joanna newsom: a non-definitive, extremely biased guide
why i love this beautiful harpist/divine being and you should too
In September 2019 (or a lifetime ago), I saw Joanna Newsom with my friend Finley, after I happened to notice she was performing for the first time in several years while we were visiting New York together. I wasn’t even really a fan of hers at the time, but when you’re looking for a birthday present for your best friend and find out that her favourite singer is semi-miraculously going to be playing in the same city as you, such stuff is in the realm of destiny. You can’t exactly say no. I’d heard some of Joanna’s music, and liked ‘Peach Plum Pear’ a reasonable amount, but I really didn’t get what made Fin lose her mind. She seemed interesting, and certainly extremely talented, but I just didn’t quite get it. I’m certain that I was far from alone in this, and I think a lot of people share my initial scepticism of Newsom’s music: it’s just so intense, her voice is so weird, and the songs are so far from anything resembling normal pop structure.
I’d like my New York story to end with me going to the show and realising as I saw her in the flesh for the first time just how transformatively talented she is, but I didn’t. I was impressed, sure: by her performing these songs entirely alone, and particularly the bit where she went seamlessly from one song to another then, in the second song, switched from piano to harp and back while barely missing a beat; by the bizarrely transporting, almost terrifying climax of ‘In California’; by the fact that she remembered all those words. I wasn’t, though, fully won over, and if I’d known the songs better I’d have got a lot more out of the experience. It was only later on that trip — having been unable to get a few of the tunes out of my head — that I properly started appreciating her music, and gradually slipped into obsession once I was back in the UK.
So to save you from my fate (inadequately appreciating Joanna Newsom), I want to go on a deep dive into why exactly I love her as much as I do, working through all four of her albums. This isn’t an objective account by any means, and I don’t think it’s particularly tenable for me to pretend I don’t essentially worship the ground Joanna Newsom walks on, so if you’re not already convinced you’re gonna have to put up with a bit of fangirling. I think she’s just a really phenomenally talented and interesting artist, making music which is both unique and unique in its uniqueness — I can’t think of a single other singer who’s nearly as singular. But I hope that my absurd devotion is tempered by the fact that I didn’t always love her music (there might even be a bit of my brain which remembers what that’s like), and that I’ll be able to offer something to those reading this who’ve either never heard her music or didn’t like it.
(If you just want to know where to start with Joanna Newsom’s music, I sum up my favourite songs from every album at the end of each section, and you can skip to the very end of this newsletter for some final recommendations. Note that her music cannot be found on Spotify due to ethical objections.)
The Milk-Eyed Mender (2004)
While she’d released music herself prior to The Milk-Eyed Mender, this was her label debut, and in many cases the music on this album is a reworking of songs on the earlier releases — so this is where we’ll start. For a debut album, it’s remarkably accomplished, although it’s some way short of the standard of what follows. This isn’t to say that it’s bad, and actually this album includes a couple of her most enduringly popular tracks; it’s just that you can really hear that she’s still developing as a songwriter, and there are a few tracks which veer into just being annoying (it doesn’t help that her voice is quite a lot less mature than in future albums, and while I still love it, it feels like it goes a little too far in some songs).
Most of my issues with MEM come from it not being quite as distinctive as later albums become. While she’s hardly sticking to conventional verse-chorus structures, you can feel bits and pieces of them coming through and she has a few actual genuine choruses (unheard of in almost all her music). Even the lyrics look a lot more typical, with none of the bizarrely long lines which break at unclear or unusual points. While it’s still obviously weird, and you can see the beginnings of her experimenting with forms, it’s frequently weird in the way a lot of similar music is weird — and while ‘freak folk’ is a generally unkind label for Joanna’s music, it’s appropriate for a lot of this album. It’s clear she’s consciously writing within a single genre in a way she just abandons in the future.
This is obviously harsh, and it’s far from unusual that a debut album would stick close to generic conventions. MEM is, actually, some people’s favourite Joanna album, a position I find slightly bizarre but can respect, and I think a lot of the reason for this — and the enduring popularity of songs like ‘Peach Plum Pear’ or ‘Sadie’ — actually is the relative normalcy of this album. ‘Peach Plum Pear’ doesn’t really have a chorus, but it’s fundamentally catchier than a lot of the more complex music Joanna went on to record and it uses language gorgeously. ‘Sadie’ is gorgeous and sad, and feels a bit more accessible in that sadness because it’s not all layered behind allegory and metaphor. And while Joanna’s music is always surprisingly funny, in my opinion, jokier songs like ‘Inflammatory Writ’ are real joys and kind-of irrepressible. So what if ‘Three Little Babes’ is the worst thing she’s ever sung? So much of this album is beautiful and funny and clever and catchy, and while it doesn’t feel like magic in the same way as, for example, Ys, it’s still a fantastic album.
