Loved, revisited and analyzed to exhaustion, the dense body of work by Joanna Newsom, now almost fifteen years on from her self-produced debut, reveals with almost excessive clarity the traits that made her an icon of contemporary songwriting. It's a story that unfolds alongside the covers of her first three albums, like milestones marking her gradual settling into the public imagination: from the naive sketches of the collage on "The Milk-Eyed Mender", so chaotic as to make the artistic birth of a "child prodigy" seem almost unthinkable, to the opulent tableau of "Have One On Me", on whose sofa Joanna reclines in a pose better suited to a Hollywood diva everyone had been waiting to catch out.
Between the two stands the portrait for "Ys", at once realistic and allegorical, marking an album that was already destined to become a classic - not just for its sublime compositional quality, but precisely because of that proudly old-fashioned, stately iconography - the work of Benjamin A. Vierling - which immortalizes Newsom as a noblewoman, somewhere between Baroque portraiture and Flemish still life.
A picture that, in order to become what it is, necessarily needed to find its complement in top-tier production and mixing: respectively Steve Albini and Jim O’Rourke, whose prestigious involvement was ultimately crowned by mastering carried out at London's Abbey Road Studios. Of course, it's partly through such resources that legendary albums take shape, but none of the names involved ever overshadow the charisma and refined songwriting of Newsom, already here at the peak of her artistic maturity.
I think I still remember the feeling I had the first time I heard it: in a disorienting jumble of colours and baroque flourishes, where Joanna's voice was the only Ariadne's thread through the intricate unfolding of the suites, I felt both intimidated and enraptured by the swiftness of the storytelling and by that kind of sped-up lyrical singing, all high notes and sudden squeaks. Quite simply, as a young and still very unprepared listener, I was discovering the first songwriter who would truly steal my heart.
With due care, I would later devote countless relistens to those textures, working my way with ever greater awareness through the arrangements of the prolific composer and accordionist Van Dyke Parks: on his part, it was almost a miracle that he managed to balance the sheer size of the ensemble (another sixteen musicians) within each tableau, calibrating every intervention so as to avoid the risk - compounded by the density of the lyrics - of an unbearable cloyingness.
Simply reading the lyrics - illustrated and laid out like a book of nursery rhymes in the double-LP edition - reveals on its own a musicality and elegance that unmistakably echo the poems of W. H. Auden, that polished and sensitive chronicler of modernity who made the art of rhymed composition shine with new splendour. With even greater ambition, Newsom devotes herself to weaving a dense skein of archaic expressions, each of which nonetheless plays a precise role, if not always of meaning, then at least of sound.
The long tale that already unfolds in "Emily" is a whirlwind of historical references, obsolete names of things and animals, erudite notions of biology and astronomy. Trappings, precisely - ornaments that enrich a pastoral scene already blooming in full splendour, following its own natural and unstoppable course: within it, the souls of Joanna and her sister Emily are ideally united beneath the same starry vault, close in heart though relatively distant on Earth. The memory of a shared childhood, rich with discoveries about the natural world, is for Joanna a way of ideally drawing closer to a close friend as well as a close relative, through the very passion for astrophysics that defines her.
Anyhow, I sat by your side, by the water
You taught me the names of the stars overhead that I wrote down in my ledger
Though all I knew of the rote universe were those pleiades loosed in December
I promised you I'd set them to verse so I'd always remember
The fable of the monkey and the bear ("Monkey & Bear") doubles down on vocal and metrical virtuosity, adopting the frantic rhythm and the dizzying alliterations typical of the eccentric Dr. Seuss. In barely ten minutes, more than a hundred and fifty irregularly rhymed lines pile up, like an overexcited game of hopscotch scrawled in the margins: the ensemble's cadences grow ever more angular, verse after verse, in step with the sharp plucking of a harp that exactly mirrors Newsom's impertinent voice.
The cunning chimpanzee of the tale tries to persuade Ursula - the bear, precisely - not to flee the circus where they perform, once the chance arises for them to escape captivity (But still/ They have got to pay the bills/ Hadn't they?/ That is what the monkey would say). Accepting the risk of a death that has already befallen two horses that fled the enclosure, Ursula decides not to put a price on her freedom: she sheds her performing costume and vanishes over the horizon, leaving us wondering about her fate.
