Joanna Newsom has spoken exclusively to Uncut about her forthcoming album, Divers. Talking to Jaan Uhelszki in Los Angeles, Newsom discussed the "fear of loss" that informed her fourth album, and how it was prompted by her marriage to comedian Andy Samberg. "Everyone's getting older. When I crossed...
Joanna Newsom has spoken exclusively to Uncut about her forthcoming album, Divers.
Talking to Jaan Uhelszki in Los Angeles, Newsom discussed the “fear of loss” that informed her fourth album, and how it was prompted by her marriage to comedian Andy Samberg. “Everyone’s getting older. When I crossed that line in my mind where I knew I was with the person that I wanted to marry, it was a very heavy thing, because you’re inviting death into your life. You know that that’s hopefully after many, many, many, many years, but the idea of death stops being abstract, because there is someone you can’t bear to lose. when it registers as true, it’s like a little shade of grief that comes in when love is its most real version. Then it contains death inside of it, and then that death contains love inside of it.”
She also describes how her appearance in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice delayed the record, but that it was “totally worth it.” She added, “What really happened is I spent four years in this suspended state of agitation, waiting for things to make sense. But then it was just sustained, slow work.”
The diving theme first emerged in ‘You Will Not Take My Heart Alive’, but she didn’t notice it until a few songs in. “For me, it’s not just the diving that’s important, it’s the implication of the medium that’s being moved through in the process of diving and that, for me, might be the thing that really connects back to the thesis of… I don’t want to say thesis. That’s too much work.”
Newsom has unveiled another album track, ‘Leaving The City’, which you can hear below.
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