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| Joanna Newsom, the Changeling
By JODY ROSEN
| 03/11/2010 | Name: Guest
Comments: LARK CAMP is a weeklong gathering of folk musicians held each summer in the Mendocino Woodlands, on the California coast, 150 miles north of San Francisco. Part music-and-dance academy, part freewheeling hoedown, Lark Camp brings together specialists in American and world-music traditions — Cajun fiddlers, hula dancers, Andean panpipe experts, Galician accordionists — who teach workshops and lead late-night jam sessions around campfires beneath the stretching redwoods.
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Ben Davies
PLUCKY Newsom performing in Canberra, Australia, in January.
Joanna Newsom, a singer, songwriter and harpist who is one of indie music’s leading lights, first went to Lark Camp when she was around 12. (She has been a frequent attendee ever since.) It was there, as a young teenager in the mid-1990s, that Newsom had what she calls her transformative musical experience. The camp’s harp teacher, Diana Stork, recognized that Newsom was an unusually gifted young player. She was steeped in Celtic and classical harp repertory; she had begun to compose her own instrumental pieces. “Joanna had a great imagination, and a beautiful lyrical sense, a very nice sense of chordal accompaniment,” Stork says. “The one thing that I really thought I could share with her was polyrhythms.”Stork showed Newsom a style adapted from the harplike West African kora — tricky polymetric patterns in which the player plucks out different rhythms with each hand. “That was when I started obsessing,” Newsom told me recently. At Lark Camp, she practiced the technique for hours on end. “Everybody would be lining up for dinner at night,” Stork recalls, “and Joanna would still be there, alone with her harp in the woods, playing and playing, trying to get it.”A willowy girl strumming a harp in the forest gloaming: it’s a scene that sums up the Joanna Newsom mystique. From the moment she came to prominence, with the release of her 2004 debut album, “The Milk-Eyed Mender,” Newsom has been regarded as an exotic. The rock audience had never seen her like: a beautiful young woman, perched on a chair at the lip of a nightclub stage, plinking the 47 strings of a contraption 10 times as large as a Gibson Les Paul. The effect was heightened by Newsom’s brash singing voice — which has been likened to Kate Bush’s and Lisa Simpson’s — and by her extravagantly literary lyrics, which are packed with pastoral imagery, showy rhymes and archaisms. Early publicity photos captured Newsom gazing into the murk on the edge of the woods, and her roots in Nevada City, a bucolic Northern California town with a reputation as a counterculture bastion, added to the aura. The music press quickly agreed on a cliché: Newsom was an earth child, an enchanted rustic, sprinkling pixie dust with each pluck of her harp strings. But look again at the teenager with her harp in the Mendocino forest. Was she a wood sprite? Or was she woodshedding: a serious musician, diligently, obsessively, honing her skills?“If there’s a musical idea you’re obsessing over, in order to work it out, you keep playing constantly, and you turn into a shredder,” Newsom told me when I met her recently in Nevada City. “Lark Camp was really about people jamming, sharing ideas and showing off. And that was really my way in — that chest-puffing, folk-camp-shredder mentality.”
Newsom and I were in the bar of National Hotel, a landmarked building on Nevada City’s hilly main drag. It was early January, and Newsom was doing a final series of rehearsals with her band before heading to Australia for the first leg of a tour to support her third album, a 3-CD opus titled “Have One on Me.” In person, Newsom comes off as neither an ethereal “hippie-dippy” nor a fearsome shredder. She is a trim, petite woman with large green eyes and waist-length light brown hair. She was wearing a gray dress, cinched with a big belt and an eyepopping necklace that she bought in New York — a dozen or so antique watch faces strung together on a gold chain. The necklace fit in nicely with the surroundings at the National Hotel, whose décor might be described as Funky Victoriana. We met at the National at Newsom’s suggestion. She lives outside Nevada City, in a house that she bought a few years ago. Newsom is fiercely protective of her privacy. When I arrived in town it was unclear whether I would get to see Newsom’s home; permission was eventually granted, with a strong proviso from her publicist that I was not to describe the exterior in any way that might give an overly zealous fan clues to its location. Newsom is similarly guarded about her work. I told Newsom that her bandmate Ryan Francesconi, a composer and multi-instrumentalist who arranged the songs on “Have One on Me,” had e-mailed me the notes he took in preparation for scoring the album’s title track. She was visibly irked. “I’m kinda bummed about that,” she said. “I like listeners to form their own theories.”There is no shortage of Joanna Newsom Theory. Newsom is among the most critically lionized American musicians to emerge in the past decade. (This year, Roan Press published “Visions of Joanna Newsom,” featuring essays by Dave Eggers and other admirers.) She is certainly one of the most singular. She’s a classically trained virtuoso on an instrument with little meaningful popular-music lineage. She writes sprawling songs, unhinged from verse-chorus pop form and crammed full-to-bursting with lyrics that owe more to John Donne and Anne Sexton than to any songwriting sources. All of this would seem to relegate Newsom to the high-art avant-garde hinterlands. Yet she is an indie-rock star: “The Milk-Eyed Mender” and “Ys” (pronounced “ees”), from 2007, sold 200,000 and 250,000 copies respectively, huge numbers for independent-label releases, especially in the anemic 21st-century record marketplace. But sales figures don’t tell the whole story; her popularity is a phenomenon of depth, not breadth. To the members of her cult, Newsom inspires the kind of exegetical fervor that Bob Dylan did in 1966 — fandom on the high-rock album-era model, with devotees who pore over the runes of lyric sheets like Talmudists. What they find in Newsom’s songs, above all, is a place. Her work hovers between genres, traditions, eras — between folk and pop and art song, with hints of Celtic ballads and Charles Ives and West African griot music filtering through the tunes. But the where of her songs is unmistakable. Newsom is a landscape painter: from the start, her songs have overflowed with flora and fauna, with refracted fairytale visions of Nevada City and environs. She calls “Have One on Me,” which was released in late February, her “early ’70s California singer-songwriter album,” citing influences like Joni Mitchell’s “For the Roses” and Graham Nash’s “Songs for Beginners.” It’s also the record in which Newsom writes most explicitly about her home turf. 1 2 3 4 5 Next Page »Jody Rosen, the music critic for Slate, is writing a book about the Knowledge, London's taxi-driver examination.
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