Saturday Night Live alum Andy Samberg and musical artist Joanna Newsom have been married for over a decade and share two children. Despite their massive success in their respective industries, they seem to live a very cozy home life.
“Oh, he’s my favorite person in the world,” Newsom told Larry King in an interview in 2015. “Yeah, he’s the person I would most want to hang out with at any given moment.”
Samberg seems to feel the same, telling iNews in 2018, “It’s important to be with someone that you trust; someone you can laugh and be your true self with. Those two are tied in my personal experience.”
Here’s everything about Joanna Newsom and her relationship with Samberg.
Who is Joanna Newsom?
Newsom was born in 1982 in northern California, then grew up in Nevada City. Her parents were doctors and also musicians. Her mother played the piano, hammered dulcimer, and autoharp. She apparently asked to learn the harp when she was only four, according to The Guardian.
“My mom came from a long history of being a musician and had formally studied piano for years and played over the course of my childhood,” Newsom told Under the Radar magazine in 2010. “She had an African drum group that would meet in our upstairs garage every week for years and years, and she played hammered dulcimer and autoharp.”
Newsom went on to study at Mills College in Oakland, studying musical composition and creative writing, but she dropped out before graduating, per the New York Times. She signed with a label in 2002. She is now a very well-known musical artist, who is especially famous for her skill on the harp and her unique vocals. Her first album, The Milk-Eyed Mender, was released in 2004.
And as a bonus piece of trivia, she is also the second cousin, twice removed, of Governor Gavin Newsom.
Samberg has talked about his wife’s music, admitting to Conan O’Brien in 2017, “We have multiple harps in the home. It’s incredible for me when she plays—I just sort of lie down on the floor and zen out while she plays. It’s really great.”
Newsom does do some acting, even making a cameo in the Brooklyn Nine-Nine series finale in 2021 as Caroline Saint-Jacques-Renard. And yes, she plays a musician.
How did Joanna Newsom and Andy Samberg meet?
Newsom told Seth Meyers in 2016 that she remembered the moment they met very well. It was backstage at one of her shows, which Samberg attended with mutual friend Fred Armisen. Meyers had just said that Samberg was a fan of hers. She replied, “I was a big fan of his.”
She continued, “In fact, the night that I met him, Fred Armisen brought him to one of my shows. And I had just been with my band backstage like an hour before, watching ‘Just 2 Guyz.’ So when I met him, he was kinda shy. And I said, ‘Oh my god, you’re the cunt! You’re Steve the cunt!”
She was quoting the Lonely Island sketch there.
“He always says he saw like, heart bubbles,” Newsom added.
How long have they been together?
They were first linked romantically in 2008. In February 2013, Us Weekly reported they were engaged. CBS News reported they were married at Big Sur, California, in September of that year.
“I liked it, and I put a ring on it,” Samberg joked in early 2014, adding about their honeymoon in the Maldives, “It was incredible. It was amazing.”
Do they have any children?
Samberg and Newsom have kept their children’s lives very private, including their names and exact ages. But they did announce the arrival of their first daughter in August 2017. In February 2023, Jorma Taccone of the Lonely Island let it slip on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon that they had a second girl in 2022.
In 2021, Samberg told People, “We have a 3-year-old, so you make breakfast, we have a small playgroup that we have going with a few other families so we make sure we get her over to that in time.”
He shared that they just buckle down on their work during the day.
“Then the kid comes home and that’s it,” he added. “You make dinner, bath time, bedtime and you collapse.”
Aimée Lutkin
Aimée Lutkin is the weekend editor at ELLE.com. Her writing has appeared in Jezebel, Glamour, Marie Claire and more. Her first book, The Lonely Hunter, will be released by Dial Press in February 2022.
