Joanna Newsom
“Good Intentions Paving Company” (2010-03-23: Live in Washington (NPR broadcast)

I’m not going to project my own mirthlessness onto Joanna Newsom, but I have a feeling she is a pretty serious person when it comes to writing words and making music. (By the way, this is a gorgeous version of the fan favorite. Since she doesn’t have a bunch of studio Joannas to harmonize with, it get’s a little dicey. But no worry: Avail!)

Anyway, I was doing research and thinking about how Joanna Newsom is (beside Pavement—and hmmm, for entirely different, in fact opposite reasons…) the perfect sort of musician for me. I don’t want to get entirely emo here, but I like sort of tear up when I listen to some of her songs. I think it’s deeply affecting art. It goes beyond simply simulating a feeling and being a substitute for a feeling; it is a feeling, and an extremely verbalized one at that. In many eerily similar ways, she has a lot in common with David Wallace.

But, in any case, I wanted to share this funny story JoNew relates in an early Vice interview:

Vice: What’s the craziest party you ever went to?
Joanna: A house party in Nevada City where I saw this intense-looking guy with black eyeliner, a black trenchcoat, and all these elaborate rings get punched out by a biker named Monster John. Everyone just went back to partying, but suddenly, the guy got up and started screaming all this Dungeons & Dragons stuff in a deep growl, like, “I AM THARAGAT THE WOLF-GOD!!

Vice: He sounds like a great guy.
The combo of whatever drug he was on plus getting punched that hard locked him into some alternate universe. He climbed onto this teepee frame in the yard and ranted for two hours. Then he dove headfirst into a patch of blackberry bushes! Do you know blackberry bushes?

Vice: They’re thorny, right?
Uh, yeah. Finally some of his friends showed up and talked to him in his own language. One got down on the ground in a wolf-stance and said, “THARAGAT! I OFFER YOU SAFE PASSAGE!” The wolf-god responded well to this and came out, but then he saw this naked, body-painted man who was peeing on everything, and I guess the wolf-god didn’t cotton much to him because he just lunged at him.

Vice: The wolf-god lunged at the pissing body-paint dude.
Nevada City is a very small, weird town. Anyway, finally this guy who was a jujitsu master intervened. He and the wolf-god got into this exchange of weird stances until eventually the jujitsu guy bound the wolf-god up in rope and put him in a van.