By this third change of scene, the album has already amassed an imposing wealth of lyrical content, yet we're not even halfway through, and there's still more than one discovery to be made: Newsom's second work turns out to be structured like a chest that, beneath its ornately carved and decorated exterior, leads to a core lined with the simplest and most elegant of velvets.
From a technical standpoint, but also due to a certain melodic kinship, "Sawdust And Diamonds" seems like the grown-up version of "Bridges And Balloons", the first song with which Joanna officially introduced herself to the world: the harp's swift patterns chase one another with few variations in a hypnotic, minimalist-inflected texture - Philip Glass, of course - lending resonance to the dominant theme of life after death, eternity, and the white staircase that leads to it (From the top of the flight/ Of the wide, white stairs/ Through the rest of my life/ Do you wait for me there?).
By a fortunate and unsettling coincidence, the lyric's densely poetic text hides within its lines a reference to the inspiration behind the album's title and the imaginative scenarios that pervade it throughout: Ys is said to be the name of a mythical city built on the coast of Brittany and later submerged by the rising tide of the Atlantic Ocean; its legend has been told since medieval times and, in the modern era, has inspired numerous literary works, one of which found its way to the harpist's bedside table, lent to her by a friend. By that point the album was already finished, and all that remained was to give it a name: Joanna had no doubts left about her choice once she came across the passage evoking the tolling of the bell of the cathédrale engloutie (referencing a Debussy prelude of the same origin), which, to her great astonishment, had similarly already surfaced in the lyrics of "Sawdust And Diamonds":
Then I hear a noise from the hull
Seven days out to sea
It is that damnable bell!
And it tolls — well, I believe that it tolls — for me
It tolls for me
Almost imperceptibly, Joanna lays bare her own anxieties and digs deep into the human condition, paving the way for the longest piece in the collection, the definitive synthesis of poem and concerto for harp and chamber orchestra. Traditionally, in music, greater length is in itself a warning sign for the listener: it is therefore with great embarrassment that I recently realised I hadn't truly listened to "Only Skin" in several years - an unforgivable oversight, given that it is perhaps Newsom's most admirable feat of songwriting, so elaborate and anguished that it leaves you almost breathless. A puzzle that even the most devoted fans keep pondering without success, aware only of the connective role the suite plays alongside the other four songs, each corresponding to a crucial episode in Joanna's personal life.
And it is once again the beyond of what is corporeal - and therefore temporary - that lies at the heart of a narrative that begins in medias res and immediately piles up disordered sensations, as in a lucid dream in which the only figures standing out clearly are two lovers embracing, somewhere between idyll and storm. The most tangible and unpredictable image lingers: a layer of skin that, when peeled away, produces the melodious sound of violins, like the veil separating what for us represents the feeling of being alive from a leap into the unknown, where we cannot know if or what part of us and of those we love will survive. Existence is a bolt of lightning hurtling towards its end, but in this frantic rush we might be lucky enough to find someone able to stop time for us:
We have everything
Life is thundering blissful towards death
In a stampede
Of his fumbling green gentleness
You stopped by;
I was all alive
In my doorway, we shucked and jived
And when you wept, I was gone;
See, I got gone when I got wise
But I can’t with certainty say we survived
For my part I can't say with certainty whether these lines hold the ultimate meaning of the song, or even of the whole album, but the solemnity and tone of utter farewell running through this epic journey seem to suggest as much. Throughout, the absolute centrality of Joanna's strings and voice is never lost, lit by a spotlight around which the strings rush past like gusts of wind, thickening and thinning like clouds, while the various movements are instead marked by the alternating appearance of an accordion, a banjo, or a clean-toned guitar (overabundant elements that on the following EP would be ironically grouped together under the name "Ys Street Band"). This can only be the true final act, a swan song brimming with chaste devotion and complete self-surrender, having, all things considered, nothing more to offer:
And I’m going to be right behind you
And if the love of a woman or two, dear
Couldn’t move you to such heights
Then all I can do
Is do, my darling, right by you
In contrast with such a majestic, all-encompassing tapestry, "Cosmia" is a minutely detailed, perfectly self-contained vignette, a landing on a dream pillow that dissolves every torment but not the passion, which if anything burns even more fiercely. With the curtain raised again, Joanna allows herself an encore as vibrant as a neoclassical opera aria yet as sweet as only a serenade can be, amid refrains and recurring lines that evoke an unstoppable call of love (And I miss your precious heart). So from the ashes of another loss rises a hymn to life and hope, cast as the metaphor of a moth's nocturnal flight, drifting away from the swarm gathered around the same light to chase another, truer one - or perhaps simply a different one - that of the moon.
