Joanna Newsom

Joanna Newsom (born 1982) is an American singer-songwriter. She plays the harp, as well as the piano and the harpischord.

Quotes

I have a lot of interest in interior rhyming; not just rhyming at the end of the lines, but playing around with rhymes within the lines, playing with where the syllabic emphases in the sentences are, lining those up at strange moments in the line of the song. I’m not sure if that comes across or not.
- dustedmagazine.com, 19 April 2004

I'm not terribly interested in playing harp on other people's music right now. Partly because I feel like many people view the harp as this kind of gimmick. You know, like they have songs that are fully realized, complete songs, and then they think "How do we make this special? - Ooh, let's bring the harp in!" and they kind of want a harpist to play a glissando and play some heavenly noise in the background. I'm really interested in the harp as a fully actualized, self-contained way of presenting songs. That there is a bass in the harp - there is a way to create a rhythmic sense without drums - there's a way to have all sorts of textural variations and expressive variations.
I also don't want to feel bound to the harp, I'd be interested in bringing other instruments in at some time. But I think the harp has been viewed in one particular way for so long, and has been limited for so long, that I feel like I am really interested in stretching the boundaries of what it's capable of doing and how it's perceived.
- Sunday Service, 13 December 2004

My voice in combination with the harp - which, by the way, I use because I've played it my entire life, not to make some statement about the harp - somehow has … coloured people's interpretations of the music and projected an idea of childlike or fairytale quality or innocence. Which sometimes prevents people from listening to the songs the way I would like them to be listened to.
- Sydney Morning Herald, 10 October 2005

Well, Nabokov is definitely my favorite author, though I feel strange calling him an "influence," since I can't trace the ways in which his writing may or may not have seeped into my own. But I also love William Faulkner, Thomas Pynchon, Kenneth Patchen, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, Mark Helprin (who wrote a beautiful book called Winter's Tale), and Kurt Vonnegut. My favorite book of all time is The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle.
- chickfactor.com - Issue 16, 2005

Interview with Pitchfork (2006)

A conversation between Brian Howe and Joanna Newsom, about her album Ys (2006)

[The title] was the last thing that I chose, after all the songs and the cover art were finished. So none of the songs directly allude to that myth. But the main themes that emerge out of that myth are really close to the themes on the record -- mortality, decadence, an excess of water, isolation, rebirth. The myth is also significant to me because of the way that I encountered it, which relates to one of the huge events the record is about.
I also liked the power of the word itself. I liked how violent and cryptic it felt; it's such a daunting word to encounter. I like how it contrasted this finely rendered, carefully composed front cover -- the painting is information-dense, formal, and stylized; it looks the way something looks when a painter spends a year on it, which is what Benjamin [Vierling] did. So it has all this detail and carefulness to it, which was really important to me and relates very closely to the record. But I also felt like it needed some sort of ballast, or balance, next to it, to reflect the other elements of the record; its innate violence. I wanted a word that was like throwing a brick at the visual on the front cover; I liked that whenever someone looked at that cover they also had to encounter this short, weird word.

I don't necessarily see the elements that I invoke on the cover and in the songs as being in binary opposition. I know certain binary tensions emerge between these elements, but a lot of times they're more like archetypal elements; these free-standing, huge forces. Mortality, standing alone, as a thing; as opposed to, "Over here's life; over here's death. Here's bad luck, but here's blessing and redemption. Here's water; here's fire." Certainly those things come up again and again in the songs, but it's not intentional, and probably has more to do with the fact that those things emerge in real life, without any effort on our part whatsoever, than they are derived from any classical tradition. I think classicism in general might reflect more closely the natural order of human life, while postmodernism is somehow removed from the natural order, more cerebral and sterile, removed from real life on some level. So what seems like classicism in some of these songs might be just what I view as an accurate reflection of real life on this planet.

I can't call them linear narratives, and I can't call them chronological in a traditional, classical sense; I'm sure there's plenty of stuff I borrow more from William Faulkner than William Shakespeare. I just find it funny that at this point, we see a collection of highly charged, highly potent symbols as referring back to a classical aesthetic, because to me they seem deeply connected to the pedestrian actuality of real life.

