Joanna Newsom: arc of a diver

It’s time for breakfast in LA with JOANNA NEWSOM. In this extract from Jaan Uhelszki’s interview with Newsom in Uncut’s November 2015 issue (Take 222), she prepares to reveal the mysteries of her magical fourth album, Divers…

East of the Hollywood sign and a mile and a half straight downhill from the three imposing Art Deco orbs of the Griffith Observatory lies Los Feliz. It’s a town whose history is stowed discreetly beneath the lacy purple jacaranda and ancient pepper trees that line its well-scrubbed sidewalks. This is where Walt Disney drew his first sketches of Mickey Mouse and where Courtney Love first showed her “Celebrity Skin”, stripping off at Jumbo’s Clown Room for the lordy sum of $300. Since 2008 or so, the hipster glitterati have been increasingly congregating here in their hoodies, yoga pants and cross-bodies, clutching paper cups from The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf and sharing counter space with the likes of Ryan Gosling, Scarlett Johansson and Dakota Johnson.

But Los Feliz wasn’t always such an appealing place. Two days after killing Sharon Tate and four others at Roman Polanski’s Beverly Hills home, Charles Manson’s followers travelled east 11 miles and brutally murdered grocery store owner Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary here on August 10, 1969. One suspects that the reason Joanna Newsom chose this little warren of celebrity to discuss her fourth album with Uncut has more to do with the LaBianca killings and less to do with its proximity to her nearby home or the strong filtered coffee. It’s a geographical and historical signifier that plays neatly into one of the important themes of her new album, Divers. But there are other, more rarified concerns on the record, too. As Newsom explains, she was drawn to the friendly competition between Percy Bysshe Shelley and his friend Horace Smith. Each composed a poem entitled “Ozymandias” about the same topic – the idea that prominent figures and the empires that they build are impermanent and their legacies are very likely to fall into decay and oblivion. “I had never known about the second ‘Ozymandias’ poem, the Horace Smith poem,” Newsom says from her seat in the wood-panelled vestibule of Little Dom’s restaurant. “The Horace Smith one is essentially the same and maybe better, but the Shelley one became part of the popular consciousness. If you say ‘Ozymandias’, it’s shorthand for an idea, and people who aren’t English scholars or even poetry fans know about it.

“Within that context, the Horace Smith ‘Ozymandias’ is just lost, and I was thinking about the phenomenon of one of those poems becoming what it describes. It doesn’t just describe the poem, it describes the process of the rendering of obsolescence. I think any record, any remnant is inherently cryptic. We’re just seeing those elements are in many cases the results of bias, in many cases the result of arbitrariness, randomness, in many cases the result of acts of God, as it were. We’re never experiencing anything as real, we’re experiencing a distorted, adulterated, or aggrandised, or lionised, or different version of the past. It was a really exciting idea for me.”

It has been five years since Joanna Newsom last released an album. During that time, she left her arboreal home in Nevada City, married comic actor Andy Samberg, and continued her gentle flirtation with high fashion, modelling for Marc Jacobs and Michael van der Ham. She moved first to New York, then Los Angeles, where in between her touring schedule she found time to appear in an episode of Portlandia (with erstwhile Fleet Fox Robin Pecknold) as a disgruntled flower child, and also make her feature film debut in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice. She appeared on the soundtrack to the 2011 Muppets move and became the subject of a tribute album, Versions Of Joanna (and a scholarly tribute book, Visions Of Johanna). She even had a Jell-O shot “Peach, Plum, Pear” named after a track from 2004’s The Milk-Eyed Mender. It’s a miracle, really, that she even had time to think about another album, let alone record one. Newsom claims to be lazy (“I definitely have wasted a lot of time on the internet,” she says. Researching? “No, shopping.”), but the truth is she’s been working on Divers since 2011, pondering a series of historical anomalies and seemingly disparate events that proved to be interconnected across the centuries, lining up like a novel by Inherent Vice author Thomas Pynchon or at the very least Dan Brown….

SEARCH FOR THE FULL INTERVIEW FROM UNCUT NOVEMBER 2015/TAKE 222 IN THE ARCHIVE