Annabel Mehran
Her songs are like epic poems sprung to life.
To her legions of devoted listeners, Joanna Newsom’s songs are like aural crossword puzzles, mysteries to be unraveled and dissected into their component references and influences.
But despite the fact that she’s almost constantly barraged by fan requests to explicate her song catalogue, she’s not trying to baffle anybody.
“I’m honored by the fact that people are listening with that level of interest,” says Newsom, who spoke to Isthmus by phone from New York City as she was gearing up for a North American tour that stops at Madison’s Orpheum Theater on Friday, Dec. 18. “But I’m not being intentionally complex. It’s just kind of the way I work. I’m trying to create a series of worlds that feel real to me. One of the things I do is layer, like layers of lacquer to a painter. For me, the most important thing is the story — the narrative truth of the song.”
That’s abundantly evident on the 33-year-old’s latest release, Divers, where 11 meticulously rendered songs encompass histories both real and invented. “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne” imagines the fate of a military brigade, while the title of “Sapokanikan” connects the original name of Greenwich Village with references to Tammany Hall and the ill-fated Ozymandias (Egyptian Pharoah Ramesses II). Each song is like an epic poem sprung to lyrical life, evoked by Newsom’s soaring, throaty voice and her gorgeous harp-playing. They’re complex works that demand careful attention.
Newsom, who was born in Nevada City, Calif., and lived in New York while she was writing Divers, has said she was inspired in part by the city and that its complexities informed some of the narratives of her songs. The term she used when describing the album to the Los Angeles Times was “a narrative loop” in which the songs aren’t chronological but are linked by a concept. It’s obviously an appealing one — Divers attracted a heavy-hitting lineup of musical collaborators, including contemporary composer Nico Muhly and Dirty Projectors founder David Longstreth, who contributed orchestral arrangement to “Time, As a Symptom,” the Emily Dickinson-esque song that closes the album.
Newsom grew up in a house without TV — her mother, as she puts it, “had done a ton of research on the effects of watching violence on TV” — and while she wasn’t immune to its influence (in fact, she loves watching it today, something her husband, former Saturday Night Live star Andy Samberg, probably appreciates), it left her free to play in the woods, writing music and pursuing her love of the harp, the instrument she gravitated to at an early age.
“For my personality type, it was probably good [to not have TV]. I’m easily distracted.” Except when she’s writing music, that is. When she’s in the middle of making a record, Newsom becomes hyper-focused, which perhaps accounts for the attention to detail that marks her lyrics and composition.
“I forget to pay bills, I forget to eat,” she says of her musical fugue state. “When I start writing, I can’t stop until an idea is fully evoked.”
Newsom appreciates the fact that stories written about her no longer lead with the fact that she plays the unwieldy harp, as they did when she released her first albums, 2004’s The Milk-Eyed Mender and its 2006 follow-up Ys. Instead, everyone’s focused on figuring out her lyrical footnotes and influences.
She says it’s akin to how people appreciate — or fail to appreciate — a good joke.
“I could lay my songs bare in the cold glare of the sunlight, but at no point would the listener understand the essential truth, the true spirit of the song. I draw the line at the notion that someone needs to do work to ‘get’ the music.”
That’s fine by us, Joanna. We’re happy just to sit back and appreciate the beauty.
