Acierto, Mireya
Joanna Newsom
Issue #30
With her second album, Ys, the 20-something delivers one of the year’s most artistic albums. She’s made a name for herself as the mysteriously quirky, fairytale-writing harpist.
By Eugenia Williamson
Published: December 1st, 2006 | 11:18am
Joanna Newsom is sick of being photographed in the woods. For the record, she's not especially small or elfin, and her speaking voice sounds nothing like the way she sings. She is very articulate and energetic — ebullient, even — and quite poised for 24.
In mid September, on a characteristically drippy fall Chicago evening, I waited to meet Newsom at a bar in Logan Square. The pigtailed hostess became wide-eyed when I had told her of Newsom's impending arrival. In time, I met with an equally wide-eyed Joanna Newsom to discuss her new record, Ys, over several pints of Harp. Yes, Joanna Newsom drinks Harp.
Newsom wore a pink T-shirt, straight-leg jeans, and the world’s most adorable pair of sparkly, stacked heels, a direct defiance of the ethereal image her music projects. The 24-year-old also wore street clothes to sit for the portrait that graces the cover of Ys. “It’s a blouse and a shirt,” she said. “In the painting, they look really Renaissance-y, but if you saw me walking down the street wearing them with a pair of jeans, it wouldn’t look weird at all. I didn’t anticipate that people would think it was cheesy.”
Some have found artist Benjamin Vierling’s painting cheesy. In a representative comment by one Stereogum poster calling himself Pierro Della Francesca, “The picture looks like it was done by the guy who paints the unicorns on Trapper Keeper covers attempting to mimic the style of Botticelli's portrait of Simonetta Vespucci.” Newsom bristles at this sort of criticism. “I’m used to people making fun of me,” she said, “but it bums me out that anyone would ignore the fact that he’s a really good painter.” In spite of sometimes overwhelming snark, Newsom remains a good sport. “Some people have said that it looks like the cover of a young-adult fantasy book, and that’s sort of a legitimate point,” she said. Fittingly, Newsom has been reading Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Arthurian classic, The Mists of Avalon, although she acknowledges it’s “incredibly dorky.”
According to the specifications Newsom gave Vierling, representations in the portrait correspond to the album’s themes. “I originally wanted a Hieronymus Bosch effect,” she said, “something with tons and tons of information. Everything stands for something.” The finished project depicts Newsom in a classical three-quarter profile, holding a sickle and a mounted butterfly, wearing a wreath that contains wheat (“harvest and fertility,” Newsom explained) and poppies (“opium and sluggishness”). Newsom owns up to the charges of Renaissance Faire-tomfoolery lobbed against her, acknowledging that the cover has “all the conventions of Renaissance painting, so people couldn’t be more right on.”
The album’s packaging is elaborate, its booklet filled with embellished, painstakingly formatted liner notes and acknowledgements. The intricacy reflects countless hours of effort. “We sourced a lot of old books to find colors and non-copyrighted design and so forth, and we would research to make sure that the copyrights had expired. We would just pirate the shit out of ‘em, plunder them for all they were worth,” Newsom said.
In a musical landscape dominated by minimalism and self-consciousness, Newsom’s latest effort sticks out like a flugelhorn in a garage full of drum machines. Packaging aside, the record itself is both an anachronism and a departure from Newsom’s first Drag City release, 2004’s The Milk-Eyed Mender. The fully orchestrated album contains five songs, the shortest of which is more than seven minutes long, the longest more than 16. Newsom sings of thistles, meadowlarks, rushes, and sparrows, and she’s braced for an infantilizing critical reception like the one sometimes incurred by The Milk-Eyed Mender. “The songs are really dark,” she said of her last full-length. “Not just dark, they’re adult. They’re actual heavy shit. It was really frustrating that some people developed an idea of what I was doing, and what I was about, and never bothered to listen more closely; even when, to my understanding, these lines were overtly heavy. It would take actual effort to avoid understanding the dark meaning in a particular line, to at least sense it.” As she challenged this kind of estimation, Newsom closed her eyes, stuck her fingers in her ears, and sang a series of lalalas in imitation of a defiant toddler. “It would take complete denial to consider these the products of a whimsical, fairy-tale innocent,” she concluded.
