Joanna Newsom: Musician wields power through song

Joanna Newsom laughs when it's suggested, jokingly, what might happen if her band's equipment went missing.

She was amused imagining the expression on the face of whoever made off with her stuff upon discovering they now possessed such esoteric instruments as a kavla, a tambura and Newsom’s signature harp.

“I’d like to think it could be a life-changing moment,” she recently told the Free Press. “When you have those instruments of power, you can’t help but wield them.”

Newsom’s most powerful instrument, though, is her extraordinary, instantly recognizable singing voice, which she has wielded mightily on the four acclaimed albums she’s released since emerging as a unique presence in indie music a decade ago. “Divers,” her latest, is receiving year-end accolades from numerous critics.

By Newsom’s standards, it’s a relatively conventional release: 11 songs, all roughly between three and seven minutes in length. In contrast, her previous album, “Have One On Me,” sprawled across three discs and contained more than two hours of music. Its predecessor, “Ys,” contained five tracks between seven and 17 minutes in length.

Yet “Divers” is as dense and multitudinous as anything she’s recorded. The songs swell with lush string and brass arrangements as well as more traditional rock instrumentation and heavily layered vocals. Although Newsom collaborated with several musicians and arrangers to flesh out the songs, she describes writing as a solitary endeavor, totally removed from the abstractions of commerce, audience or performance.

“In the moment of writing, I don’t even like thinking about it as a product that anyone will hear,” she said. “That clams my brain up a little bit. I find when I’m thinking beyond writing, it gives me a kind of stage fright. When a song is done, I get prepared for it to be in the world. When I’m writing it feels indecent.”

Her lyrics unspool complex, entwined narratives about history, mortality and love, all annotated exhaustively online by her devoted fan base. Newsom is flattered by the obsessive attention her work inspires, but insists it’s just as important to remember a song for a hummable tune as it is to fully grasp the artist’s meaning.

“I try to not write with any one kind of listening in mind,” she said. “First and foremost, the things that are important to me about my songs are that they’re interesting and thoughtful and beautiful by my metrics and that they register and have emotional truth to them.”

Once the writing and recording was complete, Newsom spent months preparing to perform the new album. Her ensemble includes longtime collaborator Ryan Francesconi on guitar, tambura, banjo, kaval and flute; Mirabai Peart on violin, viola, backing vocals and keyboards, and her brother Pete Newsom on drums and keyboards. Newsom herself switches between harp and piano, often in the same song.

Her band is now touring throughout the East Coast and Midwest, including Tuesday's date at the Royal Oak Music Theatre, and will perform in Japan and Australia before returning to the U.S. in the spring for a series of West Coast shows. Her brief European tour in support of the album happened to include a show in Paris a few days before the recent terror attacks, and emotions still were raw while she was giving interviews in the days afterward.

She said she had just listened to an audio recording of her show, which she routinely does, and found herself overcome while thinking about the Paris audience.

“I just kept listening to sounds from people talking in the audience, or laughing at jokes or shifting in their seats,” she said. “It was so overwhelming to think that those were the people who could have been slaughtered.”

It frightened her to speculate whether people who watched her play at the venue Salle Gaveau might also have gone to the show by Eagles of Death Metal at the Bataclan a few days later, where gunmen opened fire and killed 89.

“They chose the best of humanity to attack,” she said. “There are few things more beautiful and heart-affirming than seeing music performed — to have saved up money or have forgone other luxuries in life to go see music, and those are the people who were targeted. It’s so sickening.”

Joanna Newsom

with Alela Diane & Ryan Francesconi
Doors at 7 p.m. Tue.
Royal Oak Music Theatre
318 W. 4th St., Royal Oak
royaloakmusictheatre.com
$29.50-$49.50