Joanna Newsom is a Californian multi-instrumentalist and singer. Her fourth album Divers is due for release next Friday (October 23). In a recent interview with the Observer, she has highlighted how her music is discussed differently to her male peers.
“It’s an infantilising thing that happens,” she commented, “The language is minimising and narrowing of possible narrative depth… it was so disturbing to me when I was younger.”
“A lot of the writing about my music is done through a lens of straight-up sexism and, in other cases, just a coding of feminising of things,” she went on, giving an example of how male songwriters are treated differently. She mentioned her “early, early days”, when she was making similar music to folk musician Devendra Banhart.
“He and I had some aesthetic similarities, but where for him people would use words like ‘eccentric’ or ‘psychedelic’ and for me they’d use ‘fairytales’ and ‘unicorns’.”
You can read the full interview here
#Peace.Love.JoannaNewsom
