Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
People
Stills
Nervous
Still
Hour
Look
Anybody
Firsts
Especially
Harp
Play
Expression
Harps
Looks
Takes
Expressions
First
Hours
Tune
Trying
Half
Tunes

More quotes by Joanna Newsom

Image
I am not doing something that it is experimental music in relation to classical music.
Joanna Newsom
Image
I can understand someone not liking the voice or the songs.
Joanna Newsom
Image
The so-called positive press has in some ways been more difficult to swallow than the negative.
Joanna Newsom
Image
People are often afraid for me. They think that I am going to break. I can make it through a set.
Joanna Newsom
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I am producing sounds that people are not used to hearing from the harp.
Joanna Newsom
Image
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.
Joanna Newsom
Image
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.
Joanna Newsom
Image
What a woman does is open doors. And it is not a question of locking or unlocking.
Joanna Newsom
Image
We deserve to know light. And grow evermore lighter and lighter.
Joanna Newsom
Image
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
Image
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
Image
You should listen to a lot of different music.
Joanna Newsom
Image
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
Image
I can't play my songs on the smaller harp. I have a Celtic harp. I can't do the key changes.
Joanna Newsom
Image
There are some mornings when the sky looks like a road.
Joanna Newsom
Image
I wasn't interested in writing music that wasn't beautiful for me to listen to.
Joanna Newsom
Image
I have a deep rooted folk sensibility that I can't get away from completely.
Joanna Newsom
Image
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