Newsom blames pervasive sexist attitudes for this sort of misunderstanding. “The most topical example might be Devendra [Banhart],” she explained. “He has a non-conventional voice, and his lyrical style is extremely different from mine. But I think there are parallels. I think people are much more hesitant to use words like ‘childlike’ or ‘innocent’ to describe him. They were more quick — to the disservice of his songs — to jump to ‘creepy,’ ‘prophetic,’ ‘shambolic.’ Those are no more accurate. But those belie other prejudices. I think it immediately codes that critique as gender-specific.”
Newsom's run-ins with sexism weren't relegated to the impersonal realm of music journalism. She also received static from acquaintances. “I remember being absolutely wounded by some woman once saying that what I was doing — this was a friend of a friend — she said, ‘What Joanna is doing is bad for women.’ I wanted to be, like, ‘Actually, the mentality that breeds you interpreting what I do in the particular way you do is bad for women — beyotch!’ It really depends on the person. But it comes to my attention that there are some really interesting undercurrents that stem from people’s baggage, that connects to gender.”
These undercurrents include the way people apprehend her songs. “I think that there are women, as well as men, who misinterpret my music for reasons that are gender-specific. But I would definitely say that I’ve had better conversations with women about it,” she said. “When a woman says something, how they interpret vocal timbre, how they interpret composition, the extent to which they pay attention to musicality, lyrics — there are a lot of those divisions that run neatly along gender lines.”
Newsom has observed that women pay more attention to her lyrics, and the way I approached Ys fits into this assessment. Newsom’s lyrics are far more straightforward than they were on Mender in terms of structure and content. She attributes this to an evolution in her writing style. “Arbitrariness has been totally eradicated from my writing,” she declared. “I think that it certainly wasn’t the centerpiece of what I was doing before, but there are lines on the first record that I could not tell you what they mean. They felt right. I don’t think they’re dishonest or disingenuous — they’re true to something, whether it’s just a feeling or an impression, or they just sound good. On this new record, there is no line that I couldn’t tell you what it meant to me. I shouldn’t, but I know what every line means.”
This shift can perhaps be attributed to some of the criticism Mender received. “I’ve always been slightly offended by this suggestion of pure whimsy with nothing underneath it,” Newsom said. “I guess, to some extent, it would have been accurate to say that there were certain lines that were said because they were interesting to me. I think the exorcism of arbitrariness imposes certain limitations over the words I can use, and they will make the sentences a little more pure.” Newsom will admit that Ys is about a recent breakup, a new relationship, and her love for her family, but she divulged little else. “I’m not trying to be cryptic,” she said, “but I often say things that I regret later. I don’t want to limit people’s interpretations of the songs.”
Newsom’s painstaking approach to lyrics has not escaped the attention of the literary community. Since the release of The Milk-Eyed Mender, she has garnered praise from the likes of Dave Eggers and Judy Budnitz. Newsom is pleased but unsurprised by this attention. “All questions of goodness aside, I think it’s evident that I’m really interested in writing,” she said. “Some of my favorite songwriters don’t care as much about words, but I still love them because they write amazing songs. Maybe they have a different approach, a different relationship to language — there’s a thousand different ways that music can be good. I know that my lot in life is not to be able to ignore language. I can’t not care about it in the context of songwriting. Some people can so gracefully and so eloquently sidestep that, but for better or for worse, whether or not I’m successful in it, I think it’s evident that I have a preoccupation with language.”
