Joanna Newsom: Quotes about life

Joanna Newsom is American musician. Explore interesting quotes on life.
Joanna Newsom: 122   quotes 0   likes

“Now her coat drags through the water,
Bagging, with a life's-worth of hunger, limitless minnows
In the magnetic embrace,
Balletic and glacial, of Bear's insatiable shadow.”

Joanna Newsom

Monkey & Bear
Ys (2006)

Life , Hunger , Water

“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

Divers
Divers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divers_(Joanna_Newsom_album) (2015)

Life , Death , Wedding

“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

Sydney Morning Herald, 10 October 2005

Life , People , Music , Way

“In this life, who did you love,
beneath the drifting ashes,
beneath the sheeting banks of air
that barrenly bore our rations?”

Joanna Newsom

Have One On Me (2010)

Love , Life

“So it would seem to be true:
when cruel birth debases, we forget.
When cruel death debases,
we believe it erases all the rest
that precedes.
But stand brave, life-liver,
bleeding out your days
in the river of time.
Stand brave:
time moves both ways”

Joanna Newsom

Divers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divers_(Joanna_Newsom_album) (2015)

Life , Death , Way , Birth

“I can't call them linear narratives, and I can't call them chronological in a traditional, classical sense; I'm sure there's plenty of stuff I borrow more from William Faulkner than William Shakespeare. I just find it funny that at this point, we see a collection of highly charged, highly potent symbols as referring back to a classical aesthetic, because to me they seem deeply connected to the pedestrian actuality of real life.”

Joanna Newsom

Interview with Pitchfork (2006)

Life , Sense

“I don't necessarily see the elements that I invoke on the cover and in the songs as being in binary opposition. I know certain binary tensions emerge between these elements, but a lot of times they're more like archetypal elements; these free-standing, huge forces. Mortality, standing alone, as a thing; as opposed to, "Over here's life; over here's death. Here's bad luck, but here's blessing and redemption. Here's water; here's fire." Certainly those things come up again and again in the songs, but it's not intentional, and probably has more to do with the fact that those things emerge in real life, without any effort on our part whatsoever, than they are derived from any classical tradition. I think classicism in general might reflect more closely the natural order of human life, while postmodernism is somehow removed from the natural order, more cerebral and sterile, removed from real life on some level. So what seems like classicism in some of these songs might be just what I view as an accurate reflection of real life on this planet.”

Joanna Newsom

Interview with Pitchfork (2006)

Life , Death , Bad luck , Nature