Joanna Newsom
Emerges From the Hills, Older and Yser
BY KJERSTI EGERDAHL

PHOTOS BY JB GALUSHA, ASSISTED BY SANDY BERNIER

Joanna Newsom has found her kingdom. On the phone from the dressing room of Cleveland’s Beechwood Ballroom, her voice warms up while describing the house she left San Francisco for. “I have a little acreage, enough for animals if I want them, there’s big pine trees, big rhododendrons, and this big pyracantha bush that just blows up in front of the house.” She’s near her hometown of Nevada City, near her family and her old dog, in a place she describes with a smile as “sort of protected and around everything that’s familiar and slow — the hearth and the home — it’s good for me.” Not that she’s just relaxing in the golden California hills; as she says, “it’s a great place to write — it’s a great place for everything that’s important to me.”

Her new album, Ys, was clearly not born in the city. Not only are the songs set in farmyards and knee-deep in poppies, but all of them also have a folk-tale quality that no urban legend could ever live up to. Newsom pulls listeners in to a marionette theater — the saga of a dancing bear and a mother’s lament for her son — with equal facility. While none of this sounds much like the life of an American girl, Newsom asserts that everything has an autobiographical base. “Each song on this album does relate back to a focused space of one year, and five specific events within that year,” she says. “It’s my hope that these songs have an intrinsic value even if the specific story is not explicit, but a collection of images.” The first song on Ys, “Emily,” is a good example — it’s named after Newsom’s little sister, who also provides backup vocals. “She is the person at whom the song is directed, but it’s not necessarily about her,” says Newsom. “When you write a letter to somebody, that person determines the contents of the letter, even though the letter isn’t about them.”

There are only five such letters on Ys, but they last nearly an hour — so it makes a kind of mathematical sense that they contain so much more than the songs on her last album, The Milk-Eyed Mender. The objects displayed and handled on that album — bones and pinecones, twisted string — hinted at a story: the last track, “Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie,” throws in a list of shells at the end without expanding on what they mean to the song. On Ys, rather than collecting clues and artifacts, listeners enter the world that they’ve come from. Going back to “Emily,” the song creates its own naturalist’s catalogue: “The meteorite is the source of the light / And the meteor’s just what we see / And the meteoroid is a stone that’s devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee.” The first time around, the list shows a girl learning from her sister, staring at the night sky and taking careful notes. The second time we hear it, the rhyme comes directly after the girl is “dumbstruck with the sweetness of being / ‘till we don’t be.” The recitation suddenly becomes frantic. It’s no longer about remembering the definitions; it’s a chant to fend off death, disorder, or loss.

The instrumentation reinforces both moods. In the first track, mid-range, simple harp notes punctuate the downbeats, with a ballast of low strings underneath and violins dancing lightly at the edges of the vocals. Later, the harp notes come thicker and faster over plucked, almost tolling bass. Sweeping and ducking violins continue in odd, jolting rhythms after the verse.

This full orchestration is probably the most important departure for Newsom. Past songs and performances have gotten people excited by what she can do with just one instrument, but here she was drawn to a new angle. “About two-thirds of the way through the process of writing these songs I knew I wanted an orchestra with them,” she says. “I’m not sure why, but it seemed completely necessary to me.” She wanted the orchestra to swirl around her voice and harp — like “a hallucination,” she says. “I wanted the vocal and harp part to sort of feel like the core of the recording, sort of physical and tangible and solid next to the wash of the orchestration.” Newsom had tried composing in school, but she never got beyond what she calls “rudimentary, sort of clumsy attempts.” She decided that someone more skilled would bring more to the album than she could. “I didn’t have the musical vocabulary to tell the story I wanted to tell.” After listening “kind of obsessively” to Song Cycle, the psychedelic first album of composer and Brian Wilson collaborator Van Dyke Parks, she knew he had the sound she wanted. So she started asking around to see if anyone knew of an arranger who could pull off his sound; eventually someone asked why she didn’t just try Parks himself. “We just thought we’d ask — and he was really open to the idea,” says Newsom. He made himself available (and affordable), but insisted that because of Newsom’s improvisational live playing, and her idea of the orchestra as hallucinatory and detached, she should record her parts first for him to work around.

