Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me (RIP blogs)

(somehow)

http://www.searchviews.com/wp-content/themes/clean-copy-full-3-column-1/images/the_more_you_know2.jpg

Is that thing under the fence supposed to be a bear? It looks like some sort of badger.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyBn8kGCsg8

my main problem with Ys, by the way, is that a lot of the arrangement seemed really ornamental and distant (as opposed to integral and necessary), which I think is why so many people prefer hearing small-group live recordings -- it'd probably have been a better record if she'd recorded it that way.

also "words that rhyme" is not the same as "clever wordplay"

― plaxico (I know, right?), Tuesday, January 26, 2010 9:48 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark

and the little white dove
made with love, made with love:
made with glue, and a glove, and some pliers

xpost

nabisco: Thanks for the Pallett recommendation! (I really love your P4k review of it too.) I just went to Amazon Mp3 and bought it, and I'm looking forward to listening to it later.

Saw her once a couple of years ago at the Royal Albert Hall, Roy Harper was the support act and he did all 4 (long) songs from Stormcock. JN later on referred to it as one of her favourite albums, and suddenly Ys made a lot more sense.

i think she is the least jordan-friendly artist maybe ever

yeah, she said you're a douche

Have One On Me Unless You're That A-hole Jordan

i told her to stfu that your a nice guy btw

thx bro

Douche is the least rhymable word in the english language I think, she would not have used that word.

jordan's a douche, like lyndon larouche

works 4 me tbh

that mr. que is such a douche/he should learn how to fermez his bouche

jordan i heard tony allen is guesting on the new one

Okay, you all know this is a regular horse of mine, but: that dove bit is at best a play on two already similar senses of the phrase "made with," no?

The reason this is a regular horse of mine is that I would really hate it if we reached some point where using any kind of basic poetic or rhetorical technique in your lyrics -- even a really simple and straightforward one like that -- suddenly became an occasion for "oo, aren't you clever" and "how pretentious / 'twee' is that," etc., because I'm pretty sure we don't collectively want lyricists to feel like they should speak with unadorned, monosyllabic directness to avoid seeming too uppity about it.

I realize Newsom is not a great person to ride this particular horse for, because yes, she really pushes and foregrounds the use of poetic language and very planned/crafted phrasing. But, you know, still. It's not like she's exactly symptomatic of a giant glut of that sort of thing, right?

Spelunking rhymes with clunking.

quoted re: the suggestion (i think - couldn't actually tell which side plaxico was coming down on) that she was just long words and rhymes, you know - was just pulling some example of a technique. i maybe don't belong here because if i've got a horse it's selective quoting to prove or disprove quality of a lyricist; i think just about anyone's going to write something which fits one of the profiles of basic or pretentious lyricism (be it 'be my, be my baby, be my little baby' or 'i don't believe in an interventionist god' or whatever). maybe this precludes lyrical discussion altogether.

I would really hate it if we reached some point where using any kind of basic poetic or rhetorical technique in your lyrics -- even a really simple and straightforward one like that -- suddenly became an occasion for "oo, aren't you clever" and "how pretentious / 'twee' is that," etc.

nabisco I don't know how to break this to you

this is why we cant have nice things

that dove bit is at best a play on two already similar senses of the phrase "made with," no?

from erik davis profile in arthur:
The easy rhyme of dove and love reflects the hackneyed ease of the cliché, which she then promptly takes apart. The word glove is a splice of glue and love, held together, as it were, with pliers and glue. This wordplay is not just surface but sense: it reflects the provisional and patched-together quality that exists beneath our idealizations of love, as well as what Newsom calls the “the Frankenstein phenomenon” that emerges when that love actually creates a living being.

last part of that quoted through laziness rather than to impress the romantic mysticism of her words btw

oh, my fault, schlump, I thought you meant it the other way!

yeah J0hn, I know the horse I'm riding is a little bit dead, but still -- bummer that it's so much easier to go "LOL what are you trying," as if the attempt is a bad thing in itself, than to take a stand on how it's working

xpost - haha I took issue with various things about that Davis piece at the time

thanks god my detailed analysis of "emily" has been lost to the sands of the sandbox

bummer that it's so much easier to go "LOL what are you trying," as if the attempt is a bad thing in itself, than to take a stand on how it's working

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvFvPKPqCRg

dont really like that erik davis bit :(

I mean I agree with you, but I'm a doof who reads poetry. the battle, if there was one, is kind of lost. when the terminology of poetic craft does manage to leak into general use at all, gotta just celebrate that people are trying to engage at some level; no gain in trying to explain "it's not wordplay just because you pronounced a word wrong to make it fit your meter" (my own all-time Quixote topic).

