Joanna Newsom looks at her fingers and can’t help but fret about what the
forthcoming week has in store. It starts this afternoon, when she leaves her
Newcastle hotel for a six-hour rehearsal with the Northern Sinfonia. A
fortnight in Argentina with her family, away from her beloved pedal harp,
has softened her callouses. Even if her fingertips stay intact today, three
shows in six days may call for extreme measures. “I have put superglue on
them before – and, at a pinch, that works. But it’s far from ideal.”
The words are uttered not so much in self-pity, but with the pragmatism of
someone familiar with that pain barrier. The pain is expected. Harder to
make sense of is the gale of flattery directed at Newsom’s second album, Ys.
Before Christmas it would have taken a brave man to bet that a work by a
Californian harpist with a voice known for its “polarising” qualities would
have held its own among seasonal sluggers such as Take That and the Killers.
There was, however, one thing Ys had in its favour. You would
struggle to name a record that sounded quite like it. The narrative and
musical scope of its five songs suggest that, in years to come, it may be
come to be seen as the Astral Weeks or Hounds Of Love of
its generation. Come the end of 2006, a list of critics’ polls compiled by
HMV had Newsom’s album at the top.
The singer ponders some of the superlatives lavished upon her. “It’s funny,”
she hazards, “I never really know what to say, bu mostly it depends on the
context.”
In the context of the Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles a year ago Newsom cried
tears of disbelief after Van Dyke Parks — who, lest we forget, arranged
Brian Wilson’s Smile — interrupted her flow to say that he
wanted to work on her album. Newsom had just performed Emily, the 12-minute
letter addressed to her younger sister, that opens Ys and sets out the
album’s vast thematic boundaries: the childhood confidences that bind people
through life and love: “Anyhow, I sat by your side, by the water/ You taught
me the names of the stars overhead, that I wrote down in my ledger.”
Asked about that meeting with Parks, Newsom recalls feeling mortified that she
had so dramatically lost her composure when approached by one of her musical
heroes. Afterwards she began the eight-hour drive back to her home in Nevada
and thrust herself into a kind of denial, embarrassed that she “had just
cried in front of this poor man who had taken time out of his busy schedule
to listen”.
She decided that what Parks probably meant was that he might enter “a kind of
mentorship, in which we might work together over the years. I didn’t even
tell my friends about it.”
You can hardly blame Newsom for keeping her own counsel when it comes to her
musical aspirations. The history of singing harpists in popular music pretty
much begins and ends with the Celtic harp played by the Incredible String
Band’s Robin Williamson. As for the huge, pedal-driven classical version,
Newsom is in virgin territory.
With this lack of precedent in mind, the teenaged Newsom — raised in a family
of classical musicians — thought she might go into composition. But when she
dropped out of the composition programme at Mills College in San Francisco
to take a creative writing course, events gathered their own momentum. “As
soon as I did that,” she recalls, “I found myself gravitating toward song
forms a lot more.
It felt really intuitive to start writing more words, and I felt more open to
the possibility of singing.”
Although it probably didn’t feel that way at the time, her biggest leap of
faith involved burning a few CDs to solicit advice from friends. Although
hers is a voice that has famously polarised critics — detractors put it
somewhere between Lisa Simpson and Björk — Newsom’s chums were more
diplomatic. Or maybe they just liked it. Given that her boyfriend at the
time was Noah Georgeson — the guitarist, producer and best friend of the
Christ almighty of outsider-folk Devendra Banhart — it was probably the
latter. So did Will Oldham, who happened upon the CD and passed it on to the
Chicago indie imprint Drag City.
While she remains friendly with Banhart, the mere mention of his name on this
sunny afternoon is enough to make the skies momentarily darken. Whatever you
care to call the uprising of acoustic music that has propelled Newsom and
him to wider acclaim — nu-folk, strange folk, acid folk — she draws a line
between it and her.
