PROVIDENCE – How does a 9-year-old start playing the harp?
In a word: Zelda.
Emma Newton grew up playing the popular Nintendo video game series “The Legend of Zelda,” and remembers the exact moment when, as a child, they were transfixed by the instrument’s gentle, whimsical tones.
“There was this one scene where [protagonist Link] would jump into the Fountain of Healing and this beautiful fairy would come out, and this harp music would be cascading behind her,” Newton, who uses they/them pronouns, recalls on this week’s Rhode Island Report podcast.
“As a kid who was obsessed with fairies and magical creatures, there was nothing I wanted to do more than be the fairy in the fountain playing the harp, making beautiful, magical music that heals people,” they said. “I thought that was the coolest thing ever.”
So set in motion Newton’s love affair with the ancient instrument they’ve now crafted a career playing.
Performing under the stage name Space Cowboy Newt, Newton, now 25, treks around Rhode Island, performing their own blend of harp-laced pop with their roughly 6-foot-tall instrument in tow, affectionately named, Mr. Pluck.
Newton, of Foxborough, works as an engineer at Big Nice Studio in Lincoln, R.I., helping to record artists featured on Rhode Island PBS’ “Ocean State Sessions,” a series showcasing local musicians. (Space Cowboy Newt appeared in the show’s fifth season in January.)
Additionally, Newton records and produces artists for “The Protest Song Project,” an initiative they said they started in response to the US Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022. Through the effort, Newton produces other musicians’ social justice-focused songs free of charge, as they discuss on the podcast.
Newton plays two original songs on this week’s episode, including “haberdashery.” The 2024 single deals with the “confusing and kind of tumultuous feelings of gender dysphoria,” said Newton, who is nonbinary.
“We all know right now that queer, trans, nonbinary voices are being totally silenced in this administration,” Newton says when asked what it means to be a nonbinary artist during Trump’s second term.
In January, Trump signed an executive order recognizing two sexes, male and female. The order, experts have said, includes language that is biologically inaccurate and erases trans, nonbinary, and intersex people from federal recognition.
Trump orders federal government to recognize only two sexes. What does that mean?
“Right now, we have to make our voices not just loud, but unignorable,” Newton says.
To get the latest episode each week, follow Rhode Island Report podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other podcasting platforms, or listen in the player above.
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