With fate as malleable as clay
Joanna Newsom is from a musical family and asked to take up the harp at the age of five but has to wait a few years before her parents would let her start playing. She studied under various teachers but the most important person was Diana Stork
This is from Arthur Magazine and describes what she taught Newsom.
What Stork taught Newsom was rhythm. In particular, she taught her some interlocking figures based on the kora, a stringed lute-like harp-thing made of calabash and cowhide that’s used by the wandering West African bards known as griots. Like nearly all West African music—and like essentially no classical Western music—kora music is largely polymetric, which means that each hand is following a different meter, or rhythmic pattern. The basic pattern that Stork taught Newsom is two (or four) beats against three. Stork explained that, according to the African lore she had learned, the duple measure, thumping like a heartbeat, represents the earth, while the triple time follows the breath and represents the heavens. By playing these beats against and through one another, a single performer can unite earth and sky. Said performer can also get pretty funky, because it’s the overlapping and constantly shifting slippage between the different meters that gives West African music—not to mention James Brown—that special spine-wiggling groove.
Newsom fell hard for this polymetric plucking. She loved its physicality, and the sense of substance and danceability it brought to the harp’s fragile, quietly resonating strings. She took pleasure in training her brain and hands to follow two different pulses at once, and in exploring more complex metric possibilities. Soon she began working versions of these interlocking figures into her compositions. “It was like an opportunity to do something–not new, because I didn’t make it up–but to use it in a new way.”
As an example of Kora playing here is a clip of Toumani Diabate who is one of the best exponents in the world today
Newsom’s break came when Will Oldham ended up with one of her CD’s and passed it onto the owner of Drag City, who signed her up. The first album that appeared was the Milk Eyed Mender.
The first song on the album is ‘Bridges and Balloons’, which is typical of the songs on this album – fairly short songs with simple melodies and pastoral themed lyrics.
This is how Pitchfork described the album
She wafted in like a hippie but sang about the pitfalls of poetry. She wrote like a poet but praised the birds for their illiterate flight. Her brave wail betrayed her age and her simple instrumentation-- harp and voice, mostly-- betrayed how hard the music probably was to play. The record was a breeze for the first 20 seconds. Then she started singing. You either craned your head toward the sound or you left the porch. Her whimsy was obvious and her word choice was, well-- let's say that "boat" doesn't work because only "caravel" rhymes with "beetle shell." (I kept the dictionary out after that.) She warped soft acoustic music into art-- neither "freak" nor "folk," just a harpist with a good imagination. The puns were an aside to remind us she wasn't a stiff. Her debut-- to paraphrase author Ben Marcus on the subject of experimental fiction-- didn't compete with paintball for attention; it ferreted out sensitive folks for whom lyric analysis is as spiritually gratifying as dancing. She deserved us and we needed her, puffy sleeves and all
Some other favourites from the first album
Her second album is Ys.
After the simplicity of her first album Newsom basically went off the deep end and produced one off the most ambitious albums produced in recent times. The roll call of the people helping out is pretty amazing: Van Dyke Parks did the orchestral arrangements, Steve Albini recorded the Harp and Vocals, Bill Callhan chips in some backing vocals.
Here’s what Jim O’Rourke who mixed the album had to say about it
“It’s someone’s vision seen all the way through–sweat lost, brain racked, soul searched, and fingers calloused. I doubt we’ll hear anything as brilliant in a long, long time.”
The two main influences on the album were Roy Harper’s album Stormcock and Van Dyke Parks Song cycle.
When Newsom tours in the UK she usually asks for Roy Harper to be her support act. The following clip shows up the similarities between them, especially in the way they let their voices swoop and soar and around the melody in the songs.
Van Dyke’s Song Cycle provides the inspiration for the vast orchestral landscape that the Newsom is allowed to wander around in.
The album was released in 2006 and consists of just five songs all of which are at least seven minutes long. The first song on the album is apparently about Newsom’s sister and is typical of what follows
In the live show the arrangements are typically simplified, with the the players adapting Parks’ arrangements for various combinations of banjo, guitar, drums, violin and harp. The result is a profound transformation: The baroque gives way to the backwoods, creating an earthy, campfire opera. Here’s another song from the album recorded live at a festival in the UK in 2011
Her third album, Have One on Me, was again a little out of the ordinary being a triple album. In common with many double/triple albums I think it could do with a bit of editing to lose some of the weaker songs. Still it remains an absolute stonker of an album.
The album appears to have songs about her break up with Bill Callahan (see I Wish We Were an Eagle for Callahan’s side of the story). This from the NY Times
Newsom explained that there is a vague thematic logic to the album’s three-disc structure, tracing the morning, day and night of a single 24 hours. The record opens with an idyllic vision of lovers entwined in the boudoir and ends with a blunt romantic post-mortem and images of an empty bed. Newsom watchers are sure to find autobiographical resonances in these songs. “It doesn’t take a lot of guesswork to know who’s she’s talking about,” Francesconi told me.
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The music also changed as Newsom moved away from the complex polyrythmic harp playing and featured more piano playing. As she told LA Weekly
Like, I don’t fuck around nearly as much as I used to with the idea of polymeters (the old “playing-a-part-with-my-left-hand-that’s-in-5/4-and-playing-a-part-with-my-right-hand-that’s-in-3/4” routine). There’s a bit toward the end of “Only Skin” on my last album that could be viewed, if you were the sentimental type, as the death-knell of that whole meter question. In my brain. It has sort of stopped being fascinating to me and started feeling wanky. Like, proggy. I have resisted going down that road for years now, the prog-road, and I started to realize that was the only place I could go with the meter question unless I just kind of laid it to rest.
This is my favourite track off the album and I think shows the new style of playing she adopted.
Some other highlights from the album
In terms of albums that’s it. She’s recently debuted some new tracks whilst supporting Wilco so a new album is probably on the way for next year.
Finally here is a four part interview she did when Have One on me came out that explains a lot of stuff a lot more eloquently than I can
