joanna newsom

anorthernsoul · Post by **anorthernsoul** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 6:38 pm

i've been meaning to write this for ages, but i've still not got proper internet access, so once again everyone's been without the benefit of my wisdom.

i guess lots of people will know who joanna newsom is, but i wanted to enthuse about her; partly as a result of everything i've heard, and partly for posterity, as when she puts her second album out i'll be able to ruin everything anyone posts about her by linking to this thread and pointing out that i liked her first. only kidding. but i do think that buying her lp when it comes out'll kind of be like buying blood on the tracks when it comes out. the songs ...

there's a fansite here, and in the downloads bit you can get some of the stuff she's been playing live, like emily, be a woman, only skin (harp) and the 'suite' of songs that comprises two of those that i've just mentioned. i think i converted shonn, so maybe there's room for some discussion about her. if not, the only words i have to ask of anyone posting is please refrain from cat metaphors; she doesn't sound like a cat, or a child, and there's enough tired, budget surrealism animal metaphors without yours. merci.

duppyconquerer · Post by **duppyconquerer** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 7:13 pm

Yes mate! She is incredible, i heard a song of hers about a year ago on a mixtape and kept meaning to get her album all year, which i still haven't got! but got a boot of her at The Green Man Festival this year (top quality) a few days ago which left me speechless! i have been playing it to everyone since and ranting like a maniac about it, but i've discovered she is like marmite, some people just can't stand her. incidently i can't stand marmite

u_nderscore · Post by **u_nderscore** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 7:31 pm

anorthernsoul! i'd never heard of her but just now i only got 30secs into 'be a woman' before my eyes filled up. thank you man. beautiful, beautiful music.

wow.

a beautiful noise · Post by **a beautiful noise** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 10:31 pm

yes i 'm a convert!

all is can say is "saaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaadie!'

simply fantastic, then again, DEFINETELY not everyones cup of tea. but she does posess something quite magical and oh so beautiful.

xxme

anorthernsoul · Post by **anorthernsoul** » Wed Dec 14, 2005 2:53 pm

wow, i thought i was sticking my neck out. i think if people aren't into her it all seems pretty alien.

'be a woman''s one of my favourites; i think she only played it once before it became part of the fifteen minute suite thing. if you can dig out an interview she's got these really fascinating points of reference and tastes; texas gladden and alan lomax stuff, old composers like ruth crawford seeger. be a woman sounds kind of like a traditional japanese thing ...

keep digging anyway, folks. and, yeh, that green man bootleg's great; there's some more recent stuff from the japanese tour on dimeadozen.

duppyconquerer · Post by **duppyconquerer** » Wed Dec 14, 2005 4:18 pm

Everyone talks about dimeadozen, but i gave up trying to get on it ages ago. it says all the places are taken or something, tried for weeks!
i read an interview where she said she liked Debussy and was influenced by senegalese Kora music, so i'm gonna go 'digging in the crates' for those next week.
Iraqi choubi music anyone? it's incredible really fast mental drumming with wailing over the top, and names like 'oh mother, the handsome man is torturing me',oddly Sadamm apparently loved it and spent loads funding it!

feetsies · Post by **feetsies** » Sat Dec 31, 2005 11:54 am

The Book Of Right On, Peach Plum Pear, and En Gallop are my personal favorites. Sadie is the hit single. I tried getting a few people into Miss Newsom and I got ridiculed. Savages. hahaha.. I actually put one of her songs on my Xmas Comp last year. I didn't make one this year because I'm lame.

Right now, I'm currently enthralled with the Ponys. Specifically "Ferocious" is a song I could of written. It's really eerie.

