back from a residential road and ringed by trees. It has a quaint, cottagelike feel. Inside, a cluster of pleasant rooms spreads out across a single floor. The pièce de résistance is a nook that juts off the dining room: a tiny little room with three exposures, where Newsom’s harp is enthroned. For recording and touring, she rents a harp; this instrument, which she uses for rehearsal, is the Joanna Newsom ur-harp, the first and only one she has ever owned. “It doesn’t have a very good sound,” she told me. “I mean, it’s Lyon & Healy, they only make good harps, but in their range it’s their student model, and it’s old and beat up. I’ve had it since eighth grade. I’m saving up for a new one. It costs $50,000, and that’s with a discount.”
If it feels as if she still hasn’t totally moved in, that may be because, for Newsom, home decoration is a permanent, pleasurable work in progress. Newsom is a collector. She is a lifelong insomniac — she says that she goes to bed “somewhere in the 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. window” — and often spends the wee hours looking for antiques online. Her taste leans toward Victoriana and Deco and taxidermy; she has a particular fondness for the opulent Orientalism of the interiors at Hearst Castle, William Randolph Hearst’s estate in San Simeon, Calif.
For the cover photo of “Have One on Me,” Newsom dragged many of her belongings into her living room — a stuffed peacock, a leopard-print ottoman, tchotchkes and clothes and rugs and partitions — and arranged them on and around her couch, which sits in front of a wall-hung 18th-century tapestry. It’s a cabinet of curiosities, with Newsom mounted in the middle: stretched out on the sofa wearing a strapless dress and a flapper headband, peering back at the viewer, sphinxlike, with mascara-ringed eyes.
It's a mysterious image, and a glamorous one — a tableau worthy of a shape-shifting pop diva like Lady Gaga. Newsom has been a bohemian style icon for years, but lately she has also popped up in the world of high fashion. She has been spotted at fashion-week after-parties and photographed by a popular street-style blog wearing a Comme des Garçons trench coat. She appeared in a W magazine spread wearing vampy black silk shorts by Giorgio Armani. Newsom even licensed her 2004 single “Sprout and the Bean” to Victoria’s Secret for use in a “Dream Angel” push-up-bra TV commercial.
These developments have not gone unnoticed in the indie-rock blogosphere, where interest in Newsom is rabid and the lines of hipster cred are policed with a Stasi-like vigilance. In November, a post on the music blog Stereogum griped, “Joanna Newsom’s in the midst of a clear shift from the forests to the fashion set.”
The blogs have also been abuzz about Newsom’s romantic life. For the past couple of years, she has reportedly been keeping company with Andy Samberg, the “Saturday Night Live” star. The couple have been photographed on the streets of Manhattan, at LAX, at the Emmys. Her previous relationship with Bill Callahan, who has released acclaimed records under his own name and the moniker Smog, was news in indie circles, but Samberg registers in a pop-culture mainstream that previously took little notice of Newsom. People magazine included “Andy and Joanna” in a feature titled, “They’re With the Band: Stars’ Indie-Rock Romances.”
For her part, Newsom refused to discuss Samberg — or, rather, she talked about him without talking about him. She admitted that she’s spending much of her time these days in New York, where Samberg lives, and is struggling with homesickness. “I understand why it’s noteworthy,” she continued, leaving the “it” ambiguous. “It somehow impacts the overall picture in a way that nothing I was involved in before did. It changes the portrait somehow.”
“Have One on Me,” widely acclaimed by critics since its release, alters the Joanna Newsom portrait, too. It is less epic than “Ys,” but more sprawling; the 18 songs clock in at an average of seven minutes each. Newsom hadn’t planned to write so many long songs. “I worry about the length creating a barrier between listeners and the songs, where it feels like too much information and they can’t find their way in,” she said.