Best songs: ‘Sadie’, ‘Peach Plum Pear’, ‘Clam Crab Cockle Cowrie’
Ys (2006)
The Middle English poem Pearl’s title has been described as referring to not just its imagery but its structure. It’s 101 stanzas long, with 12 lines in each stanza, so the poem as a whole is 1,212 lines; each (5-stanza) section has a link word which repeats in every stanza, with the following section’s first stanza also repeating it; there’s endless alliteration and rhyme and complexity and perfection. It’s got this structural completeness which is unlike almost anything I’ve ever read.
Ys (pronounced like ‘eess’; it’s the name of a mythical Breton city) feels a lot like Pearl. To my mind, it’s undoubtedly Joanna’s greatest achievement to date, and although it’s not quite as intricately structured as Pearl, perhaps, there’s a certain monumental quality they both share, a neatness and symmetry which is simply incredible. It’s quite obviously been constructed with an extraordinary amount of care, but despite the intricacy of the album, the tracks are defined by the sheer emotion that Newsom pours into them. There’s real life in these songs, a real richness and vibrancy which is staggering — you could so easily imagine them becoming stilted and overly complex, but they just don’t, and in some senses it feels like some of the most emotionally vulnerable and straightforward music I know.
This tension between intricacy and rawness is even reflected in how the album was recorded. Every song is based around harp and vocal tracks recorded with Steve Albini, the famously austere recording engineer/producer of In Utero and Surfer Rosa, with orchestration then recorded (for every song other than ‘Sawdust and Diamonds’) by Van Dyke Parks, possibly most famous for contributing lyrics to Smile. You can see a lot of the most gorgeous bits of Ys emerging from the tension between Albini’s spartan approach, which for both Joanna and the Pixies really allows the emotional heft of the songs to shine through, and the lush detail of Parks’s backing.
I could try in a billion different ways to try to convey how much I love Ys, but I think these lines from ‘Emily’ are best at summarising what’s so perfect about it:
Pa pointed out to me for the hundredth time tonight
the way the ladle leads to a dirt-red bullet of light.
Squint skyward and listen,
loving him, we move within his borders:
just asterisms in the stars’ set order.
We could stand for a century,
staring with our heads cocked in the broad daylight
at this thing:
joy,
landlocked,
in bodies that don’t keep — dumbstruck
with the sweetness of being,
‘til we don’t be.
Told:
‘Take this
and eat this.’
There’s a kind of religious awe in these lines, not just in Eucharistic imagery at the end but throughout. Their beauty, for me, is in how the simultaneous wonder of the moment — standing staring transfixed by joy is such a wonderful image — is contrasted instantly with its impermanence and our mortality. Joy, for Joanna, is something to be treasured and marveled at because it won’t last, not despite that. We’re only alive for so long, and we’re still cut off from really knowing the experiences of others; we still need to hold on to rituals to keep feeling connected, whether they’re religious or just your dad yet again telling you the same thing about the big dipper. There’s a trick that she has of transforming seemingly mundane images, things which have happened a thousand times, into something shockingly gorgeous — even revelatory.
And yet, for all that, ‘Emily’ isn’t even the best song on the album (it could be anywhere from second to fourth, depending on my mood). That’s ‘Only Skin’, which travels so far from recognisable song structure and switches so rapidly between moods and movements over its sixteen minutes that it’s almost dizzying. Its lyrics are so detailed and continually staggering, and some of my favourites come as she describes a bird which is injured after hitting her window:
Last week, our picture window
produced a half-word:
heavy and hollow
hit by a brown bird.
We stood and watched her gape like a rattlesnake
and pant and labor over every intake.
The speaker resolves that ‘though you die, bird, you will have a fine view’, and takes it up a mountain; on the way, it appears to die, but when they arrive at the mountaintop it ‘saw the treetops, cocked her head, and up and flew’. It goes on to live beyond death, just as Newsom survives the year whose events she sings about, going on to some kind of freedom. Coincidentally, it reminds me of the opening of the poem in Nabokov’s Pale Fire:
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff — and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky
In Nabokov’s metaphor, the speaker appears to live beyond death much like the bird in ‘Only Skin’, but within a fantasy world of semblance where he ‘duplicate[s] / Myself, my lamp’, letting ‘dark glass / Hang all the furniture above the grass’. Is this what Ys is doing in suspending its real stories in fairytale and allusion? In any case, it seems unlikely that recalling a famously precise and intricate novel on this album is coincidental, and Pale Fire shares her skill in transforming the mundane — a bird hitting a window — into the magical.
