Joanna Newsom "harping" on about her new album

It’s always the last ones you expect. Eerie indie folk chanteuse Joanna Newsom has admitted that she has, horror of horrors, been licensing her music for commercials. Newsom has allowed her music to appear in adverts by Orange, HSBC, Victoria’s Secret, MTV and the Melbourne Board of Tourism, among others, to support herself while she made her new album, Have One on Me.

“It might be distasteful but it’s a totally necessary thing. That’s what allowed me to survive while I didn’t tour for two years, and make this record,â€? she told the Independent earlier this month.

The conventional wisdom is that if you allow companies to use your songs to sell products, you’re a sell out, signing up to a Faustian pact where you cheapen your music to lend credibility to a product, in exchange for them arranging for a gigantic truck full of money to drive to your house.

Arbiters of indie taste R.E.M. have never allowed their music to be used in commercials, and Tom Waits has sued every company to use, adapt, impersonate or even listen to any of his music, with the list of companies that have tried and failed to appropriate his ramshackle schtick including car companies Ford, Audi and Adam Opel, snack maker Frito Lay, and Levi.

Apparently, the highest compliment our culture grants artists nowadays is to be in an ad – ideally naked and purring on the hood of a new car. I have adamantly and repeatedly refused this dubious honor. Currently accepting in my absence is my German doppelganger.â€? Waits observed at the time of the Opel suit.

View the Opel ad, featuring the German Tom Waits doppelganger here:

The issue of what constitutes “selling out� is a thorny one in indie circles, debated by music nerds in bars and coffee shops for decades.

Some of the territory is pretty treacherous, which makes bands nervous – is it selling out to sign to a multinational record label? Or did you sell out the day you started charging your fans £15 for a t-shirt? – but  everyone  seems to agree that allowing companies to use your songs in ads is a bit sleazy.

Because, if you’re mercenary enough to pimp out a song to an advertiser, why not allow them to change the lyrics so they’re about, say, Outback Steakhouse or something? Or even appear in an ad endorsing a mobile phone? (j’accuse, Of Montreal):

But maybe it’s not so simple anymore. In an age where the mantra at record labels is belt-tightening, Joanna Newsom’s new album is a three cd, two hour epic, full of lyrics like “Poor Lola! A tarantula’s mounting Countess Landsfeld’s handsome brassiere, while they all cheer.â€?

So if she’s selling out, she’s selling out to allow herself to make a massively ambitious, uncompromising album on her own terms, which seems pretty honest and principled.

It feels juvenile to talk about ‘selling out’ seriously, but whatever you call it, it is undeniably dispiriting hearing a song by an artist you love on a commercial, because it takes whatever the song makes you feel, and shifts that emotion onto whatever it is they want you to buy.

But these days, it seems like finding a way to finance interesting music may be worth getting your hands dirty.

Other artists have explored interesting new ways to sell their music. Radiohead famously put their most recent album, In Rainbows, online, allowing fans to pay whatever they want for it. But Radiohead also had a conventional CD release deal to back up the experiment, and it still remains to be seen whether less popular bands can survive that way. As Newsom said of the period following her last album, Ys, “I wasn’t living off royalties, that’s for sure.â€?

As record labels keep shrinking, it seems like the number of execs willing to take a risk on ambitious, extravagant albums will also fall, and maybe avenues like ad revenues, previously seen as rank commercialism, will be a way for interesting artists to make the music they want to make. Jury’s still out on the Of Montreal steakhouse advert though.

Tom Brown