naturalismo

Joanna Newsom has graced the cover of PAPER magazine’s annual ‘64 Most Beautiful People’ issue. Besides some stunning photography (see above for a fine example), the fashion and lifestyle magazine does a fantastic job of combining biographical insight (”I had spent the past ten years focused on composition and I had felt so sure that I was so experimental and had never heard anything like this and was really excited about my own music”) and humbling levity (”But throughout our interview, Newsom sprinkles the conversation with an Office reference one moment and the fact that she’s memorized Marc Jacobs’s 2002 Spring and Fall collection the next”).

Click photo for link.

[download] “Bridges & Balloons” from The Milk-Eyed Mender (Drag City, 2004)

Joanna Newsom’s new EP, Joanna Newsom and the Y’s street band, is due for release on April 24th. While the Y’s Street Band sees Joanna continuing her lavish baroque folk on one third of the new EP, the other songs mark a slight return to the sound of her more personal and minimal recordings of her debut album the Milk Eyed-Mender. “Colleen,” the single new song on Y’s Street Band builds on the epic song structures she paved on her acclaimed Y’s. However, the song that most stands out to me is her re-recording of Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie. Joanna’s soft and elegant repeating melody at the end never ceases to send chills up the back of my neck. To listen to her new rendition of the song head over to Shameless complacency, who has the song posted.

In other Joanna Newsom news… she has been selected by Bjork to open for her upcoming tour on the following select dates:

05-15 Denver, CO - Red Rocks Amphitheatre
05-19 Mountain View, CA - Shoreline Amphitheatre