Folkie: Joanna Newsom

Female singers; we've all seen the category labels, in the music stores, at the Grammys, on music blogs. And they're all women & they all sing. Woohoo. Lots of them sound shit, and lots of them sound like each other -- get lost, get lost! you scream; we don't want another excuse for a strip-tease of a music video parading around pretending to make 'music'! Go find yourself a red light district, jesus.

So I'm going to tell y'all about a woman who sings unlike any other musician I have ever come across, and whose voice I hated upon hearing. Because it was just so odd & unusual & (as the harshest of critics say) "child-like" -- how could anyone sing the way Joanna Newsom did? Why would anyone sing this way? (Yes, her screeches of "disembodieeeed" sounded horrible.) And so my face would scrunch up with a look of disgust everytime "Bridges & Balloons" came up due to the iPod Shuffle's lack of judgment.



But like fungus grows on old bread & moss on old stones, so grew Joanna Newsom's eerie, quirky, completely unusual brand of music on me. This woman makes music. And she doesn't just do it with an endearing (once you hear it enough) & beautiful voice, but also with some amazingly elite harp-playing skills & some brilliantly eloquent lyrics to match (who else would sing about calm canaries getting irritable? or scraps of sassafras?). Her style of music is usually classified as 'indie folk'; some say it has strains of 'Appalachian music' -- I don't even know what that is, so I'm not going to pretend it is -- & others 'psych folk', along the breed of other eccentric & experimental folkies: Devendra Banhart, Mirah, Cat Power & the Animal Collective. I'm just going to classify it as 'beautiful' & 'inspiring' & 'lovely-to-fall-asleep-to' -- the harp lends her music a serene quality, and her lyrics are almost stories in themselves (particularly in the album Ys).

And despite her unique classifications, she still finds the time to lend her classical harp-playing skills to noise-rock trio Nervous Cop (which features the likes of Deerhoof's Greg Saunier), and her keyboard-playing skills to rockers/post-punkers The Pleased. They're worth a check-out too, if only for variance. (: There's also a loverly loverly loverrrrly cover of "Bridges & Balloons" done by none other than The Decemberists, which appears on their Picaresqueties album & has some uplifting jangly guitar chords :-) check THAT out too, because it's actually one of the best covers I have ever heard. Annnnnd long post, but I could go on about her awesomeness forever. So give her a listen.