harpcolumn

Joanna Newsom Soaring on Latest Album

Joanna Newsom talks harps, touring, and her new album Divers.
March 1, 2016

Joanna Newsom might be the best-known harpist playing today. Her latest album, Divers, was released to critical acclaim in October with both NPR and The Guardian naming it to their lists of best albums of 2015. Harp Column CD review editor Alison Young called it “storytelling in sound and color” and praised its “words burnished with artfully meticulous mixes of orchestral splashes.” Newsom’s unique sound has found appeal beyond the indie music scene where she first gained popularity. She took time between tour stops to talk with us about her new album, songwriting, and harp moving.

Harp Column: Congratulations on your new album, Divers.

Joanna Newsom: Thank you so much!

HC: The harp is kind of woven in and out of the tracks on the album. It’s foundational to all the music, yet it’s not overwhelming—it’s one of many textures in the music. How do you like to use the harp in your music? How do you think it’s most effective musically?

Joanna Newsom

Joanna Newsom was featured in our March-April 2007 issue. Download it here.

JN: I don’t think there’s any one set way in which the harp is most effective.Its character shifts, based on the desired “chromatic” palette—I mean, in the sense of tonal coloration, not in the non-diatonic sense—of a specific song, based on the desired mood of a specific record, or based on whatever harmonic or percussive or textural material seems necessary to build the particular little world of an album. I don’t really think there’s a limit on what the harp can do. For those people lucky enough to play and compose with the harp for a long lifetime, I don’t think it ever stops revealing new shades of character or miracles of patterning. I almost always write on the harp, even if I later rearrange the harp parts for piano or keyboard. My ideas are all rooted in the harp; the musical part of my brain is oriented and organized around the structure and sonic properties of the harp.

HC: In your song-writing process, what comes first—the lyrics or the melodic or harmonic line?

JN: Usually the first thing I’ll hear is a bare melodic line running over a blocky version of the chords—just the skeleton of the song. Every once in awhile, the melodic line will arrive with some words already attached. But usually the melodies start out as a string of nonsense syllables that only resolve into lyrics over time.

HC: If you were not making music, what would you do for a living?

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JN: I think I might be a deeply passionate but negligently irresponsible interior designer!

HC: You’re heading back out on tour soon—how do you think this album translates on stage?

JN: It’s been really fun figuring out how to translate this album for a live performance. I spent a lot of time listening to the album as a way of figuring out what matters most—which instrumental parts need to be reproduced exactly in a live setting, versus the ones that can be represented by another instrument in a similar tonal family—and, in the case of larger symphonic arrangements, which of the parts feel most fundamental and central to the arrangement since there are so many different instrumental lines to choose from. This process of orchestral reduction was done by Ryan Francesconi, my wonderful longtime collaborator and bandmate. He’s also the person who rearranged Van Dyke Parks’ orchestral arrangements for Ys so they could be playable by a much smaller ensemble, and he did the same with his own orchestral arrangements on “Have One On Me.” On top of Ryan’s many other gifts as a musician and an arranger, he happens to have a remarkable sense for identifying the bones of an arrangement—distilling a dense polyphonic arrangement to its purest form so that it can work in a live context with a small band, and still scratch the emotional “itch,” so to speak, for people who are attached to the sound and feel of the original recording.

The band I’ve been touring with is amazing—everyone plays multiple instruments, in order to try to cover as many parts as possible from the record—often switching instruments two or three times during the course of one song. But it’s a small band—Ryan, playing tambura and guitar and banjo and kaval and recorder and mbira and keyboard; Mirapai Peart and Veronique Serret, alternately playing violin and viola and keyboards, and singing harmony vocals; and my brother Pete Newsom on drums and keyboards. So even though we’re all kind of running back and forth the whole time, musically speaking, trying to keep different instrumental balls in the air, it also feels to me like a very connected and intimate group, which is exciting. It’s a small enough group that everyone can hear and see everyone else onstage, and because of that, we can kinda dig in and play off each other and improvise. Every night the show feels and sounds a little different, which I love.

HC: Do you take your own harp on tour?

JN: I take a rental harp on tour—always a good sturdy natural/non-gilded Lyon & Healy CG, usually a Style 30 or 85. I’ll usually rent a harp in whatever country a tour starts in (so I don’t have to deal with flying with a harp), and then we’ll travel from there with the harp in the tour bus.

HC: Harp geeks always want to know—what kind of harp do you play?

