Top 40 Joanna Newsom Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I can bear a lot but not that pall.”

— Joanna Newsom

2. “It broke my heart when I learned the moon had been passing the sun’s light off as its own.”

— Joanna Newsom

3. “Never get so attached to a poem that you forget truth that lacks lyricism.”

— Joanna Newsom

4. “And a thimble’s worth of milky moon Can touch hearts larger than a thimble.”

— Joanna Newsom

5. “We deserve to know light. And grow evermore lighter and lighter.”

— Joanna Newsom

6. “What a woman does is open doors. And it is not a question of locking or unlocking.”

— Joanna Newsom

7. “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.”

— Joanna Newsom

8. “I don’t think I’m abnormal and I think that lets people down.”

— Joanna Newsom

9. “Lyrics are very different. There is a clear line between that and a poem. Something that has been a source of great excitement and delight for me is this idea that I get to rhyme.”

— Joanna Newsom

10. “The very first Walnut Whales recording was recorded just a few weeks after I had started singing, out of the blue, started singing. And the voice, you can hear how uncomfortable I am with it, and how terrified I am with it.”

— Joanna Newsom

11. “I have a deep rooted folk sensibility that I can’t get away from completely.”

— Joanna Newsom

12. “I want to make music that somehow connects to the things that I love in America music.”

— Joanna Newsom

13. “The way that words fit together is always interesting to me. I love words.”

— Joanna Newsom

14. “We are blessed and sustained by what is not said.”

— Joanna Newsom

15. “I would happy for someone to download my music.”

— Joanna Newsom

16. “I can’t play my songs on the smaller harp. I have a Celtic harp. I can’t do the key changes.”

— Joanna Newsom

17. “And all that we built, and all that we breathed And all that we spilled or pulled up like weeds Is piled up in back and it burns irrevocably And we spoke up in turns ’til the silence crept over me.”

— Joanna Newsom

18. “I’m not a wanderer, which is funny because I’m on tour half the time. I’m a home, hearth and family kind of person.”

— Joanna Newsom

19. “If I ever met Dolly Parton for sure, I would just not be able to say anything. I love her.”

— Joanna Newsom

20. “I did spend a year in high school being obsessed with Fleetwood Mac.”

— Joanna Newsom

21. “In high school, we studied a lot of poetical forms. I was really interested in the math that was involved and the strange live break ups. That gave me a great amount of respect for a rhymed stanza.”

— Joanna Newsom

22. “People in San Francisco and the East Bay have shown interest, done interviews, and have come to shows. I guess that the news travels fast out of this island that we are on.”

— Joanna Newsom

23. “I definitely don’t subscribe to the theory that more instruments, or more vocal tracks, harmony, or double tracking the voice, is a good thing. People do their early albums very stripped down, then each album becomes bloated.”

— Joanna Newsom

24. “I am consciously trying not to make it sound Celtic or African.”

— Joanna Newsom

25. “I don’t look at people’s expressions, because I still get nervous when I play, especially when I first put the harp up there. I just try to tune – it takes me a half-hour to tune, and I get nervous if I look at anybody when I do it.”

— Joanna Newsom

26. “There’s something fundamental to the harp that has retained its appeal my whole life. It’s an instrument I am just in love with.”

— Joanna Newsom

27. “I have a recording that I did of instrumental songs.”

— Joanna Newsom

28. “I never thought people would be mortally offended by the sounds I was making.”

— Joanna Newsom

29. “I can understand someone not liking the voice or the songs.”

— Joanna Newsom

30. “I recorded harp first or singing first. I recorded it all together. Part of the reason is that I don’t know how to play the songs without also singing. I forget how they progress. I don’t think that any of them are verse, chorus, verse, and so on. They are not simple.”

— Joanna Newsom

31. “I am not doing something that it is experimental music in relation to classical music.”

— Joanna Newsom

32. “I didn’t really know a lot of the history when I was younger. I didn’t realize that the harp is coded in such a specific way in musical circles. It’s kind of this society instrument because of its history as a young woman’s parlor instrument.”

— Joanna Newsom

33. “I am always trying to write.”

— Joanna Newsom

34. “I didn’t sing for years and years, but I started playing harp when I was maybe 9 or 10. I had actually wanted to play for years leading up to that, but no teacher in our little town would take me on as a student, because I was too young.”

— Joanna Newsom

35. “I am producing sounds that people are not used to hearing from the harp.”

— Joanna Newsom

36. “You should listen to a lot of different music.”

— Joanna Newsom

37. “The so-called positive press has in some ways been more difficult to swallow than the negative.”

— Joanna Newsom

38. “I have writing songs on my own for about six years.”

— Joanna Newsom

39. “I wanted to write songs which I think is a different thing. I wanted to write music that is informed by folk music. The chord progressions are obvious references.”

— Joanna Newsom

40. “I started playing harp about fourteen years ago.”

— Joanna Newsom

41. “I played piano for about two years when I was a kid. I didn’t play long enough to be really great.”

— Joanna Newsom

42. “I wasn’t interested in writing music that wasn’t beautiful for me to listen to.”

— Joanna Newsom

43. “Around eighth grade I decided I wanted to be a composer and that’s what I went to college for. Just a few years back, I switched out of composition and into creative writing so I could work with words.”

— Joanna Newsom

44. “I’ve been unaware of how people react to the instrument. People have ideas of what a harp is supposed to sound like, and a lot of them are negative ideas.”

— Joanna Newsom

45. “People are often afraid for me. They think that I am going to break. I can make it through a set.”

— Joanna Newsom

46. “I give away CDs at shows if someone wants a CD but doesn’t have any money. I wouldn’t want to do that forever.”

— Joanna Newsom

47. “Among the responsibilities of any writer is that, no matter what else, they know what they mean. So, even if no one else knows what you’re talking about, you do. The listener can sense that, even if they don’t get the literal meaning. The faith that they place in the clues and the connections and the secrets of the lyrics is of the utmost importance.”

— Joanna Newsom

48. “The fire breather is beneath the clover, and beneath his breathing there is cold clay forever.”

— Joanna Newsom

49. “There are some mornings when the sky looks like a road.”

— Joanna Newsom