But if you have time — and a decent pair of headphones — “Have One on Me” opens up to you. On “Ys,” the ornate orchestration, by the legendary composer and songwriter Van Dyke Parks, sometimes swamped the songs, but here Ryan Francesconi’s arrangements get the proportions right and splash in surprising colors, adding Bulgarian Tambura and other Balkan accents to strings, brass and woodwinds. Most of the songs stretch out and meander, steering clear of verse-chorus structures, but there are moments when “Have One on Me” comes as close as Newsom has to the symmetries of traditional pop-song form.
Newsom explained that there is a vague thematic logic to the album’s three-disc structure, tracing the morning, day and night of a single 24 hours. The record opens with an idyllic vision of lovers entwined in the boudoir and ends with a blunt romantic post-mortem and images of an empty bed. Newsom watchers are sure to find autobiographical resonances in these songs. “It doesn’t take a lot of guesswork to know who’s she’s talking about,” Francesconi told me.
But scouring the lyrics for Newsom’s boyfriends, current and former, will get her explicators only so far. Ask Newsom about her songwriting influences, and she will cite novelists like Faulkner and Nabokov; her songs often present themselves as puzzles, with fractured narrative voices and meanings that can be teased out only through repeated close listening.
Exhibit A on “Have One on Me” is the title track. It moves from dreamy harp arpeggios to Old West saloon-song stylings to jaunty tarantellalike passages and beyond, through 11 minutes of whiplashing tempo and time-signature changes. The song’s meaning was a mystery to me until I got hold of the lyric sheet and realized it was about Lola Montez, the Irish-born dancer and actress who wowed theatrical audiences on three continents and led one of the 19th century’s most tumultuous romantic lives. (Her lovers included Franz Liszt and King Ludwig I of Bavaria, who made her countess of Lansfeld.)
Montez was also, as it happens, a resident of Nevada County, Calif., in the peak Gold Rush years. “I’ve been interested in Lola Montez since I was little,” Newsom told me. From 1853 to 1855, Montez lived in a small cottage in Grass Valley, a town next door to Nevada City. She performed her famous “spider dance”— a burlesque in which she shook rubber tarantulas out of her raised skirts — at the Nevada Theater. Today her portrait hangs in the lobby of the National Hotel. The highest point in Nevada County, rearing up on the horizon northeast of the house where Newsom grew up, is named for Montez: Mount Lola.
“I’m obviously identifying her story with my story to some extent,” Newsom said. “To be a woman and to be a performer at that time meant something very different than it does now, but I’m also interested in what the similarities are. I was interested in the fact that she was constantly traveling and constantly having to start over and make a new life for herself. And her connection to this town is very important to me.”
In other words, “Have One on Me,” like so many of Newsom’s songs, is bound up with the mythos of Nevada City. Travel, distance, exile, the yearning for home — Newsom returns to these themes repeatedly. The album’s emotional centerpiece is “In California,” a slow-boiling ballad sung in the voice of woman torn between longing for her far-flung lover and the siren call of her homeland. “If you want to know how Joanna feels about Nevada City,” Ryan Francesconi told me, “just read the lyrics to ‘In California’ very closely. It’s all in there — her relationship to her land, and her relationship of being in this place while people she loves are far away.”
But Newsom’s song transcends the personal and particular to connect to some of the deepest strains in American popular music, to Stephen Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home” and Victorian-parlor ballad plaints and the desolate nostalgia of blues and “Georgia on My Mind”: a tradition of odes to home and hearth that spans three centuries. The key moment of “In California” comes after a crashing string-and-tympani crescendo, when the instruments abruptly drop away, leaving Newsom alone with violins, crooning in the uppermost part of her register:
Some nights I just never go to sleep at all, and I stand, shaking in my doorway like a sentinel, all alone, bracing like the bow upon a ship, and fully abandoning any thought of anywhere but home, my home.
Earlier, Newsom told me: “I was the only person in my group of friends growing up who didn't feel a huge urge to leave. I didn’t want to leave — I wanted to go to college nearby so I could come home every weekend. I’m not really a traveler, by nature. It’s ironic to me that my career path forces me to travel so much. I never had that itch, that feeling, like, ‘There must be something more out there!’
“I really would have preferred,” she said, “if everything I need to do in this life would just come to my front door.”