The Milk-Eyed Mender (2004)

We sailed away on a winter's day
With fate as malleable as clay
But ships are fallible, I say
And the nautical, as all things, fades.
- Bridges & Balloons

And a thimble's worth of milky moon
Can touch hearts larger than a thimble.
- Bridges & Balloons

I killed my dinner
with karate
kicked him in the face,taste the body, shallow work is the work that I do.
- The Book of Right-On

And all that we built, and all that we breathed
And all that we spilled or pulled up like weeds
Is piled up in back and it burns irrevocably
And we spoke up in turns 'til the silence crept over me.
And the love we hold, and the love we spurn,
Will never grow cold, only taciturn

- Sadie

Go to sleep, you stunning sky, gently creep, cunning by
A quiet hum is amplified by your thumb that you suck dry
A hundred raging waters snare the lonely sigh
Hold your breath and clasp at Cassiopeia.
- Cassiopeia

While yonder, wild and blue,
the wild blue yonder looms.
'Till we are wracked with rheum,
by roads, by songs entombed.
- Swansea

I do as I please.
Now I'm on my knees.
Your skin is something that I stir into my tea.
And I am watching you
and you are starry, starry, starry...
- Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie

Ys (2006)

Emily, I saw you last night by the river
I dreamed you were skipping little stones across the surface of the water
Frowning at the angle where they were lost, and slipped under forever
In a mud cloud, mica-spangled, like the sky'd been breathing on a mirror.
And everything with wings is restless,
aimless, drunk and dour;
butterflies and birds collide, at hot ungodly hours.
And my clay-coloured motherlessness rangily reclines;
come on home now!
All my bones are dolorous with vines!
We could stand for a century
Staring, with our heads cocked
In the broad daylight at this thing
Joy
Landlocked
In bodies that don't keep
Dumbstruck with the sweetness of being
Until we don't be
- Emily

Now her coat drags through the water,
Bagging, with a life's-worth of hunger, limitless minnows
In the magnetic embrace,
Balletic and glacial, of Bear's insatiable shadow.
- Monkey & Bear

Then the slow lip of fire moves across the prairie with precision
While, somewhere, with your pliers and glue, you make your first incision
And, in a moment of almost-unbearable vision, doubled over with the hunger of lions
'Hold me close', cooed the dove, who was stuffed now with sawdust and diamonds.
And though our bones, they may break
And our souls separate,
why the long face?
And though our bodies recoil
From the grip of the soil,
why the long face?
- Sawdust & Diamonds

Picking through your pocket lining, well what is this?
Scrap of sassafras, eh Sisyphus?
Well I'm starvin' and freezin'
In this measly old bed
(Then I'll crawl across the salt flats
To stroke your sweet head)
Come across the desert,
with no shoes on?
(I love you truly,
or I love no-one)
- Only Skin

Water were your limbs
And the fire was your hair
And then the moon caught your eye,
and you rose through the air.
Well if you've seen true light,
then this is my prayer:
Will you call me
When you get there?
- Cosmia

Joanna Newsom and the Ys Street Band (2007)

"Have you come, then, to rescue me?"
He laughed and said, "from what, 'Colleen'?"
You dried and dressed most willingly.
You corseted, and caught the dread disease
by which one comes to know such peace."
- Colleen

Have One On Me (2010)

We are blessed and sustained by what is not said
- Easy

By the time you read this
I will be so far away
Daddy longlegs, how in the world
Am I to be expected to stay?
- Have One On Me

We broke our hearts,
in the war between
St. George and the dragon,
but both, in equal part,
are welcome to come along.
I'm inviting everyone.
- '81

But it can make you feel over, and old
(Lord, you know it's a shame),
when I only want for you to pull over,
and hold me,
till I can't remember my own name.
- Good Intentions Paving Company

This is the song for Baby Birch.
I will never know you.
And at the back of what we've done,
there is that knowledge of you.
held her there,
kicking and mewling,
upended, unspooling, unsung and blue;
told her "wherever you go,
little runaway bunny,
I will find you."
And then she ran,
as they're liable to do.
- Baby Birch

And if you come and see me,
you will upset the order.
You cannot come and see me,
for I set myself apart.
But when you come and see me,
in California,
you cross the border of my heart.
- In California

A feather of a hawk was bound
Bound around my neck
A poultice made of fig
The eager little vultures pecked
- Jackrabbits

Wolf-spider, crouch in your funnel nest.
If I knew you, once,
now I know you less.
In the sinking sand,
where we've come to rest,
have I had a hand in your loneliness?
With the loneliness
of you mighty men,
with your mighty kiss
that might never, never end,
while, so far away,
in the seat of the West,
burns the fount
of the heat
of that loneliness.
- Go Long

And, when the bulbs do flash,
as bright as morning,
the crowd keeps on gathering
like an electric storm.
- Esme

Driven through by her own sword,
summer died last night, alone.
I may have changed, it's hard to gauge
Time won't account for how I've aged
Would that I could tie your lying tongue
Who says that leaving keeps you young.
- Autumn