“I love what Devendra’s doing, but in the case of certain other artists the
comparison offends me. A lot of what I see out there is a real smug, knowing
otherness. And meanwhile, I’m like . . .”
In what might be an all-time first, words momentarily fail her. “Singing your
guts out?” I venture.
“Exactly. Honestly trying to delight in discovering new things that my voice
can do.”
The charge of knowing otherness, of course, is also something against which
Newsom has had to defend herself from those who simply couldn’t believe this
was how someone would choose to present their singing voice.
It’s hard not to see both sides on this. Of course she wasn’t parading an act
but, at the same time, the Newsom of the album Milk-Eyed Mender
(2004) expressed herself with a voice that seemed pointedly untutoured.
This, it turns out, isn’t so far from the truth. She talks about the singing
on that album as though it were a strike against criticism that had yet to
be made. “When I first started singing, it was almost like a ‘f*** you’ punk
thing. I can hear myself really going full force for notes that I knew I
couldn’t hit. Ironically, I’ve been doing that for so long now that I’ve
ended up being able to hit the notes.”
At the same time, she’s quick to point out that, had she been a man, she might
not have come under the same pressure to prettify her voice. “When a woman
has a voice of a comparable timbre to Bob Dylan it’s made into more of an
issue.”
It’s perhaps no coincidence that fellow artists have been among the first to
declare their admiration for Newsom’s musical fearlessness. Writing in the
music magazine Spin, the author Dave Eggers declared that her music “makes
my heart feel stout and enables me, with my eyes, to breathe fire”.
After they toured together in 2004, Bill Callahan of Smog started dating her.
On Ys the two can be heard toasting their love some 14 minutes into Only
Skin: “But I’m starving and freezing in my measly old bed,” they
harmonise, before a lone Newsom replies: “Then I’ll crawl across the salt
flats to stroke your sweet head.”
I suggest to Newsom that being in a relationship with another artist must
surely make her more courageous. “Being loved makes you more courageous,”
she replies. “By whom, it doesn’t matter.”
When Van Dyke Parks telephones from Los Angeles with his recollections of
their maiden meeting, it doesn’t take long to work out what he and Newsom
saw in each other. Newsom’s love of words — check out the “hydrocephalitic
listlessness” of the peonies in Emily — is shared by Parks, who describes
the moment he decided he would work with her.
“After 30 minutes I thought she might want to pause. In my mind were the
images of the bards, the troubadours, the poets. And the druid marrow of my
bones started to shout at me: ‘You should serve this person. This is an
anomaly to a dull event called popular music!’ ” At this, Newsom allows
herself an amused giggle. “His wife Sally was sitting next to him,” she
says. “She patted his leg and said, ‘Let her finish, dear! She went to all
the trouble to rent this harp!’ ” “That’s right,” concurs Parks drily. “My
wife is very good at crowd control!” In the months since they last spoke,
the 64-year-old Parks says that he has held on to her “finely handwritten
ruminations about the arrangements” — 15 pages in total — so important does
he feel its value will become to Newsom and her family.
To do justice to Newsom’s “contained rapture”, he set aside his
longstanding rule that artists refrain from chipping in with the
arrangement. As he puts it: “It’s like the Pope and birth control. If you
don’t play the game then don’t make the rules.”
Back in Newcastle, Newsom remains reticent when it comes to discussing her
achievements. You can already see in her the beginnings of a reaction
against what we think we know about her. And who can blame her? No one wants
to be perpetually on call as an alt-folk, harp-wielding Brontë with a
facility for endless ornithological allegories.
The Joanna Newsom who celebrated her 25th birthday this week wants to go to a
club and indulge her love of roots reggae. She wants to go swimming. She
wants to sing Carly Simon songs in a karaoke bar. And when the tour
finishes, she wants to go home and make mushroom moussaka while listening to
Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours.
More than anything though, she wants her callouses to harden. “I’m rarely
happy when my fingertips are soft. When all is said and done, that’s the
bottom line.”
Ys is released by Drag City
