Steps into the wild true yonder Monday January 7, 2008
Joanna Newsom took musical risks and hit the big time, writes Bernard Zuel.
Art as emotional release … Joanna Newsom transferred a difficult year's experience into her successful album Ys.
There are certain no-brainers in popular music: sex sells anything, even Celine Dion; children of famous artists rarely match their parents' ability but can outspend them; Michael Jackson is not a good babysitter. Ever.
An obvious one to add would be this: obscurity is guaranteed for an album of five lengthy, chorus-free pieces of music that owe as much to Elizabethan tunes and early-20th-century classical music as they do the rambling tales of mid-period Dylan, Van Morrison and American folk. An album whose lyrics toy with ornate language, baroque structures and archaic forms, sung by a woman whose voice can polarise audiences.
Did I mention that the album's featured instrument is a harp and its title is unpronounceable?
Certainly Joanna Newsom, the 25-year-old Californian whose second album Ys fits all of the above criteria, did not enter the studio under any misapprehension.
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An explanation of sorts for her approach may come from another strand of conversation with Newsom where she explained that she was a fan of the work of the Russian-born author Vladimir Nabokov, whose most famous work was written in English. Newsom can wax lyrical on the beauty of his approach to English and its connection with his perspective as an outsider to the language and culture. While the comparison with her is unstated, it is clearly appropriate.
"I guess I like to keep it as a reminder of the absolute fluidity of language," Newsom says of Nabokov's writing. "Because Nabokov was so brilliant and because his grasp of English was so good, but he was still approaching it from the slightly disorienting state where it was his second language, I feel that he had the opportunity to rethink some of the underlying structure and syntax that we build into a language.
"There's so much that is so instinctual but only because it is learnt that way and I feel he had a constant alertness and awareness about how we would combine words with a constant evaluation of what would work best there, that creates an impeccable distillation. There is no unnecessary word and each word is the most perfect word they could possibly be used in that particular sentence. And those words in combination, there would be a certain musicality to the words."
Joanna Newsom performs with the Sydney Symphony at the Opera House on January 25 and 26 as part of the Sydney Festival.