JN: At home, I play a Lyon & Healy Prince William! I rent my harps for tour, and I’ve often rented harps for recording as well (since I’ve often recorded on a different coast than where I live), so I’d actually spent about the first ten years of my music career with only my old childhood harp at home. But a few years ago I finally went to the Lyon & Healy factory in Chicago in search of a “serious” harp. I spent the day there and played about ten harps before I fell in love with this glorious instrument. I also still have my original Lyon & Healy Style 15, which has survived several falls during my clumsy wedding-harpist days, accompanied me on camping trips in the foggy redwoods, and been hefted up countless beer-slicked bar-room steps around the country for the first couple years I toured. Technicians who come to regulate my two harps tend to laugh at the contrast between them, but I love my Style 15. I call it my “offroad” harp.

HC: What’s the last album you bought?

JN: Meg Baird, Don’t Weigh Down The Light. She’s so great! I also just bought the beautiful ANOHNI single “4 Degrees.” I can’t wait for her new record.

HC: Your voice is always characterized by others as “unusual,” and the harp is always thought of by others as “unusual.” Do you think of your voice or your instrument as unusual in any way, or are they simply the tools you’ve always had to make music with?

JN: I understand that some people consider my voice to be unusual, although I don’t really think about that very often, because it’s not a very useful thought for me, creatively speaking. As you said, my voice is one of the tools available to me to make music with. Over time, the tonal color has shifted and the range has expanded, but it’s the same basic voice. And, insofar as it’s a tool, it’s important to me to understand that particular voice—what I think it’s good at, and what I consider to be its limitations—but I don’t frame those considerations in terms of ‘unusualness’, since for me, novelty and familiarity aren’t really pure compositional values. They’re subjective critical values that can be imposed by a listener once music is finished and out in the world, but I think they’re best to ignore when trying to write freely and well. As for the harp—I think most harpists are used to being told their instrument is unusual! When I first started making records, I was a sensitive about being branded as “that girl who plays the harp”—it felt like a gimmicky characterization, and I thought it minimized me as a composer and songwriter. At that stage of my life I didn’t realize how tightly bound together my writing voice and my instrumentation actually were. I’ve sort of circled back, at this point—whenever I have to write my occupation on tax forms or custom forms or whatever, I always write “harpist”!

HC:Divers is significantly shorter than your last album, Have One on Me. How did you decide what to include on this album and what to leave off?

JN: Well, I did ultimately leave two songs off this album, but I didn’t actually cut them because of concerns about running time. They just felt somehow disconnected from the rest of the songs on the record; they didn’t feel like they served the bigger narrative idea of the album. In the place of those two songs I cut, I recorded two new songs, pretty late in the process—during the mixing phase, with Noah Georgeson. I wrote “A Pin-Light Bent” during that phase. I had been feeling like there was a hole on the record, like there was a conspicuous absence of one particular kind of narrative perspective, which was needed in order for the idea to feel complete. Then I decided to record a cover of the traditional song “Same Old Man.” The lyrics of that song fit the arc of this album thematically better than anything I could have written, to be honest. Also, there’s a recurring device on this record involving the use of quotations, or fragments of quotations, buried within a larger lyrical line—in some cases juxtaposed in a way that fundamentally changes the meaning of the original quotation. And I thought that, formally speaking, it would be interesting to repeat this device on a larger scale—“quoting” an entire song, but manipulating the meaning of the original lyrics by way of changing the context, sequencing the song on the album in a way that assigns it a role within the larger narrative arc.

For this record, I wanted to see if I could make the formal structure of the songs serve to illustrate and echo and “act out” the narrative themes of the album. So, for example, some of the songs ask questions about cultural memory—what it is to be “remembered” or “forgotten”—and comment on the layers upon layers upon layers of revision, distortion, memorialization, idealization, destruction, and concealment that make up our cultural history; so it was important to me that the lyrics repeat this form, incorporate multiple layers of meaning, and employ fragments of cultural relics that are largely “forgotten” (like quotes from uncelebrated poets or obscure minor politicians), spliced with cultural material that is (for the time being at least) “remembered”. It was kind of funny to me (and kind of sad) to notice how many album reviews credited me with writing “Same Old Man”—despite the song clearly being indicated in the liner notes as a traditional cover. The phenomenon of me receiving that credit—the revisionist history involved there, the erasure of the true author, or group of authors, of the original work—seems to be yet another repetition of what the album is about in the first place.

HC: All your fans have their favorite cuts off of your new album (we love “A Pin-Light Bent” and “Divers”!), but what’s your favorite? Or is that like asking a parent which of their kids they like the best?

JN: Ha! Yes, I don’t think I could pick a favorite. It changes for me a lot during tours. Certain songs have found themselves more in the live setting, and picked up a lot of steam for me, for some reason. I really like the whole album, though, to be honest. It took me so many years to make, and I feel very happy with it. •

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Editor of Harp Column, freelance harpist, private teacher, hot yoga lover, and grammar geek.