Joanna Newsom quotes

Joanna Newsom is an American musician, singer-songwriter, and harpist known for her unique voice and intricate compositions. Her music blends folk, classical, and avant-garde influences, earning critical acclaim and a dedicated following. She is recognized for her poetic lyrics and innovative approach to contemporary music. Here are 85 of her quotes:

We are blessed and sustained by what is not said.

Joanna Newsom

My voice in combination with the harp - which, by the way, I use because I've played it my entire life, not to make some statement about the harp - somehow has ... coloured people's interpretations of the music and projected an idea of childlike or fairytale quality or innocence. Which sometimes prevents people from listening to the songs the way I would like them to be listened to.

Joanna Newsom

And all that we built, and all that we breathed And all that we spilled or pulled up like weeds Is piled up in back and it burns irrevocably And we spoke up in turns 'til the silence crept over me.

Joanna Newsom

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

Then the slow lip of fire moves across the prairie with precision While, somewhere, with your pliers and glue, you make your first incision And, in a moment of almost-unbearable vision, doubled over with the hunger of lions 'Hold me close', cooed the dove, who was stuffed now with sawdust and diamonds.

Joanna Newsom

Wolf-spider, crouch in your funnel nest. If I knew you, once, now I know you less. In the sinking sand, where we've come to rest, have I had a hand in your loneliness?

Joanna Newsom

All we saw was that Time is taller than Space is wide. That's why we got bound to a round desert island, 'neath the sky where our sailors have gone. Have they drowned, in those windy highlands? Highlands away, my John.

Joanna Newsom

But inasmuch as that light is loaned, insofar as we've borrowed bones, must every debt now be repaid in star-spotted, sickle-winged night raids.

Joanna Newsom

Now the towns and forests, highways and plains, fall back in circles like an emptying drain. And I won't come round this way again, where the lonely wind abides, and you will not take my heart, alive.

Joanna Newsom

And never will I wed. I'll hunt the pearl of death to the bottom of my life, and ever hold my breath, till I may be the diver's wife.

Joanna Newsom

But it can make you feel over, and old (Lord, you know it's a shame), when I only want for you to pull over, and hold me, till I can't remember my own name.

Joanna Newsom

While yonder, wild and blue, the wild blue yonder looms. 'Till we are wracked with rheum, by roads, by songs entombed.

Joanna Newsom

I do as I please. Now I'm on my knees. Your skin is something that I stir into my tea. And I am watching you and you are starry, starry, starry...

Joanna Newsom

This is the song for Baby Birch. I will never know you. And at the back of what we've done, there is that knowledge of you.

Joanna Newsom

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

Joanna Newsom

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.

Joanna Newsom

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

Joanna Newsom

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.

Joanna Newsom

Have you come, then, to rescue me?" He laughed and said, "from what, 'Colleen'?" You dried and dressed most willingly. You corseted, and caught the dread disease by which one comes to know such peace.

Joanna Newsom

Love is not a symptom of time. Time is just a symptom of love.

Joanna Newsom

Picking through your pocket lining, well what is this? Scrap of sassafras, eh Sisyphus?

Joanna Newsom

I know we must abide each by the rules that bind us here: the divers, and the sailors, and the women on the pier.

Joanna Newsom