x Joanna Newsom
x born 1982 in Nevada City, California. moved later to San Francisco
x singer, composer, schooled in piano, harpist since age 7
x dislikes the recurrent "child-like" comment on her music
x did not sing til recently, because she never desired to
x studied folk music in her teens, later also composing
x dad plays guitar, mum concert piano, sister cello, brother drums
x grew up next door to Terry Riley, Howard Hersh & W. Jay Sydeman
x plays keyboards for the band The Pleased
x released her first EP, Walnut Whales, in 2002
x played as opener for Will Oldham and Cat Power in 2002
x Will Oldham has said Joanna is one of his favourite storytellers
x the second EP, Yarn And Glue, is released in 2003
x her full-length album, The Milk-Eyed Mender, is released in 2004
x her second full-length album, Ys, is released in 2006

Drag City's Ys biography:

Since The Milk-Eyed Mender was released, two and a half years have passed, more or less. And...

Joanna Newsom spent a lot time moving around — first touring much of the United States and then Europe, over and over and over. It was nice sometimes. There was an amazing tour of Japan, Australia, and New Zealand (with Smog) and a beautiful trip in Iceland where a couple of shows were played. Along the road, there were lots of festivals to play as well: Bonaroo, Sasquatch, Green Man, Rothskilde, ATP, and the Patti Smith-curated Meltdown Festival…maybe even a few others. Joanna played a benefit concert with her hero Neil Young too. She blew everyone away at all these shows, by the way.

In moments not involving the harp, the singing and the audiences around the world, there were other travels — like a car trip through Portugal with her flute-playing friend Ariella (one of the few people Joanna’s played with so far onstage; though shows of the near-future will hopefully involve many other players) and a few weeks in Costa Rica on a family kayaking vacation. At some point in there, Joanna moved from San Francisco back to the hills of northern California. The eleven or so months preceding the recording of Ys were spent like this (take it, Jo!):

Two of the songs were already written by the time I came up with the plan to set them to orchestral accompaniment. Three more were written from the ground up with the intention to orchestrate them in mind. All are intended to be playable with or without accompaniment, and I’ve already played them solo in a live context quite a bit.

Vocals and harp parts were recorded first, with Steve Albini. The main reason for starting this way was that Van Dyke wanted to base his arrangements on a final version of the songs, not “scratch” versions, given the fact that I tend to improvise and vary each performance slightly. Van Dyke felt that every nuance of the performance would inform his arrangements. A happy byproduct of this necessary order of events was that the vocals and harp were recorded in a climate of quietness, ease, and spontaneity, allowing for the retention of a sense of intimacy and immediacy. The goal I had in mind was for the harp and vocals to feel like they were developing unawares of the presence of the orchestra, unburdened by any of the self-consciousness / formality / austerity / stiltedness this might provoke....as if the orchestra is hanging in a hallucinatory shimmer around the more substantial harp and voice.

Albini mic’d the harp in an insane and never-before-done manner! I’d love to describe it further but I don’t want to give away his ideas, in case he wants to do it again sometime.

Van Dyke was then given the vocal and harp tracks, along with a pile of notes from me (mostly non-technical, i.e. describing moods, colors, images, scenes and concepts I wanted to project or produce in each song, line-by-line, bar-by-bar). In the months that followed, he’d send me various drafts of the arrangements, and I’d send him back notes about what worked for me and what didn’t. Everything he sent, from day one, was amazing and lovely; the struggle, in editing and refining the drafts, mostly centered on trying to come up with arrangements that reflected Van Dyke’s singular compositional voice and ideas, but still resonated completely with me and felt seamlessly bound to my own music. This took many drafts!

Eventually I went to LA to work directly with him in his studio, combing though the arrangements bar-by-bar, till both of us felt happy with the result, and both felt a sense of ownership and closeness to it.All the arrangement work took approximately eight months. The orchestral recording sessions took place in the spring, over three days, with an additional day at the end for vocal harmonies, percussion, and Van Dyke’s accordion. Van Dyke conducted the orchestra. He is a great conductor.

The engineer for these sessions was Tim Boyle, who did an amazing job. The recording was done in analog (as was, of course, the session with Steve); many of the younger orchestral musicians had never recorded to tape before...and the older players hadn’t recorded to tape for years (this is in LA, remember). There was much ado and freaking-out at the sound of tape rewinding.

Mixing was done in New York City by Jim O’Rourke. He ruled so much. I’m a huge admirer of all his work and I couldn’t think of anybody else who matches his combination of symphonic/ classical literacy (in both arrangement and engineering terms) with experimentalism and analog-fluency. He made the record sound the way I wanted it to sound. He edited quite a bit, and tweaked and carved it, allowing the songs to be at the center of the record, above and beyond all the instrumental influences. Just about every track on the
whole album is in constant flux, and Jim was able to achieve the hallucinatory orchestral wash-effect I wanted, with parts rising up and dropping in and out almost weightlessly, disappearing without much notice and reappearing as if they’d been there the whole time.

…and that’s just about how it happened!

