A Quote by Joanna Newsom

I have a voice that's obviously untrained - and I think untrainable - so I kind of secreted it away for a long time. Actually, I would write songs with lyrics when I was younger, but I would just sing in my head.
I wouldn't just have other people write songs and me go out and sing it. I would sit down with a guitar and write 11 or 12 good songs for an album and that is gonna take a long time.
Sometimes my boyfriend would write the lyrics and I would write the melody, and other times I would start from scratch. Or sometimes I would take a local poem and put that to music...I always sang standards because the songs I wrote for myself weren't as easy to sing.
Jim had melodies as well as words. He didn't know how to play a chord on any instrument, but he had melodies in his head. To remember the lyrics he would think of melodies and then they would stay in his head. He had melodies and lyrics in his head, and he would sing them a cappella, and we would eke out the arrangements.
Maybe in the back of my mind I was kind of wishing that I would become a rock star, kind of wishing that I would reach enough people who would be willing to pay me for the music, that I would actually be able to live off of just writing the songs that I wanted to write. But I don't think I really admitted to myself that that was my goal.
I don't think there are any songs that I've written in the past that I now disagree. It's kind of like tattoos; I would never regret a tattoo, because it was how I felt at that time in my life. I don't think I've ever said anything that I would take back. So far, so good! I would probably change the music, or change how I sing it, maybe do it a little bit cooler, or a bit more grown-up. But I don't think that there are any lyrics that I regret.
I write almost everything on my albums, all the hooks etc, but I can't sing them as I hear them in my head. I would struggle to write for just my own voice as it would be pretty limiting on what my tracks are capable of sounding like, so being open to collaboration is crucial for what I do.
I don't see myself as the boss. I sing and write the songs, and it would feel strange if somebody else wrote the lyrics I sang.
I cannot sing the old songs, I sang long years ago, For heart and voice would fail me, And foolish tears would flow.
My favorite music to sing would be my own songs, my original songs, just because I know them, you know I write the tunes, so my favorite songs are the newest ones that I write. That's what I like to sing the most, because it means something, it's real, it comes from me.
It would not occur to me to write a joke like, 'This would be great if I was more like Andrew Dice Clay.' It's not the voice I write in - which is largely an extension of the voice in my head that I think in.
The songs that I sing and the songs that I write have always just been what I feel my voice does well, and what my inspirations have been and a kind of culmination of everything.
To not sing with an orchestra, to not be able to communicate through my voice, which I've done all my life, and not to be able to phrase lyrics and give people that kind of joy, I think I would be totally devastated.
I started writing my own songs from the time I was a little kid. I would write my own lyrics to other people's songs that I heard on the radio and take whatever song and make it about fairies and angels - whatever little girls sing about.
I would say the songs that have different lyrics. I always write the music first, and there's a couple of songs on this box set that have different lyrics from what ended up on the final recording.
Ironically, when I was playing in my first band, I would deliberately not write down any lyrics. I have a really good memory and I would just keep them in my head.
I want to write songs with complete sentences. I almos have this obsession with short-changing words. I would never be so pretentious to say that my lyrics are poetry. ... Poems are poems. Song lyrics are for songs.
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