Joanna Newsom is so precious she's basically a Hummel figurine. An elfin girl in a prairie dress who lilts like an Appalachian Björk and sings about Cair Paravel? That goes so deep into Cute Town, it crosses over into Total Badassville. And that's where Joanna currently resides. And that's also why she tours with dudes like Will Oldham and has an amazing record out.
Luckily for us, Joanna did a fair amount of raging with nerds in high school before the whole being-a-genius thing took over her life.
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!!
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?
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.
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.
KELLY AMNER
The Milk-Eyed Mender is out now on Drag City.
