Joanna Newsom
Joanna Newsom
Joanna Caroline Newsom is an American harpist, pianist, vocalist, lyricist and actress...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMusician
Date of Birth18 January 1982
CountryUnited States of America
song ideas voice
My voice in combination with the harp - which, by the way, I use because I've played it my entire life, not to make some statement about the harp - somehow has ... coloured people's interpretations of the music and projected an idea of childlike or fairytale quality or innocence. Which sometimes prevents people from listening to the songs the way I would like them to be listened to.
america want
I want to make music that somehow connects to the things that I love in America music.
thinking people break
People are often afraid for me. They think that I am going to break. I can make it through a set.
interesting together way
The way that words fit together is always interesting to me. I love words.
song lines rhyming
I have a lot of interest in interior rhyming; not just rhyming at the end of the lines, but playing around with rhymes within the lines, playing with where the syllabic emphases in the sentences are, lining those up at strange moments in the line of the song. I'm not sure if that comes across or not.
heart moon
And a thimble's worth of milky moon Can touch hearts larger than a thimble.
weed silence spokes
And all that we built, and all that we breathed And all that we spilled or pulled up like weeds Is piled up in back and it burns irrevocably And we spoke up in turns 'til the silence crept over me.
blessed said
We are blessed and sustained by what is not said
bears i-can
I can bear a lot but not that pall
thinking people abnormal
I don't think I'm abnormal and I think that lets people down.
song writing thinking
I wanted to write songs which I think is a different thing. I wanted to write music that is informed by folk music. The chord progressions are obvious references.
daughter play privilege
Families of privilege and money would have harps in their parlors, and their cultured daughters would learn to play. It's got such a strange history. But that wasn't the context that I learned it in, so the inherent friction between that history and the more humanist folk-y history wasn't in my conscience at all.