A soulless, mindless, watered-down, image-obsessed, artless stab at John Fahey or Marc Bolan or Karen Dalton or Donovan or Vashti Bunyan is no less lame than Nickelback. I’ve gone to some shows that have left me feeling heartbroken about the state of music. I’ve seen some awful displays, let me tell you. I have friends in my hometown, and a few in other places, but I’m not part of some epic, bracelet-clanking, eyes-rolled-back, blasé, nihilistic scenester cult. I’m pretty insulted when I occasionally get credited in the press for having anything to do with the dissemination of that vibe. I think there’s a lot of fakery, a lot of posturing - a handful of kids who just latched on to what they saw as a scene, and set themselves industriously to the synthesis of a particular vibe. JN: I think some people perceive me to be part of a movement or something that I don’t really associate myself with. Q3: What are critics’ and fans’ biggest misconceptions about you? But I think I’d spent so much time immersed in the minutiae of the project that I sometimes didn’t remember what needed to be done in order to protect the spirit of the original songs. I love the arrangements so much that I might have allowed them to be too big in the mix, in a way that would suffocate the songs themselves. I think every choice he made during the mixing process was made to uphold, substantiate, buoy, sharpen, reiterate or complement the songs. There’s so much going on, and I think mixing the thing properly required good judgment and vision and musicality, which Jim has in great excess. Dan Koretzky, the owner of Drag City, at one point mentioned to me that he thought that, to some extent, the mix was going to “make or break” the record, and I think he was right. Jim O’Rourke did an amazing job mixing the record. So, for this record, he did what he does best: He made the harp sound like itself and he made me sound like me. JN: When it comes to capturing the live sound of acoustic instruments, Albini is hands-down the best recording engineer working today. Q2: Do you think Steve Albini, who engineered the record, and Jim O’Rourke, who mixed it, brought out the best in the recordings?
The things I wanted to be able to do with that orchestra demanded the presence of an “outsider” to help with arrangements, because I didn’t feel capable of creating the sounds I wanted to create, with my own limited orchestration abilities, hence Van Dyke Parks’s participation. The things I wanted to write about - the ideas I was interested in - demanded longer songs the particular form and structure these longer songs took demanded a denser musical texture, i.e., an orchestra. But this album had its seed in one or two little ideas, which in turn begged some pretty large changes. I think that expectation detracts from actual musical values. That’s not really a huge musical value for me - the idea that someone should reinvent themselves with each new album. Joanna Newsom: This will sound strange, considering how different this album ended up being, but I didn’t set out to do something different.
Question 1: What were you hoping to evoke differently on Ys than what you did on Milk-Eyed Mender? Newsom agreed to a rare interview with STOP SMILING via email, her preferred medium.
Joanna newsom ys download full#
While her second album has only five tracks, each song’s epic length and breathtaking heft of full orchestral arrangements churns into a substantial and compelling work.
She combined elements of folk, classical and pop with the whimsy of lullabies, and scored an opening spot for Bonnie “Prince” Billy and signed to Drag City Records shortly thereafter.Īfter the critical calamity over 2004’s full-length The Milk-Eyed Mender, the dainty songwriter returns with Ys. First playing keyboards in San Francisco’s the Pleased, this Nevada City, California native began her solo adventures in 2002 with the self-released collection, Walnut Whales. The following interview with Joanna Newsom originally ran in Issue 28: 20 InterviewsĪrmed with a Celtic harp and an incomparable voice, Joanna Newsom hit the independent music world with a pluck and a warble.
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