Creativity Quote by Joanna Newsom

Newsom’s line is a rare peek behind the curtain of “organic” artistry: the moment where a musician admits that sound isn’t just discovered, it’s managed. “Consciously trying” signals craft over mystique, a refusal of the romantic story that her harp-led music simply floats in from some ancient elsewhere. She’s telling you the vibe can be dialed in or dialed out.

The loaded part is what she’s dialing away from. “Celtic” and “African” aren’t neutral genre tags here; they’re shorthand for two huge, highly commodified buckets of “roots” music that Western listeners often treat as atmospheric authenticity. Newsom’s work has always risked being heard as folk cosplay: harp equals Celtic mist; odd meters and polyrhythms get lazily filed under “African,” as if a continent were a drum loop. Her intent reads like preemptive self-defense against that flattening. She’s not rejecting those traditions as unworthy; she’s rejecting the easy narrative that her music is a postcard from other people’s histories.

There’s also an ethics subtext: anxiety about appropriation, about borrowing sonic markers that come with cultural ownership and political baggage. For a white American artist, those adjectives can become unearned gravitas, a shortcut to “timeless” without paying the dues of context.

The quote lands because it names the awkward truth: in pop culture, listeners reward the exotic tint, and artists feel pressure either to lean into it or to prove they’re not doing it. Newsom chooses the harder route, insisting on specificity over suggestion.