Newsom told me she was a “dreamy but melancholy” child, whose parents encouraged her ambitions and nurtured her iconoclasm. She doesn’t remember what drew her to the harp, but she started begging her parents for lessons at age 4 and began her studies a few years later. She also had a spiritual streak, which her parents likewise indulged. When she was 18, in the middle of her senior year of high school, she decided that she needed “some sort of ritual marker of the end of childhood.” Her plan was to camp in the open air for three days and nights, eating little, seeing no one, communing with the great outdoors. Newsom’s mother sanctioned her missing school and helped her daughter scout out a place by the Yuba, in the middle of 35 wild acres owned by family friends.

“I hesitate to speak about it because it sounds so corny, but one of my goals out there was to find a spirit-animal,” Newsom told me. “On the third day, I was kind of delirious. I’d only eaten a little rice. I’d just slept and looked at a river for three days. I was prepared to be visited by my spirit animal — I was just sitting there, saying some sort of prayer, inviting that presence into my life. And then I saw three white wolves charging down at me. I thought maybe I was hallucinating; but I was also prepared to die. But the wolves ran up and started licking my face. Then I remembered that the daughter of the woman who owned the property kept domesticated wolves.” A few hours later, Newsom hiked out of the woods and went home. Her mother had organized a celebratory dance party for Newsom and her girlfriends. She strung up lights and served four kinds of cake.

“A lot of people don’t want to leave because they feel so defined by being from here,” New­som said. Many of Newsom’s family and her childhood friends still live in Nevada City. One evening, while we were eating dinner in an Italian restaurant, a hulking young man in a hooded sweatshirt and a Mohawk stopped at our table; he was Newsom’s second cousin. The friendly guy who served me at a cafe on Broad Street turned out to be Pete Newsom, Joanna’s brother, a drummer and keyboardist who has played in the singer-songwriter Devendra Banhart’s band. He has been pulling a few barista shifts while working on a solo project, an album of Michael Jackson-inspired dance music.

Newsom herself never really left home, except for the few years she spent at Mills College in Oakland, where she studied musical composition and creative writing before dropping out. It was there that her career as a recording artist began, more or less by accident. Newsom made some rough recordings of songs she had written for voice and harp and opened a few shows at Bay Area clubs for her friend Banhart. Bonnie (Prince) Billy — a k a the indie-folk star Will Oldham — heard Newsom’s demos and asked her to tour with him. Soon after, Oldham’s label, the Chicago-based indie stalwart Drag City, signed Newsom to a record deal.

Critics branded her music “freak folk,” lumping her with Banhart and other upstarts whose psychedelic leanings and flowing tresses harked back to the woollier folk rock of the late 1960s. Newsom was called an “elfin princess,” a “faerie queen,” a “weird waif,” an “innocent flower,” a “childlike chanteuse.” There was a time when the media chatter drove Newsom to distraction. In a 2006 interview with the arts-and-culture magazine Stop Smiling, she said, “I have friends in my hometown, and a few in other places, but I’m not part of some epic, bracelet-clanking, eyes-rolled-back, blasé, nihilistic scenester cult.”

Today, Newsom told me, she regrets letting the press coverage get under her skin. “I was fresh out of women’s college and I was bummed at everyone saying that my songs were innocent and nursery-rhyme-like,” she told me. “When people would put me and Devendra Banhart in the same sentence, they were coding his eccentricities as world-weary and ‘witchy’ and coding my eccentricities as childlike and naïve. I felt like it minimized my intelligence. But I think in my defensiveness I disavowed some realities that I should not have disavowed. I think that there’s always going to be an element of my experience of the world — as much as I feel this as a deficiency — that is unprotected, unbuffered.”

Newsom’s songs, full of roiling emotions and jumpy harmonies, do feel unbuffered. But innocent and childlike? Those qualities are not foreign to indie rock, which over the past decade has been gripped in certain quarters by childhood nostalgia and a cult of the twee. But the vigor and intensity of Newsom’s music sets it apart. As a musician — in pure “chops” terms — Newsom has more in common with people like Eddie Van Halen and Wynton Marsalis than with indie stars like Banhart and the Decemberists. “I still don’t think most people realize quite how great a musician she is,” says Neal Morgan, who drums in Newsom’s touring band. Her style blends the luminous arpeggios of the classical- and folk-harp traditions with African syncopation — crisp, snappy, interlocking rhythms. (Newsom has virilized the harp, bringing a funky pulse to a dowdy drawing-room instrument.) To see Newsom perform a song like “Sawdust and Diamonds,” a 10-minute-long ballad from “Ys,” is to witness a display of virtuosity that verges on a circus sideshow stunt. Newsom picks out a bass part with her left hand and plays melody lines and chords with her right, while working the harp’s pedals with her feet and delivering 121 lines of phantasmagorical verse in a tune that madly flutters and swoops around the beat.