New Joanna Newsom Album "Ys" Due Nov 14

'sall I'm sayin.

That being said, more than anything I think this album reinforces how tempting it is to drink the Kool-Aid when its so fucking tasty on first sip and its so fucking hot outside.

i just wish you could *dance* to some of it.

it sounds awesome on vinyl, fo' sure.

I realized that I dissed Sufjan on a different thread for the same things against which I've been defending Joanna. Call me a hypocrite, but I stand by my opinions :P

"Emily" = childhood and family life
"Monkey & Bear" = perhaps about her time spent playing keyboards in The Pleased?
"Sawdust & Diamonds"/"Only Skin"/"Cosmia" = charting of a love affair, in a triptych of consummation/domesticity/separation

The final three songs are strongly tied together, but linking in the first two is a bit of a stretch. I'll continue to disagree with comments like It's lovely, idillyic and escapist. People get hung up on the imagery she uses (nature, animals, fantasy creatures), but the over-arching theme of the recent material is death - or, more specifically, mortality - and what it means in the face of love. The album is shot through with death, coupling, rebirth, sorrow, fear, fever, rapture. Tim Ellison's comment that the lyrics are "human" is most OTM.

I've written some close readings of Newsom's lyrics, but this isn't really the forum for that - but I can provide an interpretation of "Emily". It's a meditation on her relationship with her sister, her family, and her growing fame, but at its core is the theme of mortality.

The first section details bucolic scenes and memories of shared moments with her sister. Emily has an interest in astronomy, and she teaches Joanna the names of stars. Joanna writes them in her journal, sets them to song. The sisters both have their particular ways of ordering the universe - one through science, the other through the arts - and this concept of "ordering the universe" becomes key as the song progresses.

At the point of "You came and lay a cold compress against the mess I'm in" the song turns to a darker tone; "The mail is late and the great estates are not lit from within." In times of trouble and emotional turmoil ("there are worries where I've been") Joanna turns to her sister, the "midwife" to "help me find my way back in." "Come on home," she intones repeatedly, a plea for both herself and for Emily to return to the sacred place they share.

If you fondly remember a moment when a parent pointed out constellations to you, that's what's going on in "Pa pointed out to me / for the hundreth time tonight / the way the ladle leads / to a dirt red bullet of light" (her father is tracing the path to the red star Arcturus from the handle of the Big Dipper). "Joy," Newsom remarks; but she isn't content to leave us with a nostalgic afterglow. She quickly follows on with, "landlocked in bodies that don't keep / dumbstruck with the sweetness of being, till we don't be." She can't see the beauty in the world without being reminded that we will cease to exist. Even the earlier image of skipping stones is undercut by the ominous "they were lost and slipped under forever."

That is the tension running through the song, through almost all of Ys. Constellations don't exist - they're figments, a byproduct of the human need to impose form and order on the chaos of nature. We need constructions to assuage anxiety, to temper our fear of the void - Family, Art, Science - and this puts Joanna's vision of nature closer to Herzog's Grizzly Man than to Gentle Ben.

She follows this with the song's chorus, which is not just a bunch of nice-sounding words thrown together, but a knotty metaphor:

the meteorite is a source of the light
and the meteor's just what we see
and the meteoroid is a stone that's devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee

and the meteorite's just what causes the light
and the meteor's how it's perceived
and the meteoroid's a bone thrown from the void that lies quiet in offering to thee

A small science lesson is in order: A meteoroid is an object in space. A meteor is a trail of glowing vapor caused by a meteoroid entering Earth's atmosphere. A meteorite is a meteoroid that's landed on Earth. It's complex, but essentially Joanna's saying, "Look, I'm a meteorite, I'm just an unglamorous rock. I'm causing a great blaze, a meteor, and everyone's paying attention to that. But no one is seeing where I came from, my family, my sister, my father, they are the unseen forces that brought me here to you." Joanna is a "star", but she honors the grounding of her family. And that is a fucking rich, complex metaphor, so let's leave out the freshman poetry comments, eh?

You can listen to "Emily" (and the rest of Ys for that matter) and hear a happy tale of skipping stones and tra-la-la. And sure, you can enjoy the album without picking apart every metaphor and image - I'm not going to deny anyone the sensuous surface pleasures of the album. But don't say it's all frilly and frothy unless you're willing to come to terms with the depth, with the darker shades, with the layers of meaning that are available; that is, if you really want to pay attention instead of hearing what your fantasy of Joanna-as-ren-fest-tree-fairie would produce. People who trash her lyrics are only exposing the limits of their imagination, not hers.

I must not only be a souless , non creative wanker, but also ignorant.

maybe I should go back to school and study Joanna's genius poetry

I actually agree with your comment above about Ys being too serious. The material could use a little dose of wit. There are plenty of archly humorous lines on The Milk-Eyed Mender ("I killed my dinner with karate", "like a slow low-flying turkey / like a texan drying jerky"), while Ys is unfailingly earnest. Ah well, maybe next time.

Joanna Newsom: thorny, precise
Fiery Furnaces: thorny, unprecise
Sufjan Stevens: unthorny, precise

?

