Music [3]

halfwise wrote:I think she's a delightful young woman who's writing interesting songs, but eww the delivery....is she deliberately changing her voice to a squawk-growl in the low ranges?  Is she breaking all the rules for singer's enunciation of words on purpose?  Drifting pitch on long notes?

Either she's artistically messing with things, or she really needs to learn her craft.

What’s with that voice? Her vocal inflection has a Monty Python quality to it. Am I supposed to think it’s unique? At this point it sounds like the choir at a Madrigal Dinner, complete with harp.

I’ve heard the voice described as everything from a “dying cat” to a “prepubescent teen whining about the mall.” Both seem apt descriptors, as is the “Madrigal Dinner Choir.” But it is different. It is unique. And in my book, that’s worth something. On Milk-Eyed Mender, all those annoying qualities that Newsom’s voice possesses served to make the album even more haunting. (Please reference the use of “The Sprout and the Bean” in the film The Strangers. Seriously spooky.) Its eeriness mixed with that album’s incredibly catchy hooks made it one of the best records of the past decade.

When Joanna Newsom sings, it’s as if the voices of a prepubescent girl and an elderly woman have been mashed together into a shrill, semi-consonant sound struggling to hold a tune as it quivers from note to note. Even if I couldn’t come up with another reason for despising Newsom’s brand of harp-based orchestral folk, I’d be content with just blaming her pipes.

The mainstream press has remained leery of the multitalented harpist Joanna Newsom since her much-touted 2004 debut, despite consistent favorable reviews. It’s endlessly interesting to watch the press try to interpret Newsom, who is known for her acrobatic singing voice, operatic albums, and magisterial lyricism. She’s not what a woman musician is supposed to be—Taylor Swift?—and clearly it’s difficult for many of them parse a person like that. A recent New York Times profile pegged to the release of her fourth album, Divers, reads:

The untrained but deliberate squeaks and warbles in her voice and her pure disregard for established idioms—more like distance than active rejection—initially deceived some listeners into thinking she was a naïf, when in fact she’s a meticulous musical architect.

Who knew there was a brain under all that hair?

On a cold November night a few years ago, I saw Newsom in concert at Carnegie Hall. I had no prior exposure except a disdainful Times profile that asked if she was a wood sprite or a serious musician. My expectations were low. As a rule I do not typically enjoy live music unless it’s classical or opera (I know, I know). But I loved this concert, because it was immediately clear that Newsom is exceptionally good at what she does. It was eminent that she was a genius and I promptly bought all her records and listened to them for two years straight. It would seem reasonable that Newsom would be considered among the greatest living musicians. Her songs are intricate and complicated and beautiful, even when they seem simple; her work builds upon itself and becomes better and better with each album. So why were her critics, mostly men, so quick to reduce her, even while giving her favorable reviews?

I would argue that it’s very simple: Because she’s a woman. In the male critic world, music is like a sport, and women shouldn’t be able to play it. Men have certain standards of how music should be, and no woman musician could ever be as good as a man, according to men. And since Newsom is kind of kooky, and the Times reported that she went to a thing called Lark Camp, and she has a high voice, and plays the harp, she projects weakness, not strength, like, um, Mick Jagger? Her “weirdness” works against her, unlike Kanye West or Prince, who are applauded for their quirks and treated like precious adult babies.

Whenever certain male critics write about Newsom, you can be sure her voice will be mentioned in a condescending fashion. Newsom indeed has a distinct-sounding singing voice, as have many well-loved and extremely successful musicians past and present, including Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Tom Waits, Freddie Mercury, James Brown, Axl Rose, Robert Plant, Isaac Brock, Eddie Vedder, and Geddy Lee. These male critics often deign to unfortunate stereotypes to characterize Newsom’s voice. Writing in theTimes about Divers, Ben Ratliff described it: “The tone of her voice oscillates between goofy young-girl singsong and constricted old-woman crackle.” In a review of her 2010 opus, “Have One on Me” on Pitchfork, Mark Richardson described her voice as “squeaky.” Mike Powell of the Village Voice said that her voice is like “a brave little coo with intermittent breaks that sounded like air being let out from a balloon through pinched fingers.” On VanityFair.com, in an article titled “The Virile Man’s Guide to Liking Joanna Newsom,” Andrew Wagner wrote, “I’ve heard the voice described as everything from a ‘dying cat’ to a ‘prepubescent teen whining about the mall’… But it is different. It is unique. And in my book, that’s worth something.” Big of you, Andrew. (It’s likely safe to say that these men don’t mind twee male singing voices.)

Newsom herself was forced to set the album off to one side when cutting the vocals.
"The most agitating, restless period of inactivity imaginable" is how she recalls her vocal rest. "It's just the most annoying feeling in the world, when you've prepared for something for months and months and spent money on it and worked out the perfect dates when all the people involved can be there and you show up and open your mouth to sing and you just can't."
She could have gotten laser surgery, she says, but if that surgery goes wrong, your voice is history. "So I decided to just put a sign on my shirt that said I couldn't talk and hide out in my house for a few months - right in the middle of when I wanted to be making a record."
Newsome says, with a laugh, then adds, "But that said, it did help me completely rethink some ideas that weren't quite there yet."
To truly grasp the magic of a Newsom album - whether in one sitting or installments - is to buy into that voice she worried she might lose, a quirky instrument that tends to occupy a range somewhere between Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" and Snow White huffing helium from a Mickey Mouse balloon.
"When I was a kid, 12 or 13 and under, I did write songs with words, which I hope never reach the light of day," Newsom says, with a laugh. "But I got very self-conscious very quickly. Thirteen was probably around the time I became aware of the fact that my voice was odd, so I stopped using it."
She was judging herself, Newsom says, by the standards of classical music, which she'd studied from age 4, playing harp and piano.
It took an odd combination of inspirations to bring her around to the sound of the voice that's helped her stand out from the crowd since the release in 2004 of "The Milk-Eyed Mender" - Fleetwood Mac, the Pixies and old field recordings.
"The whole time that I was in high school, I didn't know anything about records," Newsom says. "I certainly heard a lot of world music and classical music in my house, and certain great folk and pop records. But the first album I ever got into heavy was Fleetwood Mac 'Rumours.' And then the Pixies' 'Doolittle' I got really into after that, my senior year, and slowly I just started listening to more weird music."
Newsom laughs, as she frequently does, then clarifies that weird for her is a relative term.
"I use that word loosely," she says. "It wasn't like I was super hip to the really obscure stuff. But to someone who's only heard "Rumours," there's a whole world out there. Then, in college, I was doing a lot of ethnomusicology and started hearing a lot of field recordings, and I think that really resonated with me because I kind of heard my own voice in some of those things, in the sense that that's a musical tradition in which the coloration of your voice isn't expected to adhere so much to that Western classical standard of basically a flute-like tone. These were more like trumpets tones."
Newsom laughs again, then adds, "Which is a little closer to my voice."