From: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org (ecto-digest) To: ecto-digest@smoe.org Subject: ecto-digest V10 #177 Reply-To: ecto@smoe.org Sender: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk ecto-digest Sunday, June 27 2004 Volume 10 : Number 177 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Joanna Newsom, reviewed by the _New York Times_ [Philip David Morgan Subject: Joanna Newsom, reviewed by the _New York Times_ Good Morning, Ectofolks... Will success - or a _New York Times_ rave - spoil Joanna Newsom? You be the judge... Philip David (and shortly after sending this, off to Book-Off to liquidate some of my library) 2004.06.25 - --- 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." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/26/arts/music/26NEWS.html?ex=1089245304&ei=1& en=07ce9d588c8f0a5e Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company ------------------------------ End of ecto-digest V10 #177 ***************************