Joanna Newsom - Visions of Joanna

A childlike folk

Joanna Newsom. Californian without seeming remotely so. One third woman, one third elf, one third little girl. Big clear eyes, an actress's face and little smirks, the impression of living in a world all her own. She mainly plays the harp, occasionally also piano, harpsichord and a Wurlitzer, and, above all, she sings exceptionally well. Not because she's endowed with who-knows-what academic vocal training, but simply because she naturally possesses a strongly distinctive and original timbre, one she's able to put to use in exactly the right way: Joanna Newsom sings with the capricious expressiveness of a small child. The theatricality with which she places emphasis on certain particular phrases and passages is that of questions that shriek dizzyingly upward, of exclamations that come crashing down like a hammer on an anvil, of the embarrassment mixed with the proud awareness of talking about "grown-up things" when it comes to lines about love, of the amused excitement of someone proposing a new game they've just invented.

A purest talent, one already evident in her early solo efforts, and one that couldn't escape the attention of the cream of American indie-rock. And so the dream of every budding artist materialises. A supercast of musicians and producers at her disposal, to put together the most acclaimed and controversial record of the year.

Co-produced by Van Dyke Parks, with vocals and harp recorded by Steve Albini, mixed by Jim O'Rourke and mastered by Nick Webb at Abbey Road Studios in London, Ys becomes the smash hit of 2006: it has critics the world over spilling rivers of ink, lands on the covers of the most prestigious magazines, and opens the doors of indie stardom to Joanna.

Clouds of hype, but also poisonous undercurrents, gather around the California elf. Adjectives like "verbose" and "pretentious" are starting to be menacingly attached to her "cantatas." Is that the fate of the greats? She, who doesn't even like the adjective "childish" applied to her music, presses on regardless, and a year later raises the stakes again with a three-track EP bearing a deliciously impertinent title: Joanna Newsom And The Ys Street Band. And it's yet another small enchantment, under the banner of a timeless, unclassifiable avant-folk. But let's rewind the tape and start again from the beginning of the story: Nevada City, California, January 18, 1982.

This is where Joanna Newsom was born. Into a family of musicians, of course: her father is a country-folk guitarist, her mother a doctor and aspiring pianist with a passion for dulcimer, conga and autoharp, while her brother and sister dabble in drums and cello. As if that weren't enough, there are even illustrious neighbors, such as Terry Riley, Howard Hersh and W. Jay Sydeman.

At just 7 years old, Joanna begins studying classical harp, later delving into its Celtic, Venezuelan and African variants. In doing so, she learns the "polymetric" style, based on the systematic alternation of even and odd rhythms, favored among African kora players (a sort of 21-string lute).

Meanwhile, she lets herself be drawn in by bluegrass and folk, dreaming of emulating her idols: Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Nick Drake, but also Karen Dalton, Patti Smith and Billie Holiday. She enrolls at Mills College in Oakland, where she studies composition and creative writing. And it's here that a new revelation strikes, along the paths charted by the Lomax brothers and their Appalachian folk.

Joanna digs into the folds of that ancestral singing, so distant and yet so close to traditional Irish music. She's drawn to the ghosts of the past, to those sepia-toned photographs left to yellow in family drawers. Her harp becomes the instrument of redemption for a small, ancient world condemned to inexorable oblivion. But behind that web of strings, Joanna reveals a modern drive, a playful, almost "pop" attitude. And between one cantata and the next, she keeps a surprisingly far-sighted eye on the "inner circles" of contemporary indie-rock.

Her artistic debut, then, has little to do with her dusty guiding lights. Joanna plays piano and sings in Adam Kline's Golden Shoulders, then is recruited by former college classmate Rich Good to play keyboards in his band, Pleased. Two solidly respectable pop-rock outfits (Pleased even earn decent acclaim with their 2002 album "One Piece From The Middle"), but which mainly serve as a launching pad for her true mission: contributing to the folk revival of the new millennium. And so, within the space of a year, a couple of self-produced EPs chart the way forward: Walnut Whales (2002) and Yarn and Glue (2003) already contain, in embryonic form, much of what would become Newsom's future repertoire. They're rough, unpolished cocoons, as befits a debut, but they already ooze that taste for dreamy folk and neoclassical arrangement that would mature over her next two albums.