Beneath the porch-light
We’ve all been circling
Beat our dust hearts;
Singe our flour wings
But in the corner
Something is happening!
Wild Cosmia, what have you seen?
Water were your limbs
And the fire was your hair —
And then the moonlight caught your eye
And you rose through the air
Well, if you’ve seen true light
Then this is my prayer:
Will you call me, when you get there?
A forge of thoughts and feelings not always clearly spelled out, Newsom speaks to us elusively of her sensibility as a woman and life partner, of an everyday existence filtered through overflowing imagination and a vocabulary as exquisite as it is thoroughly out of fashion. Compared to the songs on the albums that followed, where the heart's feelings would finally lay themselves bare, evoking more familiar settings that are much easier to empathize with, "Ys" thrives on the contrast between fervent verbal explicitness and the hermeticism of its feelings, in a thicket of metaphors, symbolism and lexical tangles that not even years of study could fully untangle (there are bloggers devoted solely to such arduous decryption, like philologists dissecting Joyce's Ulysses).
This shield-like quality will always remain, to some extent, the guardian of an impenetrable secret in which lies the fragile soul of such a singular singer-songwriter: while shop windows now display the latest confirmation of "Divers", unmoored from the realism of the portrait to make room for an expression - both graphic and written - that grows ever more intimate and emotional, in a few months this unrepeatable masterpiece will turn ten years old, fully earning that status as a classic of the third millennium that it already seemed to promise upon release.
Ride the wave of great music
Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.
27/03/2016
This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Michele Palozzo, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.
Tracklist
- 1. Emily
- 2. Monkey & Bear
- 3. Sawdust And Diamonds
- 4. Only Skin
- 5. Cosmia
JOANNA NEWSOM on the web
Joanna Newsom on OndaRock
Go to artist page
All Reviews on Ondarock
JOANNA NEWSOM
Ys
The maturity album from the prodigious Californian folksinger
JOANNA NEWSOM
The Milk-Eyed Mender
JOANNA NEWSOM
Joanna Newsom And The Ys Street Band
An unexpected and surprising appendix to the fairy tales of "Ys"
JOANNA NEWSOM
Have One On Me
Two hours of music able to combine the Californian artist's whimsical talent with a more "classic" form
JOANNA NEWSOM
Divers
Fourth work, more measured and scaled-down, from the harpist singer-songwriter
Latest milestones
CHURCH
Heyday
Australian jangle-pop redefined by the fourth studio album from the group led by Steve Kilbey: a journey through psychedelia, orchestral turns and the legacy left on the alt-rock landscape
FUSHITSUSHA
1st
Keiji Haino's cosmic conception of sound in the Japanese project's noise-rock masterpiece
BONGA
Angola 72
The exile album that turned semba into a weapon of freedom: the voice of a man on the run becomes the cry of an entire nation
SANDWELL DISTRICT
Sandwell District
The sonic blueprint that an entire generation of producers would spend the decade emulating
C.V. JØRGENSEN
Storbyens små oaser
The album that revealed the brilliant Danish singer-songwriter, blending stylistic eclecticism with satirical lyrics
MARTIN DUPONT
Hot Paradox
The coldwave masterpiece from the Marseille band, blending restless innovation with unmistakable transalpine spleen
HASSISEN KONE
Harsoinen teräs
The swan song of an iconic Finnish rock band, a visionary manifesto of progressive new wave
WAR ON DRUGS
Lost In The Dream
Depression, a recording studio, a new psychedelia. The classic 2010s album that gave heartland rock a new lease on life
original design & development by
Edoardo M. Cappuccio
Edoardo M. Cappuccio
redesign by
Gabriele Brombin
Anna Quaranta
Gabriele Brombin
Anna Quaranta