new Newsom (Joanna) and musical musings

Joanna Newson reminds me of a wood-fairy. I'm a Lord of the Rings dork, and she's really organic like a hobbit, except she's graceful like an elf. But there's no weirdness in body proportion so I guess she's more like a human that lives amongst the hobbits, that maybe had a grandma of who was elf-kind... It's funny how I'll say throw out some wacky ass description like this to friends occasionally and surprisingly some (the ones you'd never expect to make a statement as gay sounding as that, just as I never expected myself too, haha) say something suuuper similar back to me about her, with a slight variation though. I love when people see eye to eye on something in such an abstract and almost absurd way that it proves the depth of the work of art in a sense. You aren't just repeating what you've heard somewhere, it's two completely original and separate lines of thought coming together..


I admit she's not for everyone, and I think her second album was brilliant but not as catchy as the first (it's a very drawn out, prose-y narrative that would be a lot more listenable if it had a silent film that she had made to accompany it), but this new song which I just stumbled upon seems to bridge the gap between both albums. It would be nice to hear some remixes with percussion, but only from nature sounds. Like a thumping on a hollowed-out fallen tree for the bass drum and an ice cycle shattering on a rock for a snare. This would be very easy to do with a field recorder and some production tweakage for that added 'umph'.


I was lucky enough to see Joanna in '06 in Kentucky, one of the only highlights of my time in med school, besides gross anatomy (dissecting dead bodies is cool, it's a fact). And the show wasn't much different than what's seen here. A little girl with a giant harp.

Bjork, one of my other favorite artists, is similar in this ethereal type of way that I'm attempting to describe. Musically, they are totally different but share this little thread of a mystical or enchanting element in their music. And both have this certain 'cinematic' quality. But cinema is really just trying to imitate life, so the best way to describe it is 'natural'. It can be in a cosmic sense or an 'earthy sense'. Joanna's is definitely more earthy, but there's still something curious about it, like it comes from an earth like planet that evolved in such a way that it actually is something like middle earth from Lord of the Rings. I'm not going to get into the weirdness of quantum physics here, but the majority of leading physicists believe in the many-worlds theory, which says these places could actually exist in the 'all of reality'. That's something that sounds insane but if it's described properly it actually makes more sense than common sense...There's a load of really crazy things that this belief implies that I don't think most scientists ever think about, or if they do, don't write about out of fear of being criticized as too 'out there'. But that's another blog altogether.

Video.