“Well, I play best from a technical standpoint when I’m most — for lack of a less cheesy way to say it — emotionally present. With my hands and the harp and everything — it’s all a unified state of focus. Which means that I have good nights and bad nights. If I see a little red light dancing in the darkness and I know that somebody’s videotaping me, I’ll get distracted, and I might forget the words. Or people will hold up their cell phones, that’s funny too — you can see the glowing face of the cell phone. That totally trips me out. Knowing that people are videotaping me is the worst — it’s being taped and they’re gonna put it on the Internet, and I hate that.”

Ah yes, the dogs of fame. An oppressive hum of attention surrounds the release of Ys, as last-minute preparations are made for the media coronation of a neo-folk fairy queen, guardian of the feminine principle in pop culture, heiress to the throne of Björk and Kate Bush. Newsom is a most gracious and unaffected interviewee, going for honesty with every answer, and that’ll wear you out quick. “I think I really upset a woman who interviewed me yesterday. I just said, you know, could we maybe talk about something else? Because I’ve been asked that question many times in the last few months. I’ve started to feel like I need to be responsible for the comments that go out into the universe, and if people ask me over and over again about the same things, it produces these volumes of quotes, which in turn get read by the next interviewer who thinks, ‘Hmmm, I should ask about that, that seems like it’s something that’s interesting to her.’ When often it’s really not — it’s just me attempting to be a good sport. And for some reason I wasn’t feeling as . . . sportive yesterday, and this poor lady was really upset with me.”

See that? “Sportive” (“adj. Gay, playful, frolicsome”), not “sporty.” Everything counts in large amounts, as Depeche Mode so wisely observed. It’s easy to mistake singularity for eccentricity, or disinhibition for indulgence, but Joanna Newsom is as serious and — in her way — as hardcore an artist as you can imagine. Albini must have loved her. Listen to that voice in “Sawdust and Diamonds,” small and rattled but shivering with defiance: “I wasn’t born of a whistle, or milked from a thistle at twilight/No; I was all horns and thorns, sprung out fully formed, knock-kneed and upright.” Take her word for it.

JOANNA NEWSOM | Somerville Theatre, 55 Davis Square, Somerville | November 14 | 617.931.2000

On the Web
Joanna Newsom: //www.dragcity.com/bands/newsom.html

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