‘Only Skin’ is the glue which holds the album together, exploring the joins between the other songs, which take individual experiences from the year in which the album was written and represent them either allegorically or (semi-)literally. Across the album, you have the pastoral beauty of ‘Emily’, the wild fairytale of ‘Monkey and Bear’ (which goes extraordinarily hard, for the record), the sparse but gorgeous solo harp of ‘Sawdust and Diamonds’, the orchestral density of ‘Only Skin’, and the crushing despair of ‘Cosmia’. It’s just wonderful, so clever and complex and transporting.
Best songs: ‘Only Skin’, ‘Emily’, ‘Monkey and Bear’
Have One On Me (2010)
Her ‘California singer-songwriter’ album, one of the first things which strikes you about Have One On Me is how much it is: it’s three full discs of music and almost exactly two hours long, and there’s an almost overwhelming richness to a lot of the music which contrasts with the more pastoral vibes on Ys. In some senses, the difference between the albums is epitomised in the covers: where the cover of Ys is a painting by Benjamin Vierling of Joanna in a fairytale setting, all rich reds and deep blues but by no means overwhelming, HOOM’s shows Joanna reclining amidst a profusion of objects (all of which, for the record, Joanna owns, I guess that’s just her idea of home decor or whatever), which resembles that computer-generated image that no one can parse — it looks like there should be recognisable objects, but your brain can’t get a grip on it.
That said, HOOM is also a lot more accessible than Ys in plenty of ways. I mean, there are songs which are under four minutes (one’s under two!), where Ys only gets down to seven minimum, and part of the muchness of the album is that Joanna’s stylistic range is a lot broader. Many songs have her on piano instead of harp, and the sound of plenty of tracks comes to resemble pop (it is still quite a way from pop). It also feels like she’s a bit more willing to let loose, with the climaxes of songs like ‘In California’ or ‘Baby Birch’ having a drama to them which isn’t quite unmatched in Ys, but is certainly slightly more common and less restrained. All of this means that HOOM was the first album of Joanna’s which I properly got into, and maybe the best place to start if you’re new to her music.
While Ys does have complex and fascinating threads running through it, they mostly join other songs to ‘Only Skin’ rather than creating any kind of progression or story over the course of the album. This isn’t true of HOOM, and there’s a really clear narrative which links (almost?) every song on the album. It starts with an uncertain declaration of love in ‘Easy’, in which she sets the stage for a tale about a difficult relationship between a woman with too much love to give and an emotionally unavailable man, and by ‘In California’ they’re taking a break from one another — but she cannot stop waiting for him. The final track, ‘Does Not Suffice’, is a rejection, and explicitly links back to both those preceding songs: she describes her lover thinking about ‘how easy I was not’, and the song’s very melody echoes the refrain of ‘In California’. Other tracks explore aspects of the relationship, although none are quite as central to the narrative as this, and they frequently tell their own tales as well.
While ‘Monkey and Bear’ (and, to a lesser extent, ‘Cosmia’) is the only narrative song in Ys, almost all of HOOM tells, or is part of, a story. Some actually seem to just describe events in Joanna’s life, like driving to a concert in ‘Good Intentions Paving Company’, while others maintain her interest in fantastical allegory, such as ‘Go Long’, which is (at least partly) a retelling of the story of Bluebeard, or the title track, which is about Lola Montez’s actual historical relationship with King Ludwig I. Everywhere, you find this muchness both in the lyrics and the music, and it sometimes feels like it recalls the moment of revelation in ‘Go Long’:
Well, I have never seen
such a terrible room —
gilded with the gold teeth
of the women who loved you!
Now, though I die,
magpie, this I bequeath:
by any other name
a jay is still blue.
The magpie-like accumulation of dead women is both a misogynist violence and materialist abomination, and the kind of accretion which seems to characterise both this scene and the album feels like it links these two things together. Also, there’s a fun ornithology joke in here, because of course there is: while magpies won’t commit, flitting around from treasure to treasure, bluejays mate for life, thus continuing the album’s contrast between a man who won’t commit and a woman who’s far too willing to do so.
Throughout these songs, the almost magical ability Joanna has with language and imagery remains, like the first lines of ‘Have One On Me’:
From the courtyard, I floated in
and watched it go down.
