How much is Joanna Newsom worth?
| Net Worth: | $5 Million |
|---|---|
| Profession: | Professional Singer |
| Date of Birth: | January 18, 1982 |
| Country: | United States of America |
| Height: | 1.63 m |
About Joanna Newsom
Joanna Caroline Newsom, an American singer-songwriter, actor, and multi-instrumentalist, was born on January 18, 1982. Her voice, which she describes as “untrained, screechy, amazing,” her lyrics, which are “densely poetic, full of strange syntactic parallelism, zeugmas, and alliteration,” her preferred instrument, the pedal harp, and her style of composition all contribute to her singularity as a singer and songwriter (long songs owing more to modern classical than pop-song).
Born in: January 18, 1982, Nevada City, California
Key Albums:The Milk-Eyed Mender (2004), Ys (2006), Have One On Me (2010)
She has made appearances as an actress in the 2014 films Inherent Vice and the television show Portlandia. The best record of the 2000s was Newsom’s astounding LP Ys from 2006; in 2010, she released the jaw-dropping triple album Have One On Me. In 2013, Joanna Newsom wed Andy Samberg.
Young Years
Newsom, who was raised in a musical family, started learning the piano by ear when she was four years old. She began devotedly playing the harp at age nine, with “the intention of creating music, and the aspiration of doing something with it, from the very earliest lesson onward,” Bluegrass, Andean folk, and the polyrhythms of Senegalese Kora music were among the genres that Newsom discovered while attending summer folk-music camps at Lark in the Meadow, a “hippy gathering” amidst the redwoods of Mendocino. As a youngster, Newsom began creating her own instrumental music, decided she wanted to become a classical harpist, and enrolled at Mills College in San Francisco’s current composition program.
Such careerism failed when Newsom struggled to sight-read while filling in with orchestras and transcribe her songs because she had been educated by ear. The folk-influenced music Newsom created at Mills clashed with the school’s prevailing “pitchless static noise made by people on computers.” Disgusted, she dropped out and went back to Nevada City to work in a coffee shop (‘En Gallop’ details this period).
When Newsom returned to Mills in 2002, she changed her major from composition to creative writing. This simply fuelled her imagination. Writing so frequently, according to Newsom, “made integrating that into my music just a natural thing for me to do, and to start singing for the first time in my whole life,” she said.
The untrained voice of Newsom was first an eccentric screech, or as she puts it, “untrainable” Naturally, I’ve never been a singer, she would admit. However, after hearing Texas Gladden, an Appalachian folk singer, Newsom “felt liberated by hearing her voice” (and inspired to record “Three Little Babes” in tribute to Gladden). In order to “stay sane,” Newsom played her music in Mills’ vacant practice spaces at odd hours of the night. She only decided to record these pieces “so [she] wouldn’t forget them.” She recorded the songs for her self-published EPs, Walnut Whales and Yarn and Glue, in collaboration with her then-boyfriend Noah Georgeson. These EPs served as the foundation for The Milk-Eyed Mender, her debut album, which was released in 2004.
Beginnings
Will Oldham discovered Newsom’s CDRs in 2003, invited her on tour for her first-ever live concerts, and helped her sign with illustrious label Drag City. The Milk-Eyed Mender was then released in early 2004.
According to Newsom, the appeal of her debut album may have come from the fact that it disclosed “a very personal, embarrassingly intimate part of [herself],” Many praised the album for its lack of irony and cunning, as well as its antiquated language and boldly strange, uncool behaviors. Some listeners had trouble with Newsom’s voice, a screech that occasionally bordered on a banshee shriek, but it could scarcely detract from such an astounding show of skill and lyricism that delicately balanced melancholy and humor.
In the summer of 2004, Devendra Banhart, a friend of Newsom’s, invited her on tour with him after choosing her song “Bridges and Balloons” for his scene-setting Golden Apples of the Sun collection (as detailed in Kevin Barker’s film The Family Jams). Newsom became linked to the revolt of the freak-folk as a result of this.
In actuality, Newsom’s remarkable second album, Ys, demonstrated that her creativity was beyond such auditory recidivism. The recording, a lavish song cycle engulfed in the grandeur of Van Dyke Parks’ orchestrations, dealt with themes of death and longing while evoking childhood memories of the kind of thick, epic poetry last heard in the 16th century. The “long and constantly changing” compositions, though just five songs and 56 minutes long, were more in line with her style. The first album’s tracks, according to Newsom, “I think when I was writing the first album, I felt there were these rules about how long songs could be, and how much I could ask of the listener,”
“According to Newsom, who spoke to The Wire, “I had to redefine my writing approach [for Ys] based on the reality that it was going to be constrained within this lengthier structure. Since the songs would be lengthy, I knew that the timing of the ideas and the rate at which they would emerge and grow would be different.”
Despite the album’s “less-accessible” nature, it grew in popularity when Newsom performed with orchestras and bands all over the world (as shown on the 2007 EP Joanna Newswom and The Ys Street Band). Joanna Newsom gained more notoriety thanks to her developing relationship with comedian Andy Samberg, as well as her work as an Armani model and her appearance in the “Kids.” music video.
Early in 2009, Newsom had vocal cord nodules, which prevented him from speaking or singing for weeks. She had to retrain her voice, taking out the sharp edges that formerly made her so screechy, once she could use her throat again. Her “new” voice would serve as the foundation for an album that would formally establish her as the most distinctive, astounding musician of the twenty-first century.
Breakout
Joanna Newsom released her third album, a massive triple-album collection titled Have One On Me, in February 2010. The album, which had 18 tracks and lasted 124 minutes, showed Newsom settling more easily and confidently into “singer-songwriter” territory. Her compositions were no more crazy jumbles of syllables and obscurely cryptic lingo, but rather really depressing lovesongs.
Newsom admitted to Triple J that “The mood that they project seems to feel a little more open, and a little more simple,” “Less rapid-fire syllabic form and less dense lyrics are present. Perhaps greater directness is present, and it seems more physically intense to me.”
