Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me (RIP blogs)

right, that's what i thought, i'm just trying to keep it that way :)

Newsom dissing Lady Gaga strikes me a lot like the theoryheads in my department dissing the theater/dance people for not being theoretical/intellectual enough. Like, it's more cliquey than anything about indie v. pop or anything like that. Or maybe it's just success jealousy. It's hard for me to take Newsom's claim seriously that she's a real artist and Lady Gaga isn't, tho. They're both basically pop artists.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VS58_ZeLX1g&feature=related

I find it hard to believe that there isn't any jealousy at work here.

elvin harpist wants more fans than she inexplicably already has. story at 11

my 60-something boss weighed in on gaga this morning: "six hits from one double album...and Alejandro just released. The only thing that can stop her is a tragic death."

hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

i told him a tragic death would only make her stronger

i love that he knew the specs

RIP BLOGS ALERT!!!

Joanna Newsom Is Done Reading Blogs

http://stereogum.com/368071/joanna-newsom-is-done-reading-blogs/

This is the infinite thread, it can never be stopped. You will be reading this when you're 80.

only dr. seuss and my little pony picture books for joanna from now on.

It's not too far off from the people who call her own stuff "just some crazy lady singing pseudo-poetically about unicorns & making weird facial expressions while playing polyrhythms on a pedal harp."

you thought you could put this one past me didn't you? nice try

It's not too far off from the people who call her own stuff "just some crazy lady singing pseudo-poetically about unicorns & making weird facial expressions while playing polyrhythms on a pedal harp. removing cats from her hair and throwing them into the audience"

godawful lawlessness I tell you

Aerosmith, believe me, I was in the front row at her last Boston show, and she had a Macbook on stage and read aloud a negative statement not unlike the one I posted above, taken directly from an indie blog with a five person readership's comments box that was linked to from a comment in a Tapes n' Tapes video on YouTube. Needless to say, I was in the front row that night, and I took a particularly plump cat straight to the nose, but to her credit she threw it with such vigor that the emergency room doctor and I were nothing less than impressed, and though I am now living on the street--due to mounting medical bills from other cat-related injuries sustained at Newsom shows across the United States of America--and posting to ILM from a stolen iPhone, I still hold no ill will towards her in my heart.

she had a Macbook on stage and read aloud a negative statement not unlike the one I posted above,

wait is this part true

I missed her Boston show, and have never seen her live, so one can only assume it is true.

“When I was playing new songs, people would refer to then by these titles that I hadn’t referred to them by, and they would do it real authoritatively, like super know-it-all,” she says. “It really annoyed me.”

1) These 'people' you speak of quite literally support your cunty immature ass with their excitement for your music.

2) You didn't even change the titles of the songs, crazy person.

srsly she talks about Gaga being self-serious but her attitude & general weirdness lately only tells me she really is just an annoying, affected hipster girl who'll annoy others by solely talking about herself at a party. or something.

1) These 'people' you speak of quite literally support [you] with their excitement for your music.

lol, otm

You fools, those mortals capable of transcending reality through songcraft need not your paltry sums!!

I wonder if Newsom thinks of herself as Brechtian

The conceptual confines of the adjective Brechtian fail to adequate represent the totality of the essence of Newsom!

My problem isn't actually with Lady Gaga. But there's not much in her music to distinguish it from other glossy, formulaic pop. [. . .]And, meanwhile, she seems to take herself so oddly seriously, the way she talks about her music in the third person, like she's Brecht or something.

Far out!!

I talk about my cereal like I'm Brecht and I don't give a shit who knows it!

Newsom bashing Lady Gaga and Madonna, even if it's negative press, will guarantee that many more people read about her and possibly even buy her album.

I think you mean to say "...many more people read about her, call up a track on YouTube, go 'what's THIS shit' and then ignore her."

only fifty people bothered to look up who joanna newsom was but each and every one of them went on to start a blog

I think you mean to say "...many more people read about her, call up a track on YouTube, go 'what's THIS shit' and then ignore her."

― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, 11 May 2010 14:43 (3 minutes ago) Permalink

"just glow sticks" is a bit more compressed than 'it is like pop music / music you would hear at a rave, therefore bad' -- nine out of ten times you see glow sticks these days it's in some kind of ironic ('ironic') context

i mean i kind of agree with that line on gaga, that her image is plenty interesting and her music isn't

but anyway when i read that in the paper my first thought was 'i bet someone already posted this on ilm'

Newsomian

I think you mean to say "...many more people read about her, call up a track on YouTube, go 'what's THIS shit' and then ignore her."

― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, 11 May 2010 14:43 (3 minutes ago) Permalink

― i fake it so real, i am beyonce (surm), Tuesday, May 11, 2010 9:47 AM (1 hour ago)

You guys shouldn't be mean to her. She's just shy.

Morday slam dunking it!

Fuck. Mordy. You know what I mean. Apologies dude.

the roots track that samples book of right on is kind of rad imo

this album has not grown on me

listened to the whole thing in the car over the last two days coming down out of stunning Cascade mountain beauty, it should have been an ideal soundtrack. and the good parts were great, but a lot of this record just meanders both lyrically and melodically.

Friend of mine sent me Youtube links to two HOOM tracks. Baby Birch was lovely but ruined a bit by its last minute. Good Intentions Paving Company was flat-out awesome. I'll link my liveblogs if you like...

Baby Birch: Right, she does a mantra for three and a half minutes, which is nice, then snaps into something a bit more vigorous. Where's this going? It retreats. Then returns with a really spare, Talk Talk esque electric guitar! Lovely. Then some percussion. Wow, this shit has taken OFF. The song's disparate elements are meshing with an energy that far exceeds their modest sum. I'm not sure it has to go Oriental at the end, though. I'd have preferred it if the jammy guitar/multi-part harmony had gone on longer.

Good Intentions Paving Company: Piano balladry! But with some really interesting vocal harmonies again. This is probably the biggest change these songs are displaying from Ys - increased harmony, also perhaps a reduction in surreal or abstract narrative. Not that this narrative is straightforward - like Baby Birch, there are imperceptible advances and retreats in the music's intensity that defy simple categorisation. Use of percussion is sly - I think it perhaps gives an illusion of more order than there is, while itself moving in and out of focus. I like the increased instrumentation! Especially when you have the craft to involve such delicately gorgeous organ sounds. This middle bit is wonderful! Like, so good I had to stop typing. The jauntier bit just started again. I hope she doesn't ruin THIS one with another silly ending. Oh good, she doesn't.

plz do liveblog.

listened to this album all the way (+ ys) through at work the other day, i fucking adore it so much.

"But with some really interesting vocal harmonies again. This is probably the biggest change these songs are displaying from Ys - increased harmony"

er

am not liveblogging the whole album btw

there seem to be more moments where JN overdubs vocal harmonies onto her lead lines! correct me if I am wrong

no ok that is far more accurate

Newsom performed to a sold out Orpheum audience that rivaled Justin Bieber fans in their ardor. The singer had to spend an inordinate amount of time between songs affectionately swatting away random hollered compliments. A male fan raced to the stage and tossed her a bouquet, and a woman was intercepted by a security guard near the front row as she made a beeline for the musician. “We love you, Joanna!” was the richest insight the crowd had to offer when she queried her fans on their collective mood.

Such devotion is understandable in a 2010 pop, hip hop and rock world in which mimicry and perfectly-curated musical influence is the norm. In contrast, Newsom has crafted a body of work that sounds like none other, with willfully oblique structures and meandering, lyrical snapshots that would be ripe for parody were they not so exquisitely rendered. “Autumn” begins with the scene-setting couplet: “Driven through by her own sword/summer died last night, alone.”

The singer writes songs that seem like they could have been composed in any decade of the last 80 years (and some, earlier centuries), music that exists not because of, but despite, rock ‘n roll and pop music. Pieces such as “Easy,” “Autumn,” and “Peach, Plum, Pear,” draw on parlor tunes, baroque-tinged old-time numbers, British and American folk music, mid-century showtunes, barrelhouse blues, Vaudeville stompers and Brechtian story-songs. Newsom's lyrics seem more inspired by William Wordsworth and Robert Browning than Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan, though an affection for iconoclastic forebearers Billie Holiday, Joni Mitchell and Karen Dalton is evident.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2010/08/live-review-joanna-newsom-at-orpheum-theatre-.html

still never made it through the entirety of the second two discs more than once . . . and that "once" occurred on the day the record was released

did listen to a lot of the songs on disc one a fair amount though

weird. I saw her in a tiny bar in Berkeley six years ago or something (starry plough, opening for Smog), I never would have expected that kind of fervor later on.

Anyway the first six songs on this are still great but I can't sit through the entire thing.

She's singing about daddy longlegs and I can't stop laughing. I hate all of you.

― ksh, Tuesday, February 23, 2010 10:05 PM (5 months ago)

Such hatred is understandable in a 2010 pop, hip hop and rock world in which mimicry and perfectly-curated musical influence is the norm.

Whatever that "Garden Party" song is that opened a concert that All Songs Considered carried, I love it. Not about decoration, really clear in its occasion and purpose and sad and bright as hell.