Anyway, happy new year everyone!
amelia

andyblacktoo · Post by **andyblacktoo** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 3:53 pm

peach plum pear is an amazing track, she is truly bonkers though

Alex English · Post by **Alex English** » Wed Jan 04, 2006 4:48 am

A couple of springs ago I was in Portland, OR for a night on my way to an environmental law conference. I ended up at Berbati's Pan to check out Sean O'Hagan and The High Llamas. When I walked in there were about twenty people in there staring at this woman in an old school dress playing the harp with the childlike enchanting voice. She said she had just been signed to Drag City. I saw her later that summer with Vetiver and Devendra Banhart at an art gallery in Denver on a sweltering hot day. Milk Eyed Mender is a great album.

In a similar vein I have been digging the new Animal Collective album.

ro · Post by ro » Sun Nov 12, 2006 3:45 pm

"Five songs, fifty-five minutes..."

http://www.forcedexposure.com/bin/searc ... =exkeyword

duppyconquerer · Post by **duppyconquerer** » Sun Nov 12, 2006 3:47 pm

Beat me to it by a few seconds! I only mentioned it to Bza yesterday! It's a masterpiece, definitely my album of the year.

Her voice, lyrics and turn of phrase are astoishingly complex and moving, and her harp playing is sublime. Then you've got Van Dyke Park's magic orcestral arrangements...

and 'Only Skin' is about 17 minutes long, yet you never want it to end. Incredible. I think she's made an utterly unique record that could/should go down in musical history as a 'classic album'. It's perfect. I've been listening to it twice a day for the past week! Believe the hype.

she's touring the UK soon...

Shaun · Post by **Shaun** » Sun Nov 12, 2006 4:28 pm

duppyconquerer wrote:Beat me to it by a few seconds!

And you've both beat me to it by about 2 and a half weeks. That album got previewed in The Independent newspaper and can remember reading it on the way to Nottingham. Still got it and just looked on the website but it's not carried so i'll write it instead.....It's quite amusing.

''Unquestionably the weirdest of the current wave of American nu-folkies, harpist Joanna Newsom just raised the bizarre bar a little higher - partly by dint of her collaborators (Steve Albini, Van Dyke Parks and Jim O' Rourke), partly by the protracted length of the five pieces, and partly through the sheer oddity of her songs. Stretching to 12 minutes, these story-song fables are rendered in a welter of highly poeticised imagery in which classical opposites - myth and reality, dreaming and consciousness, earth and space, living and dead, shade into each other, their serpentine meanderings delivered in Newsom's love-it-hate-it ickle-girly voice. An acquired taste, but one well worth acquiring.'' It got four stars.

Went to buy it the following day but got side-tracked and bought something else instead and have forgot about it since. Thanks for the reminder and it seems like it as made quite an impression on at least one person.

Edit: I'm looking forward to listening to this on the basis of Duppyconquerer's review of it.

duppyconquerer · Post by **duppyconquerer** » Sun Nov 12, 2006 6:07 pm

The Jig wrote: in The Independent newspaper and can remember reading it on the way to Nottingham. Still got it and just looked on the website but it's not carried so i'll write it instead.....It's quite amusing.

''- myth and reality, dreaming and consciousness, earth and space, living and dead, shade into each other, their serpentine meanderings delivered in Newsom's love-it-hate-it ickle-girly voice. An acquired taste, but one well worth acquiring.'' It got four stars.

Edit: I'm looking forward to listening to this on the basis of Duppyconquerer's review of it.

You won't be disappointed!

I know I'm often prone to shovelling absurd amounts of hyperbole on the majority of things I recommend, but...

also in The Independent (the world's best newspaper), this time in the arts review supplement, abit ago, another reviewer said something along the lines of

that he'd listened to this album for the past couple of months and, after raving enthusiastically, had concluded that it's either the biggest self indulgence since Rick Wakeman's Journey To the Center of the Earth, or as he preffered to think, the best album ever made. It got 5 stars.

.............

