Joanna Newsom Quotes - Page 2

I did spend a year in high school being obsessed with Fleetwood Mac.

I can understand someone not liking the voice or the songs.

Families of privilege and money would have harps in their parlors, and their cultured daughters would learn to play. It's got such a strange history. But that wasn't the context that I learned it in, so the inherent friction between that history and the more humanist folk-y history wasn't in my conscience at all.

I had known that people would probably have strange reactions to my voice, because I have kind of an unwieldy, difficult voice, but I never thought that anybody would have a problem with the harp. I just assumed... C'mon, it's a beautiful instrument.

I can bear a lot but not that pall

I've been unaware of how people react to the instrument. People have ideas of what a harp is supposed to sound like, and a lot of them are negative ideas.

I don't look at people's expressions, because I still get nervous when I play, especially when I first put the harp up there. I just try to tune - it takes me a half-hour to tune, and I get nervous if I look at anybody when I do it.

I didn't sing for years and years, but I started playing harp when I was maybe 9 or 10. I had actually wanted to play for years leading up to that, but no teacher in our little town would take me on as a student, because I was too young.

Around eighth grade I decided I wanted to be a composer and that's what I went to college for. Just a few years back, I switched out of composition and into creative writing so I could work with words.

There's something fundamental to the harp that has retained its appeal my whole life. It's an instrument I am just in love with.

The so-called positive press has in some ways been more difficult to swallow than the negative.

I wanted to write songs which I think is a different thing. I wanted to write music that is informed by folk music. The chord progressions are obvious references.

I recorded harp first or singing first. I recorded it all together. Part of the reason is that I don't know how to play the songs without also singing. I forget how they progress. I don't think that any of them are verse, chorus, verse, and so on. They are not simple.

In high school, we studied a lot of poetical forms. I was really interested in the math that was involved and the strange live break ups. That gave me a great amount of respect for a rhymed stanza.

There are some mornings when the sky looks like a road.

I am consciously trying not to make it sound Celtic or African.

I played piano for about two years when I was a kid. I didn't play long enough to be really great.

I am always trying to write.

I am not doing something that it is experimental music in relation to classical music.

I have a deep rooted folk sensibility that I can't get away from completely.

I have writing songs on my own for about six years.

I started playing harp about fourteen years ago.

Lyrics are very different. There is a clear line between that and a poem. Something that has been a source of great excitement and delight for me is this idea that I get to rhyme.

People are often afraid for me. They think that I am going to break. I can make it through a set.

The way that words fit together is always interesting to me. I love words.