Top 56 Joanna Newsom Quotes
#1. I'm a big Johnny Cash girl. And I love singers like Laura Marling and Joanna Newsom.
Imogen Poots
#2. 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.
Joanna Newsom
#3. I don't think I'm abnormal and I think that lets people down.
Joanna Newsom
#4. It's valid that the Strokes and the Pleased have been influenced by some of the same bands. But it's invalid in the sense that we listen to the Strokes and try to sounds like them. I think that they are a good band.
Joanna Newsom
#5. There are some mornings when the sky looks like a road.
Joanna Newsom
#6. 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.
Joanna Newsom
#7. I wasn't born of a whistle or milked from a thistle at twilight
No I was all horns and thorns sprung out fully formed, knock-kneed and upright.
Joanna Newsom
#8. If I ever met Dolly Parton for sure, I would just not be able to say anything. I love her.
Joanna Newsom
#10. I am consciously not trying to bring in World Music elements. The ways that I work and feel are completely different in how they sound than someone playing the Kora in Africa would play it.
Joanna Newsom
#11. 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.
Joanna Newsom
#12. 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.
Joanna Newsom
#13. Maybe a good goal would be to just at least always try to create something good. Like something that is connected to love in some way. Like the [musical] equivalent of ... you can make a decision to be kind. You can make a decision to greet people kindly and make jokes with people and connect.
Joanna Newsom
#14. The way that words fit together is always interesting to me. I love words.
Joanna Newsom
#15. 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.
Joanna Newsom
#16. I am not doing something that it is experimental music in relation to classical music.
Joanna Newsom
#17. I have a recording that I did of instrumental songs.
Joanna Newsom
#18. I played piano for about two years when I was a kid. I didn't play long enough to be really great.
Joanna Newsom
#19. We are blessed and sustained by what is not said
Joanna Newsom
#20. I am consciously trying not to make it sound Celtic or African.
Joanna Newsom
#21. The moment of your greatest joy sustains:
Not axe nor hammer
Tumor, tremor
Can take it away, and it remains
It remains
Joanna Newsom
#22. People are often afraid for me. They think that I am going to break. I can make it through a set.
Joanna Newsom
#23. It broke my heart when I learned the moon had been passing the sun's light off as its own.
Joanna Newsom
#24. I have writing songs on my own for about six years.
Joanna Newsom
#25. It's totally different. I usually don't tell people about the Pleased if they know me from the harp. And if they are there to see the Pleased, I usually don't tell them about the harp. I am nervous that these people will expect something similar.
Joanna Newsom
#26. I started playing harp about fourteen years ago.
Joanna Newsom
#27. I did spend a year in high school being obsessed with Fleetwood Mac.
Joanna Newsom
#28. I can't play my songs on the smaller harp. I have a Celtic harp. I can't do the key changes.
Joanna Newsom
#29. 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.
Joanna Newsom
#30. I am producing sounds that people are not used to hearing from the harp.
Joanna Newsom
#31. I would happy for someone to download my music.
Joanna Newsom
#32. Well, yeah, I wanted to resist the urge to thicken everything up with instrumentation, because I just felt like I was interested in seeing how the songs did on their own.
Joanna Newsom
#33. People in San Francisco and the East Bay have shown interest, done interviews, and have come to shows. I guess that the news travels fast out of this island that we are on.
Joanna Newsom
#34. I can understand someone not liking the voice or the songs.
Joanna Newsom
#35. Never get so attached to a poem that you forget truth that lacks lyricism.
Joanna Newsom
#36. What a woman does is open doors. And it is not a question of locking or unlocking.
Joanna Newsom
#37. I wasn't interested in writing music that wasn't beautiful for me to listen to.
Joanna Newsom
#38. I never thought people would be mortally offended by the sounds I was making.
Joanna Newsom
#39. 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.
Joanna Newsom
#40. 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.
Joanna Newsom
#42. I didn't really know a lot of the history when I was younger. I didn't realize that the harp is coded in such a specific way in musical circles. It's kind of this society instrument because of its history as a young woman's parlor instrument.
Joanna Newsom
#43. The so-called positive press has in some ways been more difficult to swallow than the negative.
Joanna Newsom
#44. 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.
Joanna Newsom
#45. The signifieds butt-heads with the signifiers
and we all fall down slackjawed to marvel at words
while across the sky sheet impossible birds
in a steady illiterate movement homewards.
Joanna Newsom
#46. I have a voice that's obviously untrained - and I think untrainable - so I kind of secreted it away for a long time. Actually, I would write songs with lyrics when I was younger, but I would just sing in my head.
Joanna Newsom
#47. I have a deep rooted folk sensibility that I can't get away from completely.
Joanna Newsom
#48. We deserve to know light. And grow evermore lighter and lighter.
Joanna Newsom
#49. I definitely don't subscribe to the theory that more instruments, or more vocal tracks, harmony, or double tracking the voice, is a good thing. People do their early albums very stripped down, then each album becomes bloated.
Joanna Newsom
#50. 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.
Joanna Newsom
#51. I want to make music that somehow connects to the things that I love in America music.
Joanna Newsom
#52. The fire breather is beneath the clover, and beneath his breathing there is cold clay forever
Joanna Newsom
#53. The very first Walnut Whales recording was recorded just a few weeks after I had started singing, out of the blue, started singing. And the voice, you can hear how uncomfortable I am with it, and how terrified I am with it.
Joanna Newsom
#54. In the sinking sand,
where we've come to rest,
have I had a hand in your loneliness?
Joanna Newsom
#55. And all that we built, and all that we breathed And all that we spilled or pulled up like weeds Is piled up in back and it burns irrevocably And we spoke up in turns 'til the silence crept over me.
Joanna Newsom
#56. I give away CDs at shows if someone wants a CD but doesn't have any money. I wouldn't want to do that forever.
Joanna Newsom
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