…thank you, Ms. Newsom. As the record was being conceived, written, recorded and completed, more requests for shows and more shows and albums and personal appearances and interviews and correspondence of all kinds were pouring in. What little could be afforded to do was done and the rest was put off until the album was done. The release date for Ys is November 14, 2006. Joanna will tour America in October, November and December and consider what to do with the rest of the world afterwards.

 

Drag City's Press Release for Ys:

A new Joanna Newsom album — yes! Well actually, Ys. You pronounce it “ees” – and anything more you’d like to know about it, you can please look it up. What Ys means to us: it’s the title of an almost unspeakably incredible new Joanna Newsom album. Five songs, fifty-five minutes, one what-an-album!

Ahem. All frothy hype aside, the Consumer and the Fan may wish to know that: Ys is to Ms. Newsom a dream collaboration between her voice and harp and a full orchestra — a sound many of us fans have thought we were hearing when listening with closed eyes at her concert performances.

Songs familiar to Joanna’s following are a big part of Ys, having been performed in concert over the past year — but not with the arrangements you’ll find on four of the five songs here (one song being “classic” Joanna; which is to say, solo).

The songs, conceived with harp and voice and tracked as such by Steve Albini, were arranged with kindness and love by the legendary Van Dyke Parks over several months of correspondence and collaboration with Joanna.

At the end of the day, the instrument count included strings, woodwinds, and brass plus dulcimer, marimba, various percussive instruments (including a horse skull!), banjo, mandolin, electric bass guitar (played by master of mellow Lee Sklar), electric guitar (played by jazz-great(-and-definitive-MAD-magazine-authority) Grant Geisseman), and accordion played by Van Dyke himself.

If this seems like a bit of an overfull house — wait’ll you hear the mix Jim O’Rourke made of it! It’s light and lilting, with Joanna front and center and sounds blowing and tearing and swelling around her, in perfect consort. The wide-screen beauty of Ys is due to, among other things, a scrupulously all-analog production involving forty-odd tracks spread over two synched-up 24-track tape machines, mixed to tape and mastered at Abbey Road, home of the all-analog
mastering path!

Benjamin Vierling of Grass Valley, CA did the cover painting old-master style, with layers of egg-tempura and glazes. Strictly 16th-century processes, just like the recording of the album. When something suits something else so sweetly, it can’t be denied. Ys is the proof, and a sweet and stormy proof it is. We’d call it album of the year — but which of the five-or-so thousand years to place it in? Joanna’s music belongs to all time — and 2006 is quite the lucky year for having it. Ys!

 

Drag City's Milk-Eyed Mender biography:

Drag City now takes great pleasure in introducing to you this remarkable new musical singer, songwriter and all-around talent, Joanna Newsom. To those of you who don’t already know her, that is — Joanna’s cassettes, CD-Rs and mp3s have been making the rounds among the sharp-eared discerning types out there for whom new music is a joy and a pleasure that can’t be denied. For them and for you, we offer The Milk-Eyed Mender.

Raised in the tiny gold-rush town of Nevada City, California, Joanna Newsom began playing harp at the age of eight. She studied Celtic, Senegalese, Venezuelan, and Western Classical harp techniques. By the end of high school her intention was to be a composer. Soon, however, Joanna found her interest shifting to a different kind of music, reflecting her love for Appalachian folk and bluegrass. For the first time, she was starting to sing alongside the harp. Her first home-recording (the unstudied and exuberant “Walnut Whales”) was initially handed out to friends only, but soon Newsom was being contacted by a number of strangers who had somehow gotten a copy. One of these strangers was Will Oldham, who invited Newsom to join a tour he was planning for the following spring. That winter she played a few shows supporting her friend Devendra Banhart, as well as Cat Power. Soon Newsom was selling out small venues in the Bay Area (where she now lives), and receiving extremely positive local and national press. The next move was to make an album. And here it is.

Joanna’s music has more of an affinity with the folk revival of the 60s, or the bluegrass movement at present, than with most contemporary “folk” (or “anti-folk”) scenes. Affinities aside, her style could hardly be called bluegrass; nor does it evoke the pastoral tonalities of 60s folk: she sings about whalebones, sleep, grammar, mollusks, accumulation, automobiles, owls, burning boats, string collections, milk, teeth, bridges, balloons, cake, colors, and kin, all in an otherworldly, ragged-sweet voice that defies convention. Her harp arrangements are at times ethereal and delicate, at others galloping and ornate, but never overwrought — presenting not so much a mere fusion of influences, as an inquiry into the places where those influences naturally intersect. She considers the late composer Ruth Crawford Seeger (who was one of American folk music’s earliest advocates, as well as a vanguardist composer) to be a major influence, because of Seeger’s ability and desire to reconcile the tenets of experimentalism with her love for a beautiful melody.

The embroidered design of The Milk-Eyed Mender reiterates the vivid, homespun narratives of Joanna Newsom’s songs. Lyrically, she frames her unique vision of the world with words that seem dug up after a century underground -- — and while the material she tills from the dirt can seem as familiar to the listener as potatoes, it also glimmers in the spade like loose jewels. By turns elementary or rarefied, her words are always achingly heartfelt: these songs are meant to be turned over in the palm of your hand and held onto tightly.

Start listening now — for the striking new sound of Joanna Newsom.