NYT ~"Joanna Newsom one of the country's greatest young singer-songwriters", new Folk, wyrd folk, Dream Mag, PT,Espers, Stone Breath, Vorontsova, beards & banjos, etc..Blast Off?

VG

Whimsically Poetic, She Soars and Sails

June 26, 2004
By KELEFA SANNEH

When Joanna Newsom played Bowery Ballroom on Monday night,
people were leaning on the stage, singing along with every
word - and that was precisely the problem. "I like it when
people are a bit more skeptical," she said after facing a
quieter (but no less smitten) crowd on Tuesday night at the
Mercury Lounge. "I like having to work a little bit harder
to convince people."

It's not getting any easier for Ms. Newsom to find
listeners in need of convincing. Since the release in March
of her debut album, "The Milk-Eyed Mender" (Drag City), a
growing number of devotees have been gripped by a reckless
but unshakable thought. They - all right, we - are
convinced that a 22-year-old harp virtuoso from Nevada
City, Calif., happens to be one of the country's greatest
young singer-songwriters.

Start with the voice: weird and riveting, swooping wildly
from elegant sighs up to throaty yawps and back. More than
one critic has described Ms. Newsom's fearless and
whimsical singing style as childlike, a description that
she finds misleading. "I guess it sounds kind of young, but
it sounds kind of old, too," she says, and it's true. Even
her most playful songs seem like weird antiques, rescued
from some extraordinary attic.

The first song on "The Milk-Eyed Mender" is "Bridges and
Balloons," which starts with a mesmerizing harp figure and
some seafaring lyrics: "We sailed away on a winter's day/
With fate as malleable as clay." The journey soon dissolves
into giddy wordplay and, after a series of far-fetched
rhyming couplets, she breaks the scheme with a lovely
non-rhyme: "And a thimblesworth of milky moon/ Can touch
hearts larger than a thimble."

For the chorus, she sails skyward, fierce and tender, "O my
love, O it was a funny little thing." Then three sharp
iambs bring her back down, "To be/ The ones/ To've seen."
It's a perfectly simple ending, and also a cunning
rhetorical trick. That odd contraction forces you to hear
the meter. Her songs may sound sweetly serendipitous, but
she knows exactly what she's doing.

Ms. Newsom started playing the Celtic harp when she was 8,
and by the time she moved up to a full-size pedal harp, at
14, she was already drawing not only from Celtic and
classical traditions but also from West African kora music.
You can hear the kora's influence throughout the album,
especially in "Swansea" (named for a California ghost town,
not the Welsh city), where she plucks a glimmering,
mutating riff. "It's 5 against 4, intersecting every 20,"
she says. And it's somehow satisfying to hear the luminous
song expressed as a mathematical formula.

After high school Ms. Newsom moved to the Bay Area to
attend Mills College. At first she studied composition
(working with the electronic-music composer Chris Brown),
but she eventually switched to creative writing. Soon her
music and her words began to converge.

She self-released a couple of CD EP's, "Walnut Whales" and
"Yarn and Glue," and played some low-profile concerts in
the Bay Area, still unsure how people would react. "I
thought I had a voice that no one would ever want to listen
to," she said, with her usual mix of modesty and
self-possession: from the first performance, she knew
exactly what kind of voice she had.

Similarly, she says she doesn't have any regrets about "The
Milk-Eyed Mender," her marvelous debut: "For better or for
worse, it sounds the way I wanted it to sound." Along with
her producer, Noah Georgeson (lead singer for the
retro-rock band the Pleased, for whom Ms. Newsom used to
play keyboards), she tried to find different ways to
capture the harp's reverberations - "47 different strings
rising into prominence, then receding back into this field
of sound," she says.

Some listeners have claimed to hear something pure or
innocent on this album, but they're wrong. What makes it so
addictive is the way Ms. Newsom's intensely self-aware
songs flirt with nonsense. Ornate, seemingly indecipherable
lyrics ("There are bats all dissolving in a row") turn
shivery and direct, "O morning without warning like a hole/
And I watch you go." And in "Cassiopeia," a simple arpeggio
blooms into a glorious spray of harp chords.

Ms. Newsom is currently on tour with Devendra Banhart,
another idiosyncratic neo-folkie, and she lists among her
biggest influences a couple of American originals from an
earlier era, the Virginia folk warbler Texas Gladden
(1895-1967) and the folk-obsessed composer Ruth Crawford
Seeger (1901-53). And it's appealing to imagine that one of
our most original young singers is also, in an odd way, one
of our most traditional.

In the middle of a song called "Sadie," Ms. Newsom makes an
unexpected admission. "This is an old song, these are old
blues/ And this is not my tune," she sings. Then, quietly
yet firmly, she finishes the thought: "But it's mine to
use."