Joanna Newsom????

"Joanna Newsom's performance Wednesday night was easily the strangest show I've ever seen at Toad's... it was odd to see rows of chairs set up for the audience, and even weirder that Wednesday's featured attraction plays harp, an instrument not often associated with grimy rock clubs. Nor is Newsom's music, for that matter. It's best classified as part of the freak-folk movement, and her sprawling songs are more like mini-suites, full of stream-of-consciousness pastoral imagery and eclectic arrangements performed by a group of scruffy hipsters on banjo, accordion, tambura and other instruments well suited to, say, traditional Bulgarian music." - Eric Danton (Hartford Courant) - concert review

"The cover of Joanna Newsom’s new album, “Ys,” is an oil painting by the California artist Benjamin Vierling. Newsom is depicted with plaited blond hair, wearing a billowing blouse and a garland of flowers. She is seated at a window on a thronelike chair, holding a sickle in her right hand and a tiny gilt-framed painting of a moth in her left. A blackbird perches on the windowsill, a cherry in its beak; beyond lie valleys and hills. A press release issued by Newsom’s record label, Drag City, says that Vierling “did the cover painting old-master style, with layers of egg-tempera and glazes. Strictly 16th-century processes, just like the recording of the album.”

The Renaissance references may be a joke, but a careful, almost precious husbandry of the past is characteristic of Newsom’s work. Newsom, who is twenty-four, is a classically trained harpist, and “Ys”—pronounced “eess”; it’s the name of an island in Breton mythology—is a series of complex, through-composed songs that have more in common with Kurt Weill’s long-form ballads than with contemporary pop music. Yet Newsom tends to perform in rock clubs, not concert halls, and many of her fans—including the novelist Dave Eggers, who praised her “bare and unflinching” music in Spin—are devotees of independent rock. Moreover, the songs on “Ys” feature lush, intricate orchestral arrangements by the pop composer Van Dyke Parks. (Parks, who was a child actor, worked on Rufus Wainwright’s 1998 début record and on “Smile,” the legendary album by the Beach Boys, which was begun in 1967 but not completed until 2004.)

Newsom is sometimes lumped with a group of acoustic musicians called “freak folk” or “free folk.” They include the bands Tower Recordings and Feathers and the warbling singer and songwriter Devendra Banhart, with whom Newsom shares a fearlessness and a deceptively childlike air. In essence, however, folk describes simple songs that are universally accessible and performed on cheap instruments, if any. (Rap easily qualifies as folk music.) Newsom uses antique words that many English speakers won’t recognize, and plays an expensive and heavy instrument that you couldn’t bring on a camping trip, and some of her recent songs are almost as long as American sitcoms (average length: twenty-two minutes, without commercials)." - Sasha Freer-Jones (New Yorker) album review