Joanna Newsom

J: I think the fingers bleeding thing doesn't happen too often; I think I had been having too much fun in the weeks leading up to the tour instead of rehearsing four hours a day like I should have done, and I hadn't built up enough callous in time, so my fingers blistered, and then I bled when I played through the blisters...

R: Was Ys made by a different person from the one that made Walnut Whales and your early music?

J: Yeah, I think so. It would be difficult to justify saying yes if you had said, the Milk Eyed Mender, if you go as far back as those first little EPs - I don't think of them as EPs, but they're real home recorded CD-Rs that I made - but those were made in an incredibly different time, in my head, in my life, in my heart. Definitely. Some of those songs on the first EP wre written when I was still in high school. I'm almost 25 now, so without a doubt I'm a different person.

R: You've been forced to analyse what you do because of the exposure, do you feel more self-conscious about the process of writing now, or does it still come from a pure place?

J: I don't know if it ever came from an entirely pure place, I don't think anything that I do is pure, but it comes from the same place as before: writing music has been my chief joy and chief activity for almost my entire life, since I was eight years old. And nothing could be more natural to me than writing music. There are are a lot of other aspects of social interaction that I'm bad at, specifically because my entire adolescence, youth and teenagerhood was spent playing the harp all the time. So no matter what happens, the ability to write and play, it's going to be the last thing to go. They'll have to cut my hands off for that to happen, I think. It could take a number of different forms depending on what I'm thinking about in a particular period of time, or how I'm feeling. But always the reaction for me is to write music, naturally.

R: From those early days were you telling stories in the way that you do now?

J: No. I didn't sing, until I was 18 years old, so it was just instrumental. And it was like, me attempting to write music to be a composer and rthat was a very different form as well. When I was younger, everythign followed a general Celtic music form, or classical music, and when I got a little older, maybe 13 or 14, was when I started getting obsessed with all the West African figures, and then everyhting I did had to follow those lines, or had to be some outgrowth of those processes - I might not do three metre against four meter, but I might do five against seven... It was always an outgrowth of that for a few years. So whatever I'm doing with music has changed quite a bit, and it hasn't always felt evolutionary, often it's felt like a massive shift all of a sudden. But the common denominator is just that I'm playing or writing no matter what.

R: I read a quote where you said you prefer to think of yourself as a harper, not a harpist. Can you clarify the distinciton?

J: Yeah I heard that too, I've heard that damn quote everywhere, I don't think I said that ever! I truly don't. I may have pointed out that that distinction exists, but I don't in the least have a preference. People I know who play the harp sometimes make a distinction, and I believe it's a distinction between folk harp and classical harp. I believe harper is a reference to folk harp, and I think it might even be something like men have specifically been proponents of, becaue I think harpist is somehow coded as feminine somehow. I don't think there are many words in the English language ending with 'ist' that refer to something that men are likely to do. I could think of 'typist' - it's a real feminine suffix, and I'm not sure why. I don't think it's officially feminine. And the reason I say folk harp rather than classical harp is that there aren't many men who play pedal harp still, because there's so many associations with women still with that instrument that men don't feel welcome to play it. So I really don't think I said that, but I could be wrong, I don't remember. But that sounds like a really wack thing for me to say, and I don't think I did!