Joanna Newsom
I am producing sounds that people are not used to hearing from the harp.
I have writing songs on my own for about six years.
People are often afraid for me. They think that I am going to break. I can make it through a set.
I would happy for someone to download my music.
The very first Walnut Whales recording was recorded just a few weeks after I had started singing, out of the blue, started singing. And the voice, you can hear how uncomfortable I am with it, and how terrified I am with it.
People in San Francisco and the East Bay have shown interest, done interviews, and have come to shows. I guess that the news travels fast out of this island that we are on.
I give away CDs at shows if someone wants a CD but doesn't have any money. I wouldn't want to do that forever.
I played piano for about two years when I was a kid. I didn't play long enough to be really great.
I started playing harp about fourteen years ago.
I have a recording that I did of instrumental songs.
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.
I am not doing something that it is experimental music in relation to classical music.
I have a deep rooted folk sensibility that I can't get away from completely.
I wasn't interested in writing music that wasn't beautiful for me to listen to.
I did spend a year in high school being obsessed with Fleetwood Mac.
I can't play my songs on the smaller harp. I have a Celtic harp. I can't do the key changes.
I can understand someone not liking the voice or the songs.
I want to make music that somehow connects to the things that I love in America music.
I am consciously not trying to bring in World Music elements. The ways that I work and feel are completely different in how they sound than someone playing the Kora in Africa would play it.
I am consciously trying not to make it sound Celtic or African.
I recorded harp first or singing first. I recorded it all together. Part of the reason is that I don't know how to play the songs without also singing. I forget how they progress. I don't think that any of them are verse, chorus, verse, and so on. They are not simple.
I definitely don't subscribe to the theory that more instruments, or more vocal tracks, harmony, or double tracking the voice, is a good thing. People do their early albums very stripped down, then each album becomes bloated.
I am always trying to write.
Lyrics are very different. There is a clear line between that and a poem. Something that has been a source of great excitement and delight for me is this idea that I get to rhyme.
In high school, we studied a lot of poetical forms. I was really interested in the math that was involved and the strange live break ups. That gave me a great amount of respect for a rhymed stanza.
The way that words fit together is always interesting to me. I love words.
It's totally different. I usually don't tell people about the Pleased if they know me from the harp. And if they are there to see the Pleased, I usually don't tell them about the harp. I am nervous that these people will expect something similar.
It's valid that the Strokes and the Pleased have been influenced by some of the same bands. But it's invalid in the sense that we listen to the Strokes and try to sounds like them. I think that they are a good band.
You should listen to a lot of different music.
Well, yeah, I wanted to resist the urge to thicken everything up with instrumentation, because I just felt like I was interested in seeing how the songs did on their own.
It broke my heart when I learned the moon had been passing the sun’s light off as its own.Collection: Heart
We deserve to know light. And grow evermore lighter and lighter.Collection: Healing
What a woman does is open doors. And it is not a question of locking or unlocking.Collection: Doors
Never get so attached to a poem that you forget truth that lacks lyricism.Collection: Forget
I don't think I'm abnormal and I think that lets people down.Collection: Thinking
We are blessed and sustained by what is not saidCollection: Blessed
I have a voice that's obviously untrained - and I think untrainable - so I kind of secreted it away for a long time. Actually, I would write songs with lyrics when I was younger, but I would just sing in my head.Collection: Song
If I ever met Dolly Parton for sure, I would just not be able to say anything. I love her.Collection: Say Anything
And a thimble's worth of milky moon Can touch hearts larger than a thimble.Collection: Heart
I never thought people would be mortally offended by the sounds I was making.Collection: People
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.Collection: Song
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.Collection: Weed
I'm not a wanderer, which is funny because I'm on tour half the time. I'm a home, hearth and family kind of person.Collection: Home
I didn't really know a lot of the history when I was younger. I didn't realize that the harp is coded in such a specific way in musical circles. It's kind of this society instrument because of its history as a young woman's parlor instrument.Collection: Circles
I can bear a lot but not that pallCollection: Bears
Around eighth grade I decided I wanted to be a composer and that's what I went to college for. Just a few years back, I switched out of composition and into creative writing so I could work with words.Collection: Writing
There are some mornings when the sky looks like a road.Collection: Morning
The so-called positive press has in some ways been more difficult to swallow than the negative.Collection: Way
I had known that people would probably have strange reactions to my voice, because I have kind of an unwieldy, difficult voice, but I never thought that anybody would have a problem with the harp. I just assumed... C'mon, it's a beautiful instrument.Collection: Beautiful