Joanna Newsom Guests on Marc Maron’s "WTF" Podcast
Joanna Newsom appeared on the latest episode of Marc Maron‘s “WTF” podcast in support of her 2015 album Divers. Newsom discussed her childhood in Nevada City, California; her annual trips to a world folk camp from the age of nine (and a Shakespeare camp in her teens); Nevada City’s evolving community of weed-growers; and plenty more, including the themes and construction of her albums and her standing within the harpist community. Newsom also goes into detail about her working relationships with Steve Albini and Van Dyke Parks, and touches on her marriage to comedian Andy Samberg. Listen here; the interview starts at 11:40.
Asked about Divers‘ “unanswerable questions” of ageing and mortality, Newsom reflects on whether she feels closure after recording the LP: “I think so,” she says. “In the most vague, simplistic sense, you can have a song that asks, what’s the point of everything? I don’t know. OK, so why do you keep doing things? I don’t know. But if you zoom in small enough, on some level of detail, there’s some question you can answer. And so you just have to hold on to that one.”
Asked if she has “darkness,” Newsom replies:
I was a very sad child. And I was somewhat depressed as a teenager. When I was a child, I was sad for reasons—but comical, nuclear war and AIDS and starvation in Somalia, and the wash of terrifying, ‘We’re all going to die.’ My mom was a member of a group called, I think, ‘Doctors Against Nuclear Disarmament’ or something, and they used to meet in our living room. And I was so little that nobody thought I was taking it in, but I really was. So I was terrified of nuclear war when I was a toddler. And then I took a chill pill, as it were, and I stopped thinking about those things so much.
At one point Maron tells Newsom that, at a recent meeting with Disney, he nominated her for a role in a forthcoming, animated musical film with singing animal parts to fill. Newsom said she’s game (particularly to play a turtle, for some reason), so stay tuned for updates on that.
Revisit Newsom’s performance of “Anecdotes” on “Kimmel”:
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