Nevada City honored singer-songwriter Joanna Newsom with a day in her name, prompting a rare public speech about art, childhood and the town that shaped her.
Drag City
Joanna Newsom returned to her hometown this week for a civic honor that she said meant more to her than any industry award.
The singer-songwriter, harpist and cult-favorite recording artist appeared at the Nevada City City Council meeting on Wednesday, May 27, where city leaders proclaimed the date Joanna Newsom Day. The recognition brought one of Northern California’s most distinctive musicians back to the Sierra foothills town she credited with shaping her imagination.
“This proclamation truly means more to me than a Grammy or any other award could,” Newsom told the council. “Nevada City, you’re so dear to me. Being formally recognized as your native daughter is one of the highest honors I can imagine.”
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The honor came during Mayor Adam Kline’s Year of Advanced Music Appreciation, a city initiative running through June.
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Kline, a musician and longtime friend of Newsom’s, played an early role in connecting her with Drag City, the Chicago label that released her acclaimed 2004 debut album, “The Milk-Eyed Mender,” Newsom said.
Newsom told the council that Kline was among the first people she played music for about three decades ago. Years later, when she was handing out homemade demo CD-Rs to friends, she said, Kline passed one to musician Will Oldham after a performance in Nevada City. Oldham brought it back to Drag City, Newsom said, and within weeks label co-founder Dan Koretzky contacted her about releasing a record.
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“He’s also arguably the reason I have a career,” Newsom said of Kline.
For Newsom fans, the appearance was notable partly because she has largely stayed out of the public eye in recent years. Her most recent full-length album, “Divers,” was released in 2015, though her songs have continued to draw a devoted following for their intricate harp arrangements, literary lyrics and long-form storytelling.
For readers who know Newsom mainly by association, she is married to Berkeley actor, comedian and “Saturday Night Live” alum Andy Samberg, with whom she has two children. The couple married in 2013 and have kept much of their family life private, though Samberg has spoken warmly about their relationship, describing Newsom as his best friend.
She is also part of another well-known California family. Gavin Newsom — then San Francisco mayor and current California governor — is her second cousin.
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But Wednesday’s honor was less about celebrity connections than artistic roots.
Nevada City honored singer-songwriter Joanna Newsom with a day in her name, prompting a rare public speech about art, childhood and the town that shaped her.
Nevada City Government
Newsom described Nevada City not as a backdrop to its musicians’ lives, but as “a central character” in their work — “an object of devotion, a nagging riddle, a callous adversary, a fountainhead of longing and love.”
“What I loved about life here growing up was that it left room for some emptiness and some loneliness and some space, which all led to so much noticing,” she said. “I think all of these musicians who came out of this town have had a chance to do a lot of that, and I think it makes a big difference.”
In a characteristically wide-ranging turn, she moved from hometown gratitude into a meditation on metaphor and simile, arguing that true metaphor requires a kind of confidence formed outside performance or approval.
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“Metaphor is artless and unaffected and feral,” she said. “A good metaphor makes me shiver as if a ghost has passed through my body, because in a way it has.”
Newsom tied that idea to childhood, teachers and parents who let young artists make meaning without immediately correcting or interpreting it.
She remembered her late father, Bill Newsom, as her earliest literary influence and recalled a childhood game he invented called “poetry racing.” In the game, she said, she and her siblings sprinted around the lawn, stopping at trees to improvise poems from prompts shouted by the other players.
“Kids are born with their channels of improvisation thrown wide open, and my dad endeavored to keep them that way,” she said.
She also thanked her mother, Christine Newsom, for filling the family home with classical, folk, bluegrass, African, Celtic, Paraguayan, Andean and Appalachian music, and for helping her translate favorite songs into harp chords when she refused to learn sheet music.
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Joanna Newsom at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco, in December 2006. Nevada City honored Newsom with a day in her name, prompting a rare public speech about art, childhood and the town that shaped her.
Michael Maloney/SFC
Her harp teacher, Lisa Stein, received some of Newsom’s most pointed praise. Newsom said Stein taught composition not by imposing rules, but by giving her a steady harmonic base over which she could improvise on a small harp as a child.
“I can’t emphasize to you enough how important this was for every aspect of the rest of my life,” she said.
The ceremony also offered a reminder of Nevada City’s broader arts identity.
The Grass Valley-Nevada City area is part of a state-designated cultural district, and the region has long promoted its concentration of musicians, writers, theater spaces, festivals and visual artists as central to its economy and sense of place.
Newsom closed with a joke about the local mining history, noting that she understood she was to receive “the key to the mineshaft at Empire Mine.”
“I have rambled, and I haven’t scratched the surface of why I love it here and why I love being from here, why I’m so proud to be from here,” she said. “Mostly I want to thank you all deeply and let you know that my Empire Mine shaft door is always open if you want to come down and say hi.”