MOG

This interview has been in the works for a long time, with lots of starts and stops. I didn't think it was ever going to happen, actually, but it did. It's mostly about Newsom's EP from last spring and how she went from the elaborate orchestrations of Ys to the more stripped down live-ish sound.

Here's the intro, follow the jump to the actual Q&A:

I first saw Joanna Newsom 2004, filling the middle slot between Vetiver and Devendra Banhart on the magical "church" tour, where her distinctive voice echoed off a clam-shell shaped sanctuary and her intricate web of harp notes shimmered and hung in the warm June night air. She was just starting to make a name for herself then, on the strength of a couple of home recorded CDs, and her first effort for Drag City, The Milk Eyed Mender had been released only a couple of months prior. I knew who she was because Banhart had mentioned her to about six months before during an interview, in one of his long stream-of-consciousness lists of everyone worth listening to. (If he were as good at making stock picks as he is at pinpointing emerging musicians, Banhart would be a millionaire by now.) But that night, the combination of her very skilled and complex harp music and the childlike enthusiasm of her breathy, unconventional singing caught me off guard. At one point, she put down her harp and simply sang a capella, leading the crowd in a flurry of handclapping. It was weirdly primitive and sophisticated all at the same time.

I lost track of her for a while, then in early 2006, someone posted a rumor on the Dusted writer's board that Newsom was working with Van Dyke Parks, whose lush string parts and baroque orchestrations had embellished Beach Boys' SMiLE and his own Song Cycle. "How is that going to work"," I asked myself, thinking of the improvisatory lightness and vulnerability of Newsom's work, the polish and calculation of Parks' arrangements. The answer, when it came in Ys later that year was beautifully. Dusted's Rob Hatch-Miller called it, "one of those rare sophomore albums that shatters exceedingly high expectations" and the album topped a raft of best of lists for 2007.

Yet even as Ys drew unprecedented attention, Newsom had already moved on, taking a few long-time friends and collaborators on the road with a stripped-down, back-to-basics set of songs that, nonetheless, captured much of the complexity of her Ys recordings. Three of these songs were released in May, on the Joanna Newsom & the Ys Street Band EP, two new ones and an alternate take of "Cosmia". Newsom agreed to talk to Dusted, by email, about the same time the EP came out, but one thing led to another and the summer slipped by. Here, after a bit of a delay as she toured and worked on other projects, are her answers: (Read them here: http://www.dustedmagazine.com/features/646)