Joanna Newsom Quotes

In December of that year,
the word came down that she was here.
The days grew shorter.
I was sure, if she came 'round,
I’d hold my ground. I'd endure.
But they'd alluded to a change
that came to pass,
and Spring, deranged,
weeping grass and sleepless,
broke herself upon my windowglass.
And I could barely breathe, for seeing
all the splintered light that leaked her fissures,
fleeing, launched in flight:
unstaunched daylight, brightly bleeding,
bleached the night with dawn, deleting,
in that high sun,
after our good run,
when the spirit bends
beneath knowing it must end.

We could stand for a century
Staring, with our heads cocked
In the broad daylight at this thing
Joy
Landlocked
In bodies that don't keep
Dumbstruck with the sweetness of being
Until we don't be

And though our bones, they may break
And our souls separate,
why the long face?
And though our bodies recoil
From the grip of the soil,
why the long face?

In martial wind, and in clarion rain, we minced into battle, wincing in pain; not meant for walking, backs bound in twine:
not angel or devil,
but level, in time.

I don't necessarily see the elements that I invoke on the cover and in the songs as being in binary opposition. I know certain binary tensions emerge between these elements, but a lot of times they're more like archetypal elements; these free-standing, huge forces. Mortality, standing alone, as a thing; as opposed to, "Over here's life; over here's death. Here's bad luck, but here's blessing and redemption. Here's water; here's fire." Certainly those things come up again and again in the songs, but it's not intentional, and probably has more to do with the fact that those things emerge in real life, without any effort on our part whatsoever, than they are derived from any classical tradition. I think classicism in general might reflect more closely the natural order of human life, while postmodernism is somehow removed from the natural order, more cerebral and sterile, removed from real life on some level. So what seems like classicism in some of these songs might be just what I view as an accurate reflection of real life on this planet.

My voice in combination with the harp - which, by the way, I use because I've played it my entire life, not to make some statement about the harp - somehow has … coloured people's interpretations of the music and projected an idea of childlike or fairytale quality or innocence. Which sometimes prevents people from listening to the songs the way I would like them to be listened to.

Well I'm starvin' and freezin'
In this measly old bed
(Then I'll crawl across the salt flats
To stroke your sweet head)
Come across the desert,
with no shoes on?
(I love you truly,
or I love no-one)

Driven through by her own sword,
summer died last night, alone.

We sailed away on a winter's day
With fate as malleable as clay
But ships are fallible, I say
And the nautical, as all things, fades.

This is the song for Baby Birch. I will never know you. And at the back of what we've done, there is that knowledge of you.

But it can make you feel over, and old (Lord, you know it's a shame), when I only want for you to pull over, and hold me,
till I can't remember my own name.

And if you come and see me,
you will upset the order.
You cannot come and see me,
for I set myself apart.
But when you come and see me,
in California,
you cross the border of my heart.

Emily, I saw you last night by the river
I dreamed you were skipping little stones across the surface of the water
Frowning at the angle where they were lost, and slipped under forever
In a mud cloud, mica-spangled, like the sky'd been breathing on a mirror.

I have a lot of interest in interior rhyming; not just rhyming at the end of the lines, but playing around with rhymes within the lines, playing with where the syllabic emphases in the sentences are, lining those up at strange moments in the line of the song. I’m not sure if that comes across or not.

What’s redacted will repeat,
and you cannot learn that you burn when you touch the heat,
so we touch the heat,
and we cut facsimiles of love and death
(just separate holes in sheets
where you cannot breathe, and you cannot see).