Joanna Newsom – New album and a Retrospective Interview

Joanna Newsom, or her label, are being mysterious over the possible release of a new album. It’s a good way of getting people talking. Well look at this post! If you visit Drag City on this page you’ll be faced with a link titled “The noose…um, draws closer”. All a bit strange or rather very suggestive? when you click on it you get this little comic sketch with what most are assuming to be the release date (23rd Feb 2010)…I have to agree with them.

We’ll just have to wait and see. In the meantime I thought I’d get retrospective. This is an old interview from 2004 with Arthur Magazine:

Two weeks after seeing her wow drunk hipsters in a Seattle rock club, and after tagging along on the photo shoot for this piece, I interviewed Joanna for an hour by mobile phone. I was struck once again by her essential singularity—it extends even into her conversation, which is learned, humble, passionate and articulate. Here is some of what we talked about.

Arthur: You’re living in San Francisco, which seems to be a hotbed of talent at the moment. What is it about the city that is attractive to you?

Joanna Newsom: I think that things that require closer listening in order to get have an audience here: things that have more layers to them and maybe aren’t quite as bold on the outside. I visited New York last year and, granted I wasn’t there long enough to get any sort of a realistic view of what the music scene is like, but my first impression was that in order to get noticed there for what you’re doing musically, it seems like the work has to be sort of…heavy-handed, I guess. Music that’s done in big broad strokes. Subtlety or strangeness or delicacy have, for the most part, not seemed to be qualities that attract a lot of people’s ears in other cities.

Arthur: You grew up in Nevada City, California, a small Gold Rush town.

Joanna Newsom: It’s a really, really strange town. Basically every building there has been there since the Gold Rush. There’s still stages around that had a lot of Gold Rush-era performers come through, people like Lola Montez and Lala Crabtree and Mark Twain. There’s miles of boarded-up mines and tunnels. And in downtown Nevada City, there’s a network of tunnels that had to do with a system of brothels that existed during the Gold Rush. I worked in a coffeehouse downtown, which was located right above this hive of little tunnels, and it was definitely haunted. Pretty much everyone who worked there would see the ghosts of Gold Rush whores. I’m convinced I saw one.

Arthur: What kind of people live there now?

Joanna Newsom: It’s a really weird combination of extremely rural farm-type folks and older retirees, but there’s also a lot of art people and hippies and composers and artists and poets. There’s seven hills ringing the town, dotting around the edges of Nevada City. That’s where a lot of the people live… Gary Snyder lives there. Terry Riley the composer lives there. Utah Philips lives there. I grew up neighbors with the singer of Supertramp, Roger Hodgson, who has a big pool shaped like an electric guitar next to my house.

Arthur: So, were you living in the woods, then, or…?

Joanna Newsom: We were surrounded by trees. From the back porch in the house that I grew up in, all you see is mountains, graduating in height, getting more and more purple as you go further back, until you see the Sierra Butes and the snowcaps. That was my view. We had your average Northern California forest wildlife: deer, birds… I saw a mountain lion a few times. And there is the river–all you do in the summertime if you’re a kid growing up in Nevada City is go to the river every single day, and it’s beautiful and it’s clear and there’s swimming holes. I loved it as a kid. I know a lot of kids got bored. But I had a good situation–I really liked my family a lot. If you didn’t get along with your family, I imagine it wouldn’t be a good place to be AT ALL. Because there would be very little way to carve out your own space and have a network of people who supported you and had things to do to distract you from it. I had a really wonderful experience but I don’t mean to paint it as this perfect utopia because it most certainly is not.

Arthur: How did you end up playing the harp?

Joanna Newsom: From about the time I was 5, I had been telling my parents I wanted to play the harp. They took me to the harp teacher in town, which does exist, an amazing harp teacher in Nevada City, and she said that she didn’t want to take a student so young and that she thought that I should probably take piano lessons first, so I took them for a number of years. When I finally started taking the harp lessons, I think I was around 10. From the very first day I took lessons I was in love with it. I think it was the first and perhaps only thing I’ve ever done where it was just a perfect fit. Nobody had to tell me to do it because it just resonated with me so much.

Read the rest here

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