Where the hell am I supposed to start when I’m writing about Joanna Newsom? I suppose I can start from the beginning, from the first time I heard her music.
I was living in a really awful apartment that I would love to tell you all about sometime, but it was one of those sleepy southern summer afternoons where no one’s really doing anything. I was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, when I heard this faint music coming from my roommate’s bedroom. It was soft, soothing… was it a guitar? Banjo? The woman’s voice was primal – one of those “shouting down from the mountain” voices that are relegated to the “O Brother” soundtrack and the “white ethnic Appalachian folk” genre. But I listened to it and felt like a child again – all the magic in the world, in music, was there in that song. And then it was gone, almost as if in a dream; and I wasn’t really sure afterwards if it had been a dream or not. I didn’t bother asking Sam what the hell that song was for a few months, since I assumed it had all been something I half-dreamed anyway.
But long story short, one night I held him hostage in front of his computer and demanded that he tell me out who that woman singing was. I didn’t give him much to go on – just that it was a girl by herself, it was a quiet song, and that she was accompanied by a stringed instrument that wasn’t a guitar. An hour or two later (what can I say? Sam has a rather large collection of solo women singing quiet songs) we stumbled upon this:
Joanna Newsom – Bridges and Balloons
Okay. Now listen to it with your eyes closed. Now listen to it again.
I ran out and bought her album “The Milk-Eyed Mender” at Plan 9 Records, and played it incessantly for months afterwards. It was the perfect accompaniment for my life in Richmond then – whether a refuge from the dark of winter mornings, the biting winds sweeping through the streets, my walks around the Fan when spring came and trees and flowers bloomed, and again through those achingly hot days down at the river and the endless summer nights where it seemed my friends and I were the only people in the world.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I opened the plastic wrap on the CD, expecting to see this crazy old lady picking at a harp in her cabin in the middle of nowhere, and instead I find she’s a cute tiny college girl from San Francisco:
Needless to say, I spread the Gospel of Joanna everywhere I could, making everyone I knew sit and listen to her music. Most people responded as strongly as I did, though my mother was an exception; she said that Newsom’s voice was too dissonant, that it was like it was like try to hear the melody when listening to Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane play together. And I said, “Mom, it’s okay that you don’t like Joanna Newsom because you explained with a total badass jazz reference.” My mom’s pretty cool like that.
Anyway, it was around a year after I bought “Mender” that Newsom released her next album “Ys”. I was expecting the quiet folk of her first album, and so imagine my surprise when I took my first listen and heard seventeen-minute, rambling epics backed by a full bloody ORCHESTRA. It’s an intimidating listen, and it’s honestly kind of scary for me to still listen to, but as much as I love “Mender” I’m glad that Newsom is still moving and progressing as a songwriter. “Ys” is, at times, a little too much for me to wrap my head around, and I have mixed feelings about Van Dyke Parks‘s string arrangements, but this is an astonishing record, though in a very different way from “Milk-Eyed Mender”. Joanna Newsom is one of those musicians where I have absolutely NO idea what she’ll do next, (and I’ve heard that she’s written a few songs with Bjork, droooooool) but I’m looking forward to her next project, as challenging as I know it will be for me as a listener.
