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M usical virtuoso. Medieval storyteller. Indie darling.
Fairy princess. Genius. Hippie. Artist. Joanna
Newsom has been called many things in critics'
desperate attempts to define her, but not unlike
her own freewheeling compositions, Newsom herself exhib
its a kind of intractable mutability. She speaks easily, in her
instantly recognizable, goose-feather soprano, evoking images
and poetics in the ebb and flow of conversation without ever
giving herself away. She is impossibly friendly, but impossible
to pin down. Touring in support of her 2010 release. Have One
on Me, a trippy triptych that is both more expansive and less
dense than her 2006 masterpiece, Ys, she begins by explaining
her derision to release a triple album.
"That's a very good reading of it, that idea of the triptych. I
think that the structural map for the record wasn't apparent to
me from the beginning. When I was writing the material, cer
tainly the initial realization I made was just 1 have too many
songs.' I was guessing that I would eventually locate the tim
ing or organizing principle that would allow me to draw a line
through the songs, but as I went along, I just realized that
there was no way to cut this into two freestanding albums—
that the songs were completely interconnected, and that it
was part of a story. The only way to divide it would be along
lines that resembled something more like chapters or acts in
a play. Once I started thinking of it in those terms, it got a
lot easier to recognize the structure and make it three parts...
Tripartite," she adds with a lilting giggle that punctuates her
responses throughout the interview.
With a sound one might liken to Karen Dalton scoring a
harp-centric musical production of A Midsummer Night's Dream,
Newsom's extremely intricate, complex arrangements can be
unwieldy in their requirements for live performance. "There's
Ryan Francesconi," she begins. "He did all the arrangements
on the album except for harp, piano and vocals and is kind of
a longtime collaborator at this point. He plays the tambura
and kaval [Bulgarian instruments], and he also plays guitar,
recorder and banjo. [He'll also be opening up the show at the
40 Watt Club.] And then [drummer] Neil Morgan is along, and
we have Djeina and Shira, my wonderful, amazing violin play
ers. We have a trombone player named Andy [Strain], and he
holds down all the braSs parts. He also takes care of any other
bass-realm instruments: cello, timpani. He kind of handles that
particular frequency. So, there's a lot of sounds this group is
capable of even though it's not that many people."
While Newsom tends to seal herself off in a hermetic, cre
ative bubble when writing, there are a few other artists she is
openly effusive about. "I continue to really love Bjdrk. I got to
open for her a few times, and watching her perform just made
me feel so lucky to be alive at the time that she's alive making
music Just the fact that she's out there and that people love
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her so much is very heartening to me, ya know? It makes me
have hope [laughs]. And I pretty much instantly love anything
the Dirty Projectors do. For me, it's always important that a
band is playing music for the right reasons, and that it comes
out of honest love for the work and the process, and when T
saw them play I felt like there was just the most incredible
density of talent in that group—the most incredible density of
good intentions and that joy of discovery. They blow my mind."
With little in the way of concrete plans after this tour,
Newsom turns dreamy about the possibilities of the coming
years. Much of her early musical studies were based in African
rhythms and styles, so it's no surprise when she says, "I would
love to go to Africa. My godparents are in Uganda, and one of
my lifelong best friends is studying and researching Bonobo
apes in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She and I talked
about the possibility of me coming out to visit her there,
deep, deep in the jungle. I might at some point visit her and
make a survey trip of that area that has music that I love. I've
been pondering it for a few years now, but it's kind of scary.
Not only for obvious, generic reasons like political unrest, but
musically it's kind of scary for me to go outside what I know
I'm good at and try to learn something that forces me to break
down the shorthand and the synapses that I have in my brain
and start from scratch, but I think it's worth it."
Floating freely between the distant past her music rekindles
and the unknowable future: of her daydreams, Newsom remains
only vaguely tethered to the here and now, but at the same
time, it seems like her favorite place to be.
"I've never been to Athens, even to visit. I've been hear
ing pretty special things about it for years. I feel like there's a
similarity to the town that I grew up in [Nevada N City, CA], ya
know? There's a lot of music and a lot of art packed into this
little town; it's a little bit off the beaten path, and I've always
wanted to go. It's always nice to play somewhere you've never
played before as welL I'm lookin' forward to it"
And indeed, Athens has always been a home-away-from-
home for free spirits and wandering troubadours of every
stripe. We may not be able to define Joanna Newsom, but we
will welcome her, and, maybe, if we're lucky, she'll have one
on us.
David Fitzgerald
.
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NOVEMBER 17,2010