I first heard the record after it leaked, but only listened to it once as not to overdo it...it was worth the wait -

Her vocals have matured and she doesn't sound 'childish' now (I never thought she really did, but I know what people meant)

The lyrics are poetry, and I haven't been as impressed by such imaginative imagery since I first heard Dylan's 'wild mercury sound', or Ghostface's seemingly indecipherable musings. And the inlay comes in a neat little book-like form -

it's quite a step from her first album, no longer karate chopping her dinner and that...

and her 'flow' ,so to speak, on the second track would put alot of mc's who boast about their 'lyrical dexterity' and whatnot to shame. Plus there are a few glimpses of just how wide her vocal range is, the unexpected bursts making it all the more powerful.

I haven't been listening to it for a couple months yet, but every time I listen a different bit strikes me, so I know it's not one I'll lose interest with...

I've just listened to 'Ys' again now, and I'm going to replay the second track, 'Monkey & Bear'...

Shaun · Post by **Shaun** » Sun Nov 12, 2006 6:36 pm

duppyconquerer wrote: The Independent (the world's best newspaper)

I'll agree with you on that.

duppyconquerer wrote: I've just listened to 'Ys' again now, and I'm going to replay the second track, 'Monkey & Bear'...

What a tease. Just bought it for Â£8.99 delivered from HMV online.

Fuzzhead · Post by **Fuzzhead** » Sun Nov 12, 2006 6:50 pm

I'm going to have to hear what all the fuss is about.

I'll order it later too.

flamingrev · Post by **flamingrev** » Sun Nov 12, 2006 8:56 pm

i went to San Francisco about a year ago to see Brightblack, who my buddy was drumming for at the time. They SUUUUUUUUUUCKED, but Joanna Newsom opened up for them. It was my first time seeing her and I fell in love. She is the cutest little thing, I just wanted to eat her up. And the music, it just grabbed ahold of me and wouldn't let go. So good. I'm stoked about her new album.

Fuzzhead · Post by **Fuzzhead** » Sun Nov 12, 2006 9:01 pm

I sense a Duppy/Flamingrev rivalry brewing!

duppyconquerer · Post by **duppyconquerer** » Sun Nov 12, 2006 9:16 pm

Fuzzhead wrote:

" I wanted to say: Why the long face.
Sparrow, perch and play songs of long face.
Burro, buck and bray songs of long face!
Sing, I will swallow your sadness, and eat your cold clay,
just to lift your long face;
And though it may be madness, I will take to the grave
your precious longface.
And though our bones they may break, and our souls separate -
Why the long face?
And though our bodies recoil from the grip of the soil -
Why the long face?

....In the trough of the waves,
which are pawing like dogs,
pitch we, pale-faced and grave,
as I write in my log.

Then I hear a noise from the hull,
seven days out to sea.

It is that damnable bell!
And it tolls - well, I believe that it tolls - for me.
It tolls for me..."

feetsies · Post by **feetsies** » Mon Nov 13, 2006 9:35 pm

lol, great thread.

Alex English · Post by **Alex English** » Wed Nov 22, 2006 4:05 pm

She is playing the Barbican on January 19th with the London Symphony Orchestra.

Jasonsmith · Post by **Jasonsmith** » Wed Nov 22, 2006 5:32 pm

Joanna Newsom
Tuesday, January 16
Gateshead, UK
The Sage Gateshead
(accompanied by the Northern Sinfonia)

Sound familiar?

candy-cane-girl · Post by **candy-cane-girl** » Sat Nov 25, 2006 11:39 am

Oooo, thanks to your post, i just booked tickets for her, second row!

dab66 · Post by **dab66** » Sat Nov 25, 2006 1:50 pm

Full tour UK dates are:

Sunday, January 14
Glasgow, Scotland
City Halls
(accompanied by the Northern Sinfonia)

Monday, January 15
Manchester, UK
Bridgewater Hall
(accompanied by the Northern Sinfonia)

Tuesday, January 16
Gateshead, UK
The Sage Gateshead
(accompanied by the Northern Sinfonia)

Friday, January 19
London, UK
Barbican
(accompanied by the London Symphony Orchestra)

I know the London show is sold-out, tickets still available for all the others I think. The brilliant Alasdair Roberts is supporting in London, hopefully for the other shows too.