Joanna newsom April 1996

After two brilliant self-distributed EPs, Joanna Newsom's anticipated debut album The Milk-Eyed Mender was released this spring to wild cheers from critics and fans alike. Steve Lafreniere caught up with the diminutive singer-songwriter-harpist driving the final leg of her tour with fellow avant-folk upstart Devendra Banhart.

STEVE: The word “folk” is often used to describe your music.

JOANNA: I think my songs are somewhat folk-informed, but I don’t set out to reference anyone in particular. Calling them folk-informed might even be misleading, because that implies a broad knowledge that I don’t possess. But I can see when a song is influenced by the Senegalese or Venezuelan harp music that I’ve studied over the years.

STEVE: Where did you study that?

JOANNA: I’ve gone to a music camp called Lark in the Morning every summer for a number of years. It’s up in the Mendocino redwoods — it’s more like a hippie gathering than camp. Just about every musical tradition from around the world is represented by at least one master. I’ve sat in on all kinds of sessions, and listened to people play around the campfire. That’s also where I picked up a lot of West African kora harp figures.

STEVE: I’m trying to picture a group of people sitting around a campfire playing harps.

JOANNA: [laughs] Well, I take my Celtic harp, which is much smaller than the one I play onstage. It’s light enough for me to carry on my shoulder.

STEVE: Even though the harp is one of the heaviest instruments, it’s usually played by women.

JOANNA: It was traditionally considered a parlor instrument, almost like a pricey piece of furniture. Owning a harp used to be a symbol of wealth, because they’re incredibly expensive. I bought mine used and got a great deal, but they’re usually about forty thousand dollars.

STEVE: It creates a wonderful, earthy tone — too bad that the cost alone would rule it out for most musicians.

JOANNA: The harp is capable of an enormous range of expression, but composers haven’t mined its capabilities. In classical music, and even in new music, there is a lot of glissandi, where the fingers move across the strings, from one end of the harp to the other. Composers rely on the harp for particular sonic gestures, but they don’t seem to know about the percussive sounds it can create — the harsher, more articulated stuff.

STEVE: The way you play the harp seems very instinctive.

JOANNA: I’ve been playing around with certain techniques for so long — melodic structures, chord progressions, finger-picking the harp as if I’m playing a guitar — that they have become second nature. Each pattern has become a muscle memory.

STEVE: You come from Nevada City, California, a little town that looms large in the history of California hippie culture. A lot of Haight-Ashbury people used to travel back and forth between San Francisco and Nevada City in the ’60s.

JOANNA: Many of whom remained there. [laughs]

STEVE: Doesn’t the composer Terry Riley live in Nevada City?

JOANNA: Yes. I’ve met him many times over the years. I’ve seen him play long, improvised concerts there.

STEVE: It sounds like a very progressive community. Did you rebel against all that when you were a teenager?

JOANNA: No. I grew up going to Waldorf schools. They’re experimental arts-centered schools that were first developed by Rudolph Steiner. They celebrate and encourage every eccentricity that you might have, so they’re poor preparation for the world in many ways. They let you know that everything is okay and that you need to be exactly who you are. The first one I went to was, honestly, a really weird school. I loved it. It was so far out. We had to do our homework on watercolor paper with colored pencils! By the time I transferred to the local public high school, the damage was done. I didn’t want to be like anybody else.

STEVE: So you never had a punk band.

JOANNA: No. I envied the punks, but I just couldn’t pull off the toughness. I had friends who were kind of punky, who were pissed off at everyone and everything — their parents and so forth. But I was never able to get too mad at my parents. I like my parents a lot!

STEVE: Do you still live in Nevada City?

JOANNA: I consider it my home, but I go back and forth between there and San Francisco every week. It prevents me from getting too comfortable and lazy. In Nevada City, I find it hard to focus on writing music because all I want to do is swim in the river and hang out at my house. I’m sure I would feel some sort of soul starvation if I weren’t there part of the time. But I also love San Francisco. A lot of wonderful people live there.

STEVE: So much strange music is coming out of San Francisco right now — Devendra Banhart, Faun Fables, Vetiver, CocoRosie, and yourself, to name a few. Why do you think these eclectic musicians are developing such a large following?

JOANNA: Maybe it’s the delicacy and strangeness of our music, or the lack of stylized, over-the-top posturing. Or maybe it’s the fact that we’re all making music that reflects exactly who we are. We’re not censoring ourselves.

STEVE: Your lyrics have an intelligence and wit that I haven’t come across for some time. Are you interested in poetry?

JOANNA: I’m probably more interested in fiction. My love affair with language has mostly come from reading Nabokov. There’s a beautiful hand-hewn quality to his sentences. You feel like he’s deliberated over the order and choice of every word.

STEVE: You are going to have an impact on young musicians. I think some boys might even pick up the harp.

JOANNA: I get so many emails asking where to buy a harp and where to take harp lessons, that I really think Lyon and Healey should give me free strings! They’re so expensive — and I’m always thinking, “Jeez Louise, I send them a lot of business!”