Prince Charming

That's enough, in any case, for young Newsom to strike at the heart of the leading figure of the new American alt-folk, Will Oldham, aka Bonnie "Prince" Billy, who takes her under his wing, bringing her on tour as a support act and "signing her" to the reassuring banner of Drag City, which in 2004 releases Joanna Newsom's first full-length, The Milk Eyed Mender. A debut boosted by a handful of appearances alongside her friend Devendra Banhart and another rising star of female songwriting, Cat Power. But above all, a debut of real worth. Twelve vignettes, tender and crackling, twelve fables poised between traditional folk and independent singer-songwriter craft. The kind of energy and vibration it conveys isn't so much a conscious, reasoned "joy" of living, but rather an unconscious, unrestrained "hunger" for life, one that doesn't philosophize about how beautiful the things of the world are, but instead transforms them, naively and automatically, into emotions.

The music of The Milk-Eyed Mender is thus the stage that Newsom sets up to let the real protagonist move freely: played almost entirely on harp, which she handles with absolute mastery, the album unfolds through delicate ballads drawing both from folk tradition and from the typical harmonies of another, much more recent tradition - presumably that of the years in which she first approached popular music, American-school independent pop-rock. The use of the harp makes these two currents cohesive and reconcilable, and every song is musically delightful and carefully crafted, whether it leans slightly toward one side or the other.

And then there are the lyrics: each one is a small gem, suspended between the fantastical-fable-like and a sharp, playful irony. You'll hear improbable pairings and alliterations sung out ("Bridges & Balloons", "Peach, Plum, Pear", "Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie"), you'll discover that the difference between "The Sprout And The Bean" (in the song of the same name) ⟦Q1⟧, you'll come face to face with pedantic, strait-laced professors, good only for criticizing (⟦Q2⟧ - and that "poetaster!" says it all, like a comic, lopsided version of Morrissey's headmaster) and yet more: constellations ("Cassiopeia"), white swans ("Swansea"), people sucking on lemons ("This Side Of The Blue") and people destroying their own dinner with karate chops ("The Book Of Right-On"). And then the highest point of the whole record, that children's choir which in "Peach, Plum, Pear" sings the line ⟦Q3⟧ with the tone of someone who couldn't care less - the exact opposite (and therefore identical) to the kids at school carnival parties belting out songs like "oh what fun!" when they're clearly and merrily bored out of their minds.

And this time, closing the record isn't the last, splendid song, but rather that little bright red heart drawn in the booklet beneath the thank-yous, as if to remind us that music is, above all, a matter of the heart.

The album enjoys solid success within the indie scene and prompts Joanna to set off on a world tour, opening for artists of the caliber of Pixies, Kristin Hersh and Devendra Banhart. The rapport with the latter, combined with critics' tendency to carelessly coin and slap on labels, means Newsom too ends up officially lumped in with the "pre-war folk" caravan. A phantom scene, in truth, born mostly out of a desire to find a common denominator among those overseas folksingers making American popular music and stripped-down acoustic immediacy their ideological banner, drawing from Appalachian sources or chasing the demons that crowd the ballads of the American Anthology of Folk Music.

Her touring companions, then, are Animal Collective, CocoRosie, Skygreen Leopards, Devendra Banhart & co.: artists of disparate styles, united by a vague, freewheeling psych-folk attitude. The label risks caging young Joanna in, chaining her to an ideological dogma that was already outdated and obsolete from the start. And so, as in a fairy tale, the elf of Nevada City transforms into a princess.

Lethal Harp

Two years to turn a world upside down. The reluctant singer looks further ahead, beyond what was already a surprise in itself. She shuts herself away in an isolated house in the hills of Northern California. She prepares five compositions, ranging from seven to sixteen minutes long. She digs even deeper into her roots, starting with the artwork (created by painter Benjamin Vierling), in which she becomes a medieval beauty: loose, flowing blonde hair, a crown of flowers, a window looking out onto a river and mountains, a red curtain.

Ys, the title of her second album, takes its name from an island that is the setting of a legend: the protagonist is a princess who, turned into a siren, enchants sailors with the sound of her voice.

The album had a long gestation. Live run-throughs, string arrangements, high-profile collaborations.

The first stage was writing it for voice and harp, and the first big name attached was Steve Albini.

The second was the orchestration (for which thirty musicians would be used), entrusted to the immense Van Dyke Parks, to whom Newsom presented her directives and ideas, especially regarding the mood.

Finally, the third, after recording, was the mixing, handled by Jim O'Rourke.

It's exactly at this point that marketing and ambition merge. Names start leaking, the chatter begins: the upshot is that Ys, whose release was slated for November, became available online as early as September. And leaking online well ahead of time helped Newsom a lot, given that her album was anything but easy to digest.

By the time it hits stores, Ys is already the most talked-about album of the year.