Heard the cup drop;
thought ‘well,
that’s why they keep them around.’
It took me forever to realise that this is a description of an attempted poisoning, where the king’s taster dies after drinking from a poisoned cup. It’s this moment, repeated throughout her music, where the image comes into sudden clarity, and it’s also so darkly funny as Lola comes instantly to rational acceptance of the death.
I mentioned the drama of some songs on this album, and perhaps what it comes down to is the almost visceral imagery she uses. The final section of ‘Baby Birch’, a song about choosing not to have a child, is stunningly violent:
We take a walk along the dirty lake,
hear the goose cussing at me over her eggs.
You poor little cousin, I don’t want your dregs —
a little baby fussing over my legs.
There is a blacksmith and there is a shepherd and there is a butcher boy,
and there is a barber who’s cutting and cutting away at my only joy;
I saw a rabbit as slick as a knife and as pale as a candlestick
and I had thought it’d be harder to do but I caught her and skinned her quick,
held her there,
kicking and mewling, upended unspooling unsung and blue.
Told her wherever you go, little runaway bunny, I will find you —
and then she ran,
as they’re liable to do.
This is accompanied by the entrance of drums and a really rapid tempo, and is staggeringly powerful — a painful but cathartic release. Similarly, in the middle of ‘In California’ (almost exactly at the hour mark, by the way), she sings:
Some nights,
I just never go to sleep at all
and I stand,
shaking in my doorway like a sentinel,
all alone;
bracing like the bow upon a ship,
and fully abandoning
any thought of anywhere
but home —
my home.
Sometimes I can almost feel the power
and I do love you:
is it only timing
that has made it such a dark hour?
Only ever chiming out
"cuckoo, cuckoo"?
The lyrics don’t really do it justice, though, because on ‘cuckoo’ a string section feels like it knocks down the door and Joanna switches into an incredibly powerful falsetto which feels like a total expression of despair. After the entire song had just been an endless build-up of tension focused around a maddeningly steady harp line, this moment is just a total release — as I said above, I was almost terrified when I heard it live.
HOOM has its moments of beauty, but it’s probably less beautiful than Ys, both musically and lyrically. It feels a little less like it transports you from this world, even if Ys only takes you to the one reflected in the window. The flipside of this is that it feels more rooted, more real; accessible both in the sense that it’s easier for new listeners and that it’s easier to relate to or feel seen by. What it’s trying to produce isn’t beauty in the same way as Ys, which isn’t a criticism; it’s just something different. Part of that is the slightly more narrative, less fantastical approach; part of it’s the shorter songs, which feel a bit more possible to hold in your head at once; and part of it’s Joanna’s improving ability to manipulate drama and tension. While some songs in the back half of the album start to blur into one — at least, if you’re listening from the beginning — that’s not always about the music itself as it is about the fact that the album is two hours long. Overall, it’s a remarkable achievement, if not quite as consistently transformative as Ys.
(sidenote: this track-by-track analysis of HOOM is really fucking good and highly recommended)
Best songs: ‘Good Intentions Paving Company’, ‘Baby Birch’, ‘In California’
Divers (2015)
Although Ys and HOOM can both, in a sense, be considered ‘concept albums’ — every song is tied together by a central theme, and she consciously adapts her musical style to fit these approaches — Divers feels a lot closer to that convention. To start with, the theme isn’t something like ‘songs about things which happened to me this year’ or ‘songs about a specific relationship’, but ‘songs about a war in space-time as related/contrasted to the real world’. If Ys is her fantasy album and HOOM is her California album, this is her sci-fi album.
It’s also got a wildly ambitious structure: most notably, it loops, so that the lyrics of the final song, ‘Time, As a Symptom’, lead seamlessly into the first, ‘Anecdotes’:
Joy! Again, around–a pause, a sound–a song:
a way a lone a last a loved a long
a cave, a grave, a day: arise, ascend
(Areion, Rharian, go free and graze. Amen.)
A shore, a tide, unmoored–a sight, abroad:
a dawn, unmarked, undone, undarked (a god)
no time. No flock. No chime, no clock. No end
White star, white ship–Nightjar, transmit: transcend!
White star, white ship–Nightjar, transmit: transcend!
White star, white ship–Nightjar, transmit: transcend!
White star, white ship–Nightjar, transmit: trans-
//
-sending the first scouts over
back from the place beyond the dawn:
horse, bear your broken soldier,
eyes frozen wide at what went on.
