Joanna Newsom.

Joanna Newsom grew up in Nevada City, California, a Gold Rush town in the Sierra Nevada foothills, where she began studying harp as a child. After early self-released EPs, she signed to Chicago's Drag City label and released The Milk-Eyed Mender in 2004 — a debut of harp, harpsichord, and a startling, keening voice that made her one of the defining artists of the decade's new folk movement.

Her second album, Ys (2006), raised the stakes dramatically: five long-form songs recorded by Steve Albini, with orchestral arrangements by Van Dyke Parks and mixing by Jim O'Rourke. It was followed in 2010 by Have One on Me, a two-hour triple album, and in 2015 by Divers, whose videos for 'Sapokanikan' and 'Divers' were directed by Paul Thomas Anderson — a collaboration that also saw Newsom narrate and appear in Anderson's film Inherent Vice.

Newsom is famously deliberate about how her music reaches listeners. She has kept her catalog off Spotify, once dismissing the service as a 'villainous cabal,' and for years her albums lived only on physical formats and downloads. Today her records stream and sell through her official Bandcamp page, run with Drag City — the only place online that carries her full catalog with her blessing.

She performs rarely and memorably: the Ys Street Band tours of the late 2000s, the world tour behind Divers in 2015-16, the harp-and-keys 'Strings/Keys Incident' shows of 2019, and a sold-out five-night residency at the Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever in Los Angeles in May 2024, where she debuted new material.