In this life, who did you love,
beneath the drifting ashes,
beneath the sheeting banks of air
that barrenly bore our rations?
And, for the sake of that pit of snakes,
for whom did you allay your shyness,
and spend all your mercy, and madness, and grace,
in a day, beneath the bending cypress?
Hung from the underbelly of the Earth
While the stars skid away below
Gormless and brakeless; gravel-loose
Falling silent as gavels in the snow.
It is too short —
the day we are born,
we commence with our dying.
- Kingfisher

Coats of bouclé, jacquard and cashmere;
cartouche and tweed, all silver shot —
and everything that could remind you
of how easy I was not.
It does not suffice
for you to say I am a sweet girl,
or to say you hate to see me sad
because of you.
It does not suffice,
to merely lie beside each other,
as those who love each other do.
The tap of hangers,
swaying in the closet —
unburdened hooks
and empty drawers —
and everywhere I tried to love you
is yours again,
and only yours.
- Does Not Suffice

Divers (2015)

But inasmuch as that light is loaned,
insofar as we’ve borrowed bones,
must every debt now be repaid
in star-spotted, sickle-winged night raids
In the folds and the branches,
somewhere, out there,
I was only just born into open air.
Now hush, little babe.
You don’t want to be
down in the trenches,
remembering with me,
where you will not mark my leaving,
and you will not hear my parting song.
Nor is there cause for grieving.
Nor is there cause for carrying on.
- Anecdotes
Above them,
parades mark the passing of days
through parks where pale colonnades arch
in marble and steel,
where all of the Twenty Thousand attending your foot fall
(and the Cause that they died for)
are lost in the idling birdcalls,
and the records they left are cryptic at best,
lost in obsolescence
- Sapokanikan
In December of that year,
the word came down that she was here.
The days grew shorter.
I was sure, if she came 'round,
I’d hold my ground. I'd endure.
But they'd alluded to a change
that came to pass,
and Spring, deranged,
weeping grass and sleepless,
broke herself upon my windowglass.
And I could barely breathe, for seeing
all the splintered light that leaked her fissures,
fleeing, launched in flight:
unstaunched daylight, brightly bleeding,
bleached the night with dawn, deleting,
in that high sun,
after our good run,
when the spirit bends
beneath knowing it must end.
- Leaving the City
What’s redacted will repeat,
and you cannot learn that you burn when you touch the heat,
so we touch the heat,
and we cut facsimiles of love and death
(just separate holes in sheets
where you cannot breathe, and you cannot see).
- Goose Eggs
As the day is long,
so the well runs dry,
and we came to see Time is taller
than Space is wide.
And we bade goodbye
to the Great Divide:
found unlimited simulacreage to colonize!
All we saw was that Time is taller than Space is wide.
That's why we got bound to a round desert island,
'neath the sky where our sailors have gone.
Have they drowned, in those windy highlands?
Highlands away, my John.
- Waltz Of The 101st Lightborne
lists of sins and solemn vows
don't make you any friends.
- The Things I Say
And in an infinite regress:
Tell me, why is the pain of birth
lighter borne than the pain of death?
I know we must abide
each by the rules that bind us here:
the divers, and the sailors, and the women on the pier.
Recall the word you gave:
to count your way across the depths of this arid world,
where you would yoke the waves,
and lay a bed of shining pearls!
I dream it every night:
the ringing of the pail,
the motes of sand dislodged,
the shucking, quick and bright;
the twinned and cast-off shells reveal a single heart of white.
And never will I wed.
I'll hunt the pearl of death to the bottom of my life,
and ever hold my breath,
till I may be the diver's wife.
- Divers
Hey little leaf, lying on the ground—
now you're turning slightly brown!
Why don't you come back on the tree,
turn the color green the way you ought to be?
- Same Old Man
In martial wind, and in clarion rain,
we minced into battle, wincing in pain;
not meant for walking, backs bound in twine:
not angel or devil,
but level, in time.
Now the towns and forests, highways and plains,
fall back in circles like an emptying drain.
And I won't come round this way again,
where the lonely wind abides,
and you will not take my heart, alive.
- You Will Not Take My Heart Alive
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
Love is not a symptom of time.
Time is just a symptom of love
Joy! Again, around—a pause, a sound—a song:
a way a lone a last a loved a long.
A cave, a grave, a day: arise, ascend.
(Areion, Rharian; go free and graze. Amen.)
A shore, a tide, unmoored—a sight, abroad:
A dawn, unmarked, undone, undarked (a god).
No time. No flock. No chime, no clock. No end.
White star, white ship—Nightjar, transmit: transcend!
- Time, As A Symptom

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