max did you read the rest of the piece about how there's never been music like this, I mean you'd think it was loveless or some other unprecedented masterpiece of incrediblosity

i guess my attitude to lyrics isn't really nuanced or engaged really, its just a case of phrases jumping out and resonating or seeming awesome or something that grabs my attention, so when the lyrics don't have any effect on me already, any explanation abt why its clever (unless it really reframes the lyric for me, or points out something that I hadn't twigged) is unlikely to have much effect on me

dont really like that erik davis bit :(
It reads better in the original French.

also, in Newsom's defense, I'm pretty sure my favorite bit of Ys involves a variation on the whole "horse walks into a bar, bartender says 'why the long face?'" joke

xpost - haha, J0hn, I'm not worried about terminology, more about some dystopian near future where well-educated people with good vocabularies are like "oh no a singer loved by middlebrow audiences used a big word or pun, this is critical and potentially disastrous"

I don't get the criticism of the orchestration on Ys seeming ornamental or "surface" at all. I could see saying that for something consistently ~*floaty*~ like... Vespertine. But in Ys, there's a strong sense of congruency in what she's singing and the sounds of the orchestra (e.g., in Only Skin when she sings "we felt the spray of the waves..." the orchestra totally sounds like waves crashing against each other). They're always moving, changing according to some internal plot and I think this adds a lot to the songs harmonically.

It doesn't strike me as mere John Williams-style "oooh, random manipulative swell of strings here" at all and I think the songs wouldn't be half as beautiful and engaging without them.

i don't see anyone making fun of her lyrics for using big words or puns or slant rhymes, they're making fun of her because the lyrics sound kind of silly, or you know

I don't like it because the words sound bad in my ears

i mean, do you really need more than that? some people just don't like her lyrics. does that diminish your enjoyment of her?

no but it diminishes my enjoyment of reading peoples posts

in Only Skin when she sings "we felt the spray of the waves..." the orchestra totally sounds like waves crashing against each other

the kind of thing you're describing is actually what I mean about ornamentation and distance -- sometimes it's like she's playing and the arrangements are a marionette show off to the side of her, acting things out. which was not always a bad thing for me! but occasionally I didn't like that relationship between them, I guess, even if imagining the missing marionette show was fun.

after seeing the 6-piece band the record comes across a bit overblown to me, for listening I would definitely go for the live recordings of that tour before the studio LP. I think V.D.P. went a little overboard, and the arrangements seemed intrusive to me after the live experience.

Feel a bit out of depth here talking about her lyrics but I certainly like them and think her phrases are often very well paced in the compositions.

argh paced = placed

nabisco, I get what you're saying, though maybe your analogy would work better if that relationship were consistently obvious throughout the album (which it really isn't). Another problem is it reduces the orchestral part entirely to your assumed function that it should (or even intends) to fulfill in the music.

But I don't know, I'm a sucker for moments of musical "impressionism" of that sort.

Another problem is it reduces the orchestral part entirely to your assumed function that it should (or even intends) to fulfill in the music.

this is where jn's biggest boosters start sounding like cult members fyi. "this part doesn't sound like it really works" "oh you're just bringing your own set of assumptions to the table, it works fine as long as you assume that what you're hearing is completely awesome"

im pretty sure thats how you are supposed to argue stuff

"brokencyde is awful" "yes but they mean to sound like that"

now ur getting it!

Seriously John? I'm not even questioning his reaction to the music at all, I'm talking about why I think the analogy doesn't entirely work, not why the music is "awesome" or why he should love the album. Commenting in this thread IS also fine if you happen to like the album and don't feel the need to be *~witty~* about your distaste for it.

just so we're clear i wasn't being sarcastic

Pretty sure J0hn wasn't either.

'sawdust and diamonds' is the only song to make me laugh *out loud* (at the 'long face' bit nabisco mentions) aswell as well up with tears on the first listen. just never experienced anything like that range of extereme emotions in the first listen of a song ever before. them's some damn good lyrics that can do that imho.

this should be a fun thread

― what u think i steen for to push a crawfish? (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Tuesday, January 12, 2010 11:11 PM (2 weeks ago)

I'm fully expecting that there will be about three of us will enjoy this record.

― kshighway (ksh), Tuesday, January 12, 2010 11:14 PM (2 weeks ago)