And Time, in our camp, is moving
as you’d anticipate it to,
but what is this sample proving?
Anecdotes cannot say what Time may do.
So we have three albums — Ys, HOOM, Divers — with three different structures: Ys is built around a core, with each song linking back the central point of ‘Only Skin’; HOOM is a linear narrative, with a clear beginning (‘Easy’), middle (‘In California’), and end (‘Does Not Suffice’); and Divers is a loop. Branches, a line, and a circle. Each of these structures serves a purpose, too: Ys is, at its core, an attempt to work through what happened to her in one specific year, the kind of investigative work for which this kind of joining the dots is designed; HOOM is about a love story, so putting it into a narrative fits both the content and romance convention; Divers is principally concerned with themes of time and echoing, of which looping is just a part. She’s very clever, basically, and it almost gets annoying when she throws a Joyce reference in there: ‘a way a lone a last a loved a long’ is the final line of Finnegan’s Wake before it (you guessed it) loops back to the start. There’s an extremely annoying article to be written mapping Joanna’s albums toJoyce’s books, annoying most of all because it almost works.
Anyway. Divers is not quite as consistently great as either of the two albums preceding it, although it manages to be, if anything, even more experimental and innovative. Alongside the switch to sci-fi, the sound gets even further away from the pastoral orchestration of Ys; note, for instance, that the trick with listing at the end of ‘Time, As a Symptom’ is quite a lot like the end of ‘Baby Birch’, only moreso. She begins to introduce things like a celesta and a marxophone, instruments I haven’t even heard of but which are fucking cool — and which contribute to the almost alien sounds of Divers. Meanwhile, songs like ‘Leaving the City’ are as close to pop as Joanna’s ever got, which is not at all accidental. It’s not at all rare to see people commenting about how effectively she uses rhythm, rhyme, and meter in her music (see, for instance, bits of the analysis in this article), this isn’t nearly joined up with the fact that a lot of these techniques appear to come from rap. She’s talked about how much she loves artists like Kendrick Lamar, and as this thread from twitter users @regresssion and @pangmeli makes clear, she’s almost certainly using stress patterns and techniques which have been borrowed from hip-hop in verses like this one from ‘Leaving the City’:
The bridle bends in idle hands,
and slows your canter to a trot;
we mean to stop in increments,
but can’t commit, we post and sit in impotence;
the harder you hit, the deeper the dent;
we seek our name, we seek our fame,
and our credentials, paned in glass,
trained to master incidentals;
bleach our collar, leach our dollar
from our cents:
the longer you live, the higher the rent.
You can also see an analysis of the meter and rhyme in the first verse here:
It’s extraordinarily clever and interesting, and I think Joanna’s music is done a disservice when people obscure its influences. What’s frequently most impressive about her songs is how she switches genres and styles and influences, so that HOOM genuinely is influenced by the ‘California singer-songwriter’ tradition, while Divers combines quasi-medieval instrumentation with a decidedly contemporary style. She uses these resources to amazing effect as, for example, she uses consonance to fully land on the stress at ‘trot’ to mirror the change in motion, or accelerates solidly throughout the second verse to reach its climax, or many of the other techniques @regresssion identifies and I’m not clever enough to understand.
Let’s also take a moment to appreciate the fact that Joanna Newsom released an entire sci-fi concept album and just kinda pretended it was a normal album. But the sci-fi is remarkably overt, like in the lines I quote from ‘Anecdotes’ above, or ‘The Waltz of the 101st Lightborne Elite’, which (although it’s for some reason frequently taken be the only song which is set ‘during’ a time war) continues these themes and includes the lines ‘on the eve of the last of the Great Wars / after three we had narrowly won’, ‘I saw his ship in its whistling ascension / as they launched from the Capitol seat’, or
Before You and I ceased to mean Now,
and began to mean only Right Here
(to mean Inches and Miles, but not Years);
before Space has a taste of its limits,
and a new sort of coordinate awoke,
making Time just another poor tenant:
bearing weight, taking fire, trading smokes
in the war between us and our ghosts
I mean, there’s a certain point at which this is just hard sci-fi, and it’s extraordinarily fun.
She does step outside of the time war occasionally, although the preoccupation with time (or, ‘Time’) always remains, like in ‘Sapokanikan’, another uncharacteristically poppy song which Joanna has described as ‘a ragtimey encomium to the forces of remembrance, forgetting, accretion, concealment, amendment, erasure, distortion, canonization, obsolescence and immortality’ and which explores the history of New York (Sapokanikan was the name of a Lenape village in lower Manhattan before the Dutch arrived). In the final song, she begins to tie all of this up, and comes to a conclusion which returns to, and in a sense reverses, the lines from ‘Emily’ I quoted above:
But stand brave, life-liver,
bleeding out your days
in the river of time.