Newsom’s literary credentials are perhaps partly responsible for her appearance at the 2006 New Yorker Festival in October, an invitation about which her parents were especially pleased. “I told my parents, and they’ve never been to New York, and they were like, ‘You have to do it! We’ll come! Everyone reads The New Yorker! I read The New Yorker! You read The New Yorker!’” she said. “I like to read it. It’s a good magazine.” In spite of her fandom, Newsom has some reservations about the appearance. “My feeling is that a lot of the audience won’t know my music,” she confided. “It’s a panel discussion with a few young composers and a moderator who’s one of the New York Times’ music writers. It’s partially about modern music and composition. I have a feeling that they thought I could take part because I was classically trained. I’m totally nervous. I have a feeling that the audience will know more about the subject than I know. I really don’t want to look like an idiot. I said yes because my parents really wanted to go.”
Newsom is nervous about appearing in front of the New Yorker set in spite of the fact that she studied creative writing as an undergraduate, grew up in a house filled with old books, and memorized quite a bit of poetry as a child. “I went to a Waldorf school,” she disclosed. “Part of that is that you have to learn recitation, long poems. I did a lot of theater, too, Shakespeare and stuff.” She speculates that her education will help her remember Ys’ lengthy lyrics while on tour.
The voice she will use on her upcoming tour has lost most of the endearingly squeaky trills that dappled Mender. With arbitrariness abolished from her lyrical repertoire, Newsom’s vocals have also become more earthbound. “I’m able to trust my own voice,” she said. “It’s not this will o’ the wisp. I’m not just chasing it. I felt like it was this weird, phantom light that sometimes I could grab a hold of, and other times was out of reach, and I’d fail. Now, I feel that I have it a little more. It’s not this force that I’m waiting to visit itself upon me.”
Newsom’s ownership of her voice matches the sense of ownership she feels about her new record. When Mender was released, Newsom was quoted as saying she didn’t mind if people downloaded her songs. Now she feels different. In September, a hacker broke into Pictchfork.com’s server and leaked Ys. “I was prepared for it to leak,” Newsom said. “I’d been warned the second the promos go out, it’s out of our hands.” Although she was not surprised, Newsom was dismayed by the widespread coverage the leak received. “A lot of people who didn’t care about my music at all were talking about this event because it was Pitchfork,” she said. “Many people were like, ‘The Almighty Pitchfork messed up!’ Everyone seemed to think it was necessary to prove their point by sticking an mp3 of one of the songs at the end of their news items, and one of these songs represents a fifth of my record!”
Apparently, even laurelled harpists aren’t immune to illegal downloading. Unlike, say, Lars Ulrich, Newsom doesn’t take a stand against downloading per se, but she does object to the decontextualization inherent therein. “I will say that people don’t get the songs in the context of how I intended them to be received in,” she said. “I was so proud of this record. I wanted it to be received just the way I had put it together. I had planned it with so many people, and for it to be taken out of context, I was a little deflated. It’s not so much an illegal downloading question as an aesthetic preference.” She then added sarcastically, “Momma needs a brand-new bag!”
In spite of the fact that Newsom believes Pitchfork’s notoriety to be solely responsible for the petit scandale surrounding the leak, her growing popularity surely played a part. As of today, The Milk-Eyed Mender is Drag City’s best selling release. In 2004, Newsom appeared on Jimmy Kimmel. Ys was even featured as one of Entertainment Weekly’s most anticipated fall releases. It seems as though Newsom is poised to become America's first chart-topping harpist, but Newsom herself allows for the chance that her new sound might scare some listeners off. This doesn't bother her a bit. This doesn’t bother her a bit. “I need to be allowed to make the music that I want to make, and I should not resent anybody for not liking that,” she said. “If my audience shrinks, I shouldn’t hold that against anybody. Conversely, if somebody has use for the first record and not for the second record, that shouldn’t be too much of a discussion. I went in a direction that was exactly what I needed to do. And I was so interested, and had such a good time. And some people will be there with me, and other people won’t. Bless all of their hearts, but we can still have a beer at the end of the day and be friends.”
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