Five tracks, all fairly long. The album opens with the vividly imaginative story of "Emily" (dedicated to her mother), which, with hindsight, also stands as the stylistic signature of the whole record. It isn't a song so much as a long tale set to music, steeped in poetry (pay attention to the lyrics). There's very little rock here, and a lot of folk: but the bulk of it is personality. The harp accompanies, acting as a guitar, the voice, which is the true protagonist, together with the melodies.

Newsom has smoothed out the rough edges — which were nonetheless a virtue — of her debut. Her singing is more measured, centered and powerful, tailored to the scope of the record. What it has lost in liveliness it has gained in focus. Hers is a divine gift, something truly unique. Bjork comes to mind, but the comparison only half holds: where the Icelandic singer has an angelic quality, the young Californian counters with a far more human timbre, which makes it all the rarer.

Melodically, what strikes is the grace of the lines, which have severed ties with contemporary reference points, delving into more distant yet less explored landscapes, as Newsom carves out her own personal space, shunning familiar — or at least comfortable — solutions, managing to sound new even while drawing on the ancient.

The other defining element is the strings: psychedelic, disorienting, often simply layered over the song's development, soaring above it or cutting into it, sometimes deeply, with the intent of conjuring an extra dimension, a hallucinatory effect (as Newsom herself literally describes it). The result, already gorgeous in itself, is further elevated by the ending, with the voice swelling and the track speeding up, delivering with real feeling what could be recognized as a hook, before dying away in the union of harp and orchestra.

The second track, "Monkey & Bear", the story of an impossible love, instead stages a more traditional presentation — if not in structure, which remains distinctive (though more linear than in the other pieces), then certainly in the melody and in the strongly classical cut of the strings — yet it's caught off guard by a thrilling ending.

The third track, "Sawdust & Diamonds", offers another variation on the formula, stripping away the orchestra and relying on a biting harp plucking, like a piano sonata, paired with a sweet, intense delivery, stirred by the melody's emotional openings. These are the record's two "lesser" tracks, even though, especially the latter, they operate on a very high level.

"Only Skin", on the other hand, is the collection's high point. All the elements of "Emily" are present here, pushed to extremes, across sixteen-plus minutes of chasing melodies, sketching out a wondrous structure in motion that flows smoothly thanks to its slow-down/restart games, driven by the delightful main melodic line, underscored, among other things, by accordion and horns. The highlight, once again, is the final turn, when, after a long stroll over the jagged edges of the violins, Newsom begins to let out little cries, launching into the main theme, sung with a burst of grandeur in a duet with Bill Callahan (her then-new romantic partner, to whom she had already lent a cameo on "A River Ain't Too Much To Love"), whose baritone hands over the reins to her vocal climbs, with banjo notes and dry percussion filling out the background.

Closing the record, without pal­ing in comparison at all (quite the opposite), is "Cosmia", the most "song-like" of the five: graceful arpeggios and strings swollen with emotion, a stunning folkloric instrumental jolt halfway through, an open, explicit melody like never before ("and I miss your precious heart"), pushed to its most expressive peak right in the final minute.

Despite a certain structural weight — whether due to its distance from familiar conventions or its often unsettling use of strings (and more) — Ys proves to be a small work of art. It's an album that perhaps lacks the accessibility and expressive force needed to earn the word "masterpiece", but it never once makes us regret the change in direction — if anything, it offers further confirmation, by now beyond doubt, of a curious and brilliant artist.

2006 closes out in glory for Joanna, lavished with praise by critics and taken to task only by a small, scattered band of naysayers — just enough to spark debate in the following months and keep attention on her name alive. Not even her manager could have dreamed up a more fortunate scenario.

And while editorial offices and "indie" forums the world over keep arguing about just what percentage of hype-fuelled carbon monoxide might be polluting her music, she presses on undeterred down the paths of her own Wonderland. Thus comes an unexpected appendix to Ys, an EP given the irreverent title, paraphrasing the Springsteen formula, of Joanna Newsom And The Ys Street Band. Backing Newsom at the Record Plant studios in Oakland, California, is an ensemble featuring Ryan Francesconi on tamboura and guitar, Dan Cantrell on accordion, Neil Morgan on drums and vocals, and Kevin Barker on banjo and guitar.

Just three tracks, steeped in a disorienting, celestial folk. One is previously unreleased, and worth the price of the record on its own: the ancient fable of "Colleen", suspended between the medieval enchantments of the accordion, the soft embroidery of harp and guitars, Celtic flavours (a few echoes of the Irish traditional "The Well Below the Valley-O"), and a vocal that flits effortlessly between angelic whispers, little yelps and acrobatic vocalizing. The delirious lyric tells of a woman who has forgotten she was once a whale and now wears a corset made of whalebone (and when the cetacean appears to her in a dream, it asks her: “What’s cinched ‘round your waist, Colleen?/ Is that my very own baleen?/ No! Have you forgotten everything?”).