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/bigger20band20photo.jpg
L-R: Danny Cantrell, Ryan Francesconi, Kevin Barker, some harpist, Katie Hardin, Neal Morgan

Set List

solo
"Bridge and Balloons"
"The Book of Right On"
"Ca' the Yowes" (trad scottish folksong - a real treat)

w/ band
all of Ys, in order

solo encore
"Sadie"
"Peach Plum Pear"

Random observations: Her old songs aren't performed with the same oomph - the pre-band songs seemed like stretching/warmup to tackle Ys, and the post-band encore seemed like audience appeasement. The defiance has been sapped from "this is not my tune / but it's mine to use," and the hideous crackle of "bless those who've sickened below" has been tempered by her newfound tunefulness. They're still great songs and I'll gladly listen to them any time she deigns to play them - but they seem like trifles beside Ys's towers of song.

I don't prefer Ys as an album to The Milk Eyed Mender, but under the enforced focus of a live performance, the extended pieces overpower their little siblings. I agree with you, Mark, and a couple others who've posted here; the album's a bit of a chore to listen to. But live, catch her if you can. The five piece band didn't drown her out, in fact, they rarely played all at once. Mostly it was Cantrell's accordion and Francesconi's bouzouki and the rest was accents for certain passages. Cantrell also played the saw during "Cosmia", and I swear that was a high point of the night. It sounded like an organic theremin, just beautiful.

Here are the rest of her tour dates.

Wed 11/15 NEW HAVEN, CT - Toad's Place (I think this one was taped and might start making the rounds)
Thu 11/16 PHILADELPHIA, PA - Sanctuary
Fri 11/17 WASHINGTON, DC - The Black Cat
Sat 11/18 GREENSBORO, NC - Gail Brower Huggins Theater
Sun 11/19 ATLANTA, GA - Variety Playhouse
Mon 11/20 NASHVILLE, TN - Mercy Lounge
Tue 11/21 KNOXVILLE, TN - Blue Cats
Wed 11/22 ASHEVILLE, NC - The Diana Wortham Theater
Fri 11/24 LOUISVILLE, KY - Headliners
Sat 11/25 BIRMINGHAM, AL - Bottle Tree
Wed 11/29 MALIBU, CA - Malibu Performing Arts
Thu 11/30 LOS ANGELES, CA - El Rey Theater
Fri 12/1 SANTA CRUZ, CA - Rio Theatre
Sat 12/2 EUGENE, OR - Indigo District
Sun 12/3 PORTLAND, OR - Aladdin Theater
Mon 12/4 SEATTLE, WA - The Showbox
Tue 12/5 VANCOUVER, BC - St. Andrews Wisley Church
Fri 12/8 MINNEAPOLIS, MN - 400 Bar
Sat 12/9 MADISON, WI - Club 770
Mon 12/11 NORMAN, OK - Meacham Theater
Tue 12/12 HOUSTIN, TX - Orange Show
Wed 12/13 AUSTIN, TX - The Parish
Thu 12/14 MARFA, TX - The Ballroom
Fri 12/15 ALBUQUERQUE, NM - Launch Pad
Tue 12/19 SAN FRANCISCO, CA - Great American Music Hall
Wed 12/20 SAN FRANCISCO, CA - Great American Music Hall

her singing is relentless
her lyrics too much! It's not even the LENGTH of the song per se, it's then she wont stop singing and give it a break...EVER

I just listened to it again, to further try and understand why everyone gets so easily starry eyeed about it. and on monkey and bear, you are hard pressed to find more than 5 seconds of non vocal moments.

Good stuff

easily the most original, and best, record of the year, and of many other years, too. luckily i have been absent from ilm for some time so i can revel in this without paying no mind to the harpplayahataz. music is back indeed.

hahahaha

As for mood, there's at least two light (if not comedic) moments (in Emily and, I think Only Skin) where she's suddenly playing with animatronic puppets in some Disney swamp.

Maybe the third record will be the actual genius one she's clearly (potentially) capable of.

solo encore
"Sadie"
"Peach Plum Pear"

I think that was pretty much the set list at the early show at Webster Hall (NYC) that I saw, except that she switched "Sadie" to the first solo section, and "Book of Right On" to the solo encore, and played "Clam Crab Cockle Cowrie" instead of "Peach Plum Pear" for the last encore. I think I like the string arrangements on the album better than the accompaniment that was played by the touring band, but it was still a very good show.

-- Naive Teen Idol

yeah, me too. I find it just impossible to properly articulate why & where this record (and her last partly, though that was much easier to just treat as 'fun') fails for me.

It is definitely more than "pretty good" by any measure, yet at the same time I'm nowhere within 50 miles of "love" for it. And yeah, perhaps I am just not that impressed by the lyrics, at least not like Beefheart impressed or anything. They make for pretty good poetry yes, but... so what? I'm not sure they make for better music than plain old regular unfussy lyrics... they certainly take an intolerable time longer to effectively pierce my heart.

brr you are so OTM it hurts.

ps. can someone teach me how to quote another post and make it italicized ?

I'm clearly an idiot both in my understanding and study of joanna's prose/poetry AND posting on bulletin boards

:\

apple command something?

http://www.pageresource.com/html/textags.htm

I said Thank you

O_o

I do have considerably more to say about all of this, but I'm going to save it for the end-of-year CoM round-up.

Man, the one thing that just hits you in the face about her is that she is just absolutely FLAWLESS (well, as far as not hitting ONE wrong note and remembering all those changes and lyrics....).

But why does she have to play the entire album in order? It's tiring to stand and listen to, I'm sure it's tiring to actually play. Why not mix in some of the "short" songs?