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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

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Joanna Newsom
Age: 42
Born: 1982
Born: January 18
Actor
Composer
Film Actor
Harpsichordist
Musician
Pianist
Recording Artist
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
Television Actor
Grass Valley
California
Joanna Caroline Newsom
Writing
Folks
Thing
Obvious
Progressions
Think
Songs
Chord
Thinking
Song
References
Write
Progression
Music
Chords
Wanted
Informed
Different
Folk

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I'm not a wanderer, which is funny because I'm on tour half the time. I'm a home, hearth and family kind of person.
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It broke my heart when I learned the moon had been passing the sun’s light off as its own.
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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.
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I can understand someone not liking the voice or the songs.
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We deserve to know light. And grow evermore lighter and lighter.
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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.
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People are often afraid for me. They think that I am going to break. I can make it through a set.
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If I ever met Dolly Parton for sure, I would just not be able to say anything. I love her.
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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.
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I wasn't interested in writing music that wasn't beautiful for me to listen to.
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I am producing sounds that people are not used to hearing from the harp.
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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.
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The so-called positive press has in some ways been more difficult to swallow than the negative.
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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.
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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.
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You should listen to a lot of different music.
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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.
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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.
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What a woman does is open doors. And it is not a question of locking or unlocking.
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There are some mornings when the sky looks like a road.
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