Art & Creativity Quote by Joanna Newsom

Newsom’s sentence reads like it’s been yanked mid-thought, and that’s the point: she’s refusing the tidy categories listeners and critics keep trying to staple onto her work. “Experimental” is one of those prestige labels that flatters the audience as much as the artist - it implies difficulty, daring, and a heroic break from tradition. By saying she’s not making “experimental music in relation to classical music,” she’s rejecting a particular critical map where classical sits at the center and everything else is defined by its distance from it.

The phrasing matters. “In relation to” is a quiet tell: she’s not denying that her music is complex, formal, or compositionally serious; she’s denying the hierarchy embedded in the comparison. Her harp-based songs pull from Appalachian balladry, early music, pop melody, and long-form storytelling, but she’s allergic to the idea that these moves are legible only as a conversation with the conservatory. That’s a cultural fight as much as a musical one: who gets to be “serious,” and under whose rules.

There’s also a defensive tenderness here, typical of artists who become accidental symbols. Newsom has spent years fielding questions that treat her as an anomaly - the “harp girl,” the “weird” one, the “art” one - as if the music must be justified by a reference point that reassures skeptics. The subtext is a boundary: judge the work on its own internal logic, not as a footnote to classical music’s canon.