Stand brave:
time moves both ways
in the nullifying, defeating, negating, repeating
joy of life;
the nullifying, defeating, negating, repeating
joy of life.
The moment of your greatest joy sustains:
not axe nor hammer,
tumor, tremor
can take it away, and it remains;
it remains.
And it pains me to say, I was wrong
love is not a symptom of time
time is just a symptom of love
Where in ‘Emily’ she suggests that joy is beautiful because it is fleeting, and in HOOM she uses the narrative structure to suggest that love’s passing is in a sense inevitable, in ‘Time, As a Symptom’ she suggests that joy and love step outside of time’s passing and, indeed, cause it. Love is fleeting because it is love, and if this is the case it’s necessary to cherish the moments of joy you get, and know that they will always be there for you to return to and remember, as time goes both ways in the act of remembrance. Things can be lost and change and still be there for you to find them again, and if we didn’t move on we couldn’t really know love or joy.
Certain songs on Divers begin to drag, especially on the back half, but the sheer number of ideas and experiments and oddities she pours into this music is astonishing. It’s clearly not her best, but that’s sometimes just because it seems to be too clever and innovative and collapses under its own weight — and when it works, it’s like an entirely new kind of music. I am genuinely beyond excited for whatever Joanna comes out with next, because whatever it is, it’ll be extraordinary.
Best songs: ‘Sapokanikan’, ‘Leaving the City’, ‘Time, As a Symptom’
I tend to recommend listening to her albums all the way through, because they truly are staggering accomplishments and the individual songs are made richer for their connections to what surrounds them; what album to start with depends on what you’re in the mood for. If you want some weird freak folk and aren’t too interested in experimentation, Milk-Eyed Mender is for you. If you want gorgeous, intricate pastoral music with a deep emotional core, go for Ys, and if a two hour saga about love and despair and life with a bit less beauty and a bit more drama than Ys appeals, you’ll want HOOM. And then Divers, if you’re in the mood for a wildly experimental, hip hop-inflected sci-fi concept album about time and loss and change.
But I recognise that the full albums can be a bit overwhelming, and you might want some individual songs. The most immediately accessible songs are probably ‘Peach, Plum, Pear’ (live performances here), ‘Leaving the City’ (more performances; the latter, a solo harp performance on BBC’s Later…, is staggering), ‘Sapokanikan’ (with a great PTA-directed video and a good live performance), or ‘Good Intentions Paving Company’ (live). The best songs are listed above, although I want to highlight some great live performances: ‘Go Long’, ‘Baby Birch’, ‘Only Skin’ entirely solo, and ‘Time, As a Symptom’/’Anecdotes’ also entirely solo with Joanna on both harp and piano. Finally, an amazing person called Dave Connor has created a playlist of ‘The Essential Joanna Newsom Live Recordings’, a set of full concerts from across her career which he’s edited and restored.
(Also, DM me if you want me to send you my folder with downloads of both live performances and full albums.)
I didn’t really listen to ‘Divers’ much when it first came out - like yourself, I’d heard some of the tracks from MEM but not paid much attention, perhaps dismissing her along with Vetiver, Espers, Devandra as a nice enough but unnecessary rerun of 70s acid folk.
I was lucky enough to catch her live round about the release of ‘Ys’ due to a friend, and that was my gateway into her work and for a long time I thought her high watermark.
HOEM being great, but obviously an intentional tribute to the Laurel Canton tradition.
And then last year I started listening to Divers obsessively - the end of year review from Apple Music suggests over 100 times. I was blown away by it - you could remove the lyrics and there are musical
At the same time I was reading Katherine Rundell’s Donne biography, which refamiliarised me with work I’d not studied since A-level. And while the album specifically references Shelley and Joyce, the big metaphysical themes of infinity, time and love seemed to echo well with Donne. The other obvious one is parenthood - that change in perspective to seeing yourself as a link in a cycle of life. A mathematically inclined listener spotted the half and half and half lines as a reference to Zeno’s Paradox (that motion is impossible)
Back to Ys - I always thought ‘Monkey and Bear’ was somewhat about the Russian revolution as much as an origin story for Ursa Major (which ties into the astronomy themes of Emily) but that is why we keep coming back - pretty much everything has multiple layers of meaning.