So naturally, she went and recorded with — Steve Albini, famed producer of neo-folk geniuses Jawbreaker and Cheap Trick. Well, he has also worked with Newsom’s tourmate Smog. “I had always heard that Steve Albini was the best at accurately recording acoustic instruments and making them sound like exactly what they are,” she explains. He helped her create the “rough and stark and exposed and grounded” sound she says she was looking for — and invented some unorthodox ways of micing the harp, which shall henceforth remain a mystery. “I don’t think I should talk about them because I kind of feel like they’re his intellectual property,” she says.
Regardless of how they got that way, her raw recordings eventually arrived in Van Dyke Parks’ mailbox, and an eight-month arranging process began. “I edited and edited and edited and told him everything that wasn’t working for me,” Newsom says, and in the end, the two of them came up with something she couldn’t be happier with, and something she couldn’t have done herself. It’s not a very DIY concept, but then again, there’s a lot more to music than indie rock.

The idea of an orchestra is a very European concept to begin with, and Newsom agrees that she has made more use of Western influences on this album than the West African music she has often talked about as an inspiration before. She’s still reliant on West African rhythms, but she says of the music, “One downside to those ideas is that the music born of those ideas is so dense, it’s hard to play with other instruments ... the harp on this album is airier and more open.” The most distinctly European song on the album, “Monkey and Bear,” opens with a small choir of unaccompanied women’s voices, creating a madrigal-like effect before any instruments come in. “There are especially certain dramatic elements of an early English folk music on ‘Monkey and Bear,’“ Newsom says. “I’d say there’s also a French impressionism to the album.” She mentions her debt to Aaron Copland as well, the American composer who, in the early 20th century, fused local folk traditions with European classical music. “I think of those things as symptomatic of a real moment in our history, when American music really separated from European — sort of an anti-European reference,” she laughs, “without being anti-European!”

It’s not hard to draw a rough parallel here — Newsom manages to fuse an indie sensibility with the serious study of music (she’s been at it since she was a little girl) and the pursuit of the best sounds available. Musical naïveté and bedroom recording are a couple of the strongest threads running through independent and underground music, from The Ramones to Kelley Stoltz — and here’s a girl who insists that her artistic vision depends on hiring an orchestra and someone else to lead it. Punk rock bites its own tail.

Newsom puts a lot of care and thought into what she’s doing, so careless pigeonholing is hard for her to take. “I feel super-alienated by some of the comparisons people make, and I don’t understand — well, I guess I do understand some of the comparisons, but it’s hilarious to me what people consider common denominators between musicians,” she says. Things like artist intentions and seriousness about music don’t come into play enough for her, so she’s stuck with forced connections to Cocorosie (squeaky little voices) or Brightblack Morning Light (that NorCal hippie sound).
Devendra Banhart comes up as a known accomplice, but she qualifies that as well. “I definitely have a connection to Devendra, although it predates music for both of us.” The full story: he was the best friend of a guy she was with for several years, back when he was just an art student and she was just a music student. “So I have a connection with him personally, but I definitely think that what he’s doing musically is very different from what I’m doing both in intention and musically.”

When pressed, she doesn’t come up with any other musician that she really feels a (musical) connection to. Call it independence if you like; that’s probably part of the reason that the big city didn’t take too well. She lived in San Francisco for a few years, but never really built up a community or found a music scene. “For some reason when I lived there I was in a funk,” she says. “I think I can say with confidence that I will never live in a city again.” She didn’t even play out in San Francisco much when she lived there, and her first tour, with Will Oldham, completely skipped the city. She doesn’t see the city as an essential breeding ground for new talent, as many people do. “I think an artist or musician can live almost anywhere,” she says — which is true, as long as they can make a living touring. Luckily, Newsom has reached a point where she can roam all over the world, and then come back to exactly where she wants to be. She finished up her U.S. tour in December, and heads to England after New Year’s for a series of orchestral shows, including one with the London Symphony Orchestra (“which is crazy”). Then off to Australia, New Zealand and Japan, back home briefly before more Europe, and then it’s festival season — “which I’m looking forward to,” she says,” but also just bracing myself for, because it’s not my element; I’d rather be at home, nesting.”

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