JOANNA NEWSOM

I started playing harp about fourteen years ago.

I give away CDs at shows if someone wants a CD but doesn't have any money. I wouldn't want to do that forever.

You should listen to a lot of different music.

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.

I can understand someone not liking the voice or the songs.

I played piano for about two years when I was a kid. I didn't play long enough to be really great.

I would happy for someone to download my music.

I wasn't interested in writing music that wasn't beautiful for me to listen to.

Well, yeah, I wanted to resist the urge to thicken everything up with instrumentation, because I just felt like I was interested in seeing how the songs did on their own.

Lyrics are very different. There is a clear line between that and a poem. Something that has been a source of great excitement and delight for me is this idea that I get to rhyme.

I have a deep rooted folk sensibility that I can't get away from completely.

I have writing songs on my own for about six years.

I am always trying to write.

I want to make music that somehow connects to the things that I love in America music.

I did spend a year in high school being obsessed with Fleetwood Mac.

People are often afraid for me. They think that I am going to break. I can make it through a set.

It's totally different. I usually don't tell people about the Pleased if they know me from the harp. And if they are there to see the Pleased, I usually don't tell them about the harp. I am nervous that these people will expect something similar.

The way that words fit together is always interesting to me. I love words.

I am consciously not trying to bring in World Music elements. The ways that I work and feel are completely different in how they sound than someone playing the Kora in Africa would play it.

The very first Walnut Whales recording was recorded just a few weeks after I had started singing, out of the blue, started singing. And the voice, you can hear how uncomfortable I am with it, and how terrified I am with it.

It's valid that the Strokes and the Pleased have been influenced by some of the same bands. But it's invalid in the sense that we listen to the Strokes and try to sounds like them. I think that they are a good band.

I am producing sounds that people are not used to hearing from the harp.

I have a recording that I did of instrumental songs.

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.

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.