Joanna Newsom

By: Story by Matt Carr | Photographed by Annabel Mehran | October 11, 2010 | Music

“Nevada City is a huge part of who I am,” she says. “More than anything, my town has the odd, rare effect on people born within its lines of making them never want to leave and always want to return. So the album is, more than anything, about leaving home.”

Newsom, one of three children, grew up in a heavily musical family. When not practicing medicine, her father played guitar, and her mother, trained as a concert pianist, also played, conga drums and the hammer dulcimer. While her sister learned cello and her older brother the drums, Newsom straddled piano and harp, falling in love with the latter during her first lesson at just 8 years old.

Summers spent at the ethnic-music-and-dance-centered Lark Camp in Mendocino helped reinforce that interest and enable Newsom to master a style of play adapted from the polyrhythms associated with the West African kora — a 21-string harp-like lute. That musical passion followed Newsom to Mills College in Oakland, where, when not studying composition and creative writing, she worked on her own music and played in fellow Nevada City native and then-boyfriend Noah Georgeson’s rock band The Pleased. In 2002, Georgeson helped record Newsom’s first EP, Walnut Whales — a document that, in the form of a CD-R, would eventually find its way into the hands of indie-folk legend Will Oldham. Oldham, also known by his stage name Bonnie “Prince” Billy, remarkably took the time to listen to the passed-around CD-R and fell in love with it — so much so that he sent it to his label, Chicago’s Drag City, which has been home to Newsom’s recordings ever since.

“I am easy,” sings Newsom, welcoming the listener to her 2-hour-and-4-minute epic, Have One On Me, amid a flurry of violins. “I am easy; you must not fear,” she reassures, but Newsom knows nothing could be more untrue, and she admits so herself — it just takes 18 songs to get there. Where a narrator ponders hopefully in bed next to her lover on opener “Easy,” the bedroom in album closer “Does Not Suffice” is an empty and somber scene with “hangers, swaying in the closet” and “unburdened hooks and empty drawers.” “Easy I was not,” she concludes.

“It’s a triple-album full of weird, 10-minute-long harp songs,” jokes Newsom about the appeal of Have One On Me. But with the record’s natural and earthy tone that recalls the Laurel Canyon folk movement of the 1970s, the difficulty often associated with Newsom’s music has never been so easy to overlook.

Bridging the gap between her stripped-down debut and the complex Ys, Newsom has created an album that relishes and basks in wide-open spaces, allowing melodies the chance to breathe and resonate. Most importantly, one of the giant jumps forward on Have One On Me is Newsom’s newfound vocal restraint. Her tone, once squeaky, is remarkably warm and relaxed, finding its way up and down octaves with ease and maturity. The clear-voiced singer on “Easy” is nearly unrecognizable from the one encapsulated in The Milk-Eyed Mender standout “Peach, Plum and Pear.”

Newsom, who didn’t start to seriously sing until college, never had any formal vocal training, which she says was initially a problem: “I think that became a source of risk and engagement in my early performing experiences, because I was trying to reconcile something I’d spent years classically studying — the harp — with my singing, around which I had no technical or formal experience.”

Sipping whiskey in a cabin in Big Sur during the spring of 2009, Newsom and friends were having an informal jam when she realized she was having trouble singing in certain registers. It turned out she was suffering from vocal nodes and a two-month vow of silence ensued to repair her voice.

“I took three or four vocal lessons to try to curb the singing habits that had hurt me, and I think that really helped me to become conscious of the architecture of my own voice.”

After performing solidly for 10 years, Newsom says her two disciplines — singing and playing the harp — have finally caught up with each other. “You learn [instinctively] how to sing in a way that doesn’t cause harm to your body, and you learn to map and navigate the places in your skull and chest where the voice resonates. Of course, I still don’t technically know anything about singing in a classical sense, but I know a lot about how my own voice works.”

That voice, over hand-claps and a blues chord progression played on the piano, delivers its huskiest and most down-to-earth performance to date with the road song “Good Intentions Paving Company,” which while recalling the vocal presence of Joni Mitchell also remains indisputably Newsom. With the help of her two constant Have One On Me collaborators, drummer Neal Morgan and multi-instrumentalist Ryan Francesconi, it’s also the closest she’s ever come to recording a pop song. Along with the 1:49-long “On A Good Day” — the shortest song she has ever recorded — there’s evidence of an increasing directness to the listener.

The emotional core of Have One On Me, though, lies in “Baby Birch” — a 9.5-minute epic ballad that closes out the first of the three records. “I wish we could take every path,” sings Newsom. “I could spend a hundred years adoring you / Yes, I wish we could take every path / because I hated to close the door on you.” Like Robert Frost’s classic poem “The Road Not Taken,” Newsom’s carefully constructed lyrics ponder a path not taken — a dream that never came to fruition, symbolized by the “Baby Birch.” From the first six minutes of her slowly plucked harp and solo voice to the drum, hand-clap and electric guitar climax dressed in the violent imagery of a butcher and barber “cutting away at my only joy,” the song delivers as heartbreaking and significant an experience as Newsom has created to date.

Newsom has a semi-robust collection of vinyl records that predominantly span the years 1971 to 1977, filled with folk artists like Carole King, Mickey Newbury and Graham Nash. “The music I admire most is very simple,” she says. ”When I was in high school, for three and a half years straight I only listened to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors. It was the first record I loved, and I loved it in a bizarre way, to the exclusion of anything else. So it’s funny to me that the music I naturally write is so often perceived as refraction or inversion of pop forms. I’m never trying to be obtuse or difficult; for me, the impetus to write is always a joyful impulse, and I always want that joy to come across.”

Aside from tuning into the occasional top 40 radio station in her car, she rarely listens to new music. Friends though, have hooked her on a few essential albums, like the new Beach House record Teen Dream and The Fleet Foxes’ debut. The latter eventually led to Fleet Foxes singer and chief songwriter Robin Pecknold opening up for Newsom on her tour this past summer.

“Robin rules, as a musician and a human being, and he has such awesome, beautiful people in his sphere and family,” says Newsom, who joined Pecknold for a few duets on tour, including a cover of the Sheryl Crow and Kid Rock pop-country hit “Picture.” “That tour felt like summer camp to me. Reason No. 1 is that my sister came along. Also, we went swimming and had a picnic in the dead of night by a lake in Washington. I love floating in a lake at night. It scares me in that awesome, supernatural way that things used to be scary as a kid.”

Newsom also recently got the opportunity to tour with her hero, English folk musician Roy Harper, whose epic guitar-heavy album Stormcock in many ways parallels Newsom’s own boundless artistic ambition. The two have discussed collaborating on a project in the future, but Harper’s not the only one on Newsom’s radar: She says she would also love to work with Pecknold, Dolly Parton and rapper Nicki Minaj.

As for a follow-up to Have One On Me, Newsom has started to write “but nothing very good” so far. “Hopefully soon,” she says. ”I’m always terrified I’ll never write anything good again. It’s a constant state. In other news, I’m hoping to go to cooking school … and work on my posture.”