The other two tracks on a tracklist where every title starts with the letter C are a reprise of "Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie", the sweet ballad from the debut album, here given a more distinctly live feel, and an extended, almost "progressive" version of "Cosmia" from Ys, packed with acoustic trinkets and exotic touches, closing with a psychedelically tinged free-folk coda.

The bond with Irish folk is reinforced, both in the sound and in the vocabulary ("Colleen" being the generic Irish word for "girl"), while the echo of Kate Bush rings out powerfully in a voice that has by now matured a great deal since her early days.

An unexpected and welcome postscript, then, one that, brief as it is, manages to capture the full essence of the Newsom sound.

Having achieved success, Newsom changes strategy. For the new album, she keeps everything tightly under wraps until a month before release: only then are details gradually drip-fed out. The running time, the cover, the tracklist. A first track, a second, a third. No big-name collaborators are brought into play, nor any press previews ready to sing its praises.

A madrigal in three acts (and its appendix)

So when the ambitious triple album Have One On Me comes out in 2010, attention can finally settle on the substance. It's a singer-songwriter's record, a sprawling flight of fancy in which a musician of deep, unconventional personality seeks — and finds — the status of a modern classic.

Where the previous album went to extremes, leaving itself open to both fervent enthusiasm and more cynical criticism, Have One On Me works by refinement and precision. The three structural layers (voice, harp and strings) merge and enrich one another, thanks to the maturity Newsom has reached as a musician, now fully in command of the whims of her voice and her compositions.

The bulk of the record is made up of long ballads running from six to nine minutes, in which Newsom mostly takes on the role of bandleader or orchestral vocalist. The strings no longer flutter over the songs as some overarching presence but are simply part of the sound among others, merged with the horns and harp, with the piano and — when present — the drums. The edges of her voice are smoothed out into a string of trills and half-falsettos, so that her distinctive childish timbre sounds cleaner and more integrated into the song, bringing Kate Bush to mind more than once.

Newsom increasingly seeks out form, steeping her melodies in the broad seas of folk, country and even Black American music (this time the echoes are of Joni Mitchell). She can no longer confine her paths to duels between harp and strings, opening melodic rifts only now and then; instead she tries to write songs that are still, yes, romances and journeys ennobled by the music, but that this time have to stand on their own as melodies. The inspiration carrying her through is staggering, because across 18 tracks spread over two hours, the weaker ones can be counted on one hand, and even those stay well above merely decent (take "No Provenance" or "Occident", for instance).

The opening "Easy" is one of the freshest melodies here, with the full instrumentation accompanying her graceful vocal flights. From here begins a long wandering through variations on a theme: from a sweet sonata for solo harp ("'81") to a bouncy, country-tinged romp ("Good Intentions Paving Company"), from an old rural song updated to slo-core times ("Baby Birch", with a special contribution of a few electric guitar notes) to a gorgeous, evolving piece of folk ("In California"), from a desolate serenade ("Go Long") to a madrigal ("Kingfisher") all the way to a half piano-blues ("Does Not Suffice"). The songs follow one another like ancient rituals: the melodies grow familiar, unfold and reveal themselves, drift off and rise back up in full force.

Have One On Me is a record that invites participation, one that seeks out emotion and compassion, and which adapts — with a naturalness that is nothing short of astonishing — a thorny style that once seemed headed in an entirely different direction.

More than five years later, the follow-up arrives: Divers (2015). After such breadth and ambition, this is a record that recalibrates its monumentality into a more manageable mid-size format. It is, plainly put, the mignon version of its predecessor. As ever, Newsom achieves a subdued, anti-spectacular fusion through unpredictable arrangements (the title track "Divers", a pastoral chamber ode in the vein of Kate Bush on "Anecdotes", the naiveté of "Goose Eggs", "Sapokanikan"): genuine gems, as if they were the work of a singer-songwriter just starting out.

Newsom still has an enviably inner fire, no matter what: it's precisely this that gives us "Time As A Symptom", her titanically Wagnerian (and philosophical) take on the nocturnal ode, and "Leaving The City", an ancestral marvel and one of her finest disguises as a postmodern fairy. The shorter songs dig into psychological abysses with even greater ease, like "The Things I Say" and the small, lunar country tune "Same Old Man". This is the first "normal" record by the singer-songwriter from Nevada City. For her remarkable standards, that means rich invention, but also mannerism. A work that's sweet rather than epic, with the strength (and the risks) of someone who holds steady on the line between the dreamlike and the earthly.

Contributions by Michele Saran ("Divers")

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