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Peerless, Fearless

Joanna Newsom is like some kind of placebo or therapy. I know of no other musician recently who can have such an effect on people. "Esame," a song she's been performing on tour, is an exciting hint that there's more to come. "Ys," her very successful 2006 album, was thrilling and magical, but it's good to know she's continuing to write such music, taking her creativity to entirely new places. "Esame" is heartrending and just perfect. The melody is addictive; it becomes etched permanently in your brain like a musical pillow lullaby from childhood. But it's brand new. It's original. It's unique. Its story line is oddly demotic and everyday, yet it's still a love song, seemingly applicable to a whole world of addressees. Thankfully, there's a video of a performance on YouTube, though the venue she's performing in here is not nearly as scintillating as the environment of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where I was lucky enough to see her this February. Also, you can't really see her face. But you'll get the idea. When she played this song at BAM I cried--yes, cried. Not very much.

As an artist, it's almost frustrating how brilliant a poet Joanna is. The place, the feeling, the weather, and the time presented in "Esame" are so familiar, but so distant. Who is Esame? What town is "beautiful...with the rain coming down"? How old is the narrator? Is she Joanna herself? Even if we knew all the answers to "Esame," it wouldn't matter. I've listened to "Emily," from "Ys," about 400 times since I first heard it in October of 2006, and it still fascinates me, the world of stars and sisterly relations. With answers, we'd probably feel even more alienated from this fascinating soul. But we'll never get it, really. We don't have the privilege of her brain. But it does inspire me to take up the reins of my own with more persistence, animation, and fluidity. And that's why she's therapeutic. I can't function artistically without a frequent dose of Joanna.

Top 20 Albums of 2006

Alighting: A Musical Tribute

This is the song to which I fell out of a highchair guaranteed for  a childhood of jilts, stunt-jitters and jeers.

This is the song to which I death-marched in an eerie hologram of winter, to the end of the line by which fast pacers get to tomorrow.

This is the song to which I raise my oblongest finger to your bastard greencard accident, having no sagacity left to sob at it.

This is the song with which I observe a bored window, boring mirror, and the angry green wall that envies my loves and my literacy.

This is the song with which my hands skid along the skin of my latest friend in nearby dreams, making a might and definition of them.

This is the song we adopted with tired sentiment dispensed from gaping eyes, asking older references to nudge us from our sterns.

(Answers: Starship - We Built This City; The Knife - Marble House; Junior Boys - In The Morning; Liars - A Visit From Drum; Peter Bjorn & John - Young Folks; Joanna Newsom - Only Skin)

On Artists

Not to keep on about this chickadee, but I must say, Chris Dahlen had it right when he said last week,

"nobody's going to reject a record this bold just because Newsom uses the word "thee" on occasion, or because she appears in promotional photos wearing a wolf pelt ass-up on her head.  What we really can't handle is escapism. We instinctively balk at artists who hunker down in their own worlds-- especially when they force us to guess what they're thinking."

When I was more or less 'go-getting' at my place of work last dim Sunday eve, I stood for a moment before the window, watched the night fold over and over like coats of paint, and observed the tree in the backyard as my customer jogged beside me on a treadmill, my brain running away with words I hoped I'd remember to write down later.  I was having one of my catatonic moments of "hunkering down," and felt nearly ashamed for it. 

There's a time and place.  I don't get paid to "hunker down," but by God, I love hunkering down. While I do it, I discover new wines,* the endurance of my computer's battery, and the elasticity of my mind.

Try it!

*A compadre in shoe sales and endurance athletics (and hence life, and even hunkering down) recently said, [strong Western Mass. accent], "Wine opens up areas in your mind that you didn't even know were there."  And being a sentimental soul, I've saved all the corks and recorded my visits to the theres.

Live: Joanna Newsom, Webster Hall, 11.13.06

When a set of music has been literally orchestrated, as a symphony or, in the case of Joanna Newsom's new album, a veritable concerto––five tracks, supported by strings, ranging in length from 7 to 16 minutes––the pleasure in hearing it performed live is not really related to sound so much as meaning.  Even for those of us most interested in sounds––the sound of music, the sound of word––sight will trump.  As we find ourselves yards back from the stage fixated intently on the performer, we'll be transformed as fans.  And it's not the eighteen dollar double shot of whiskey; it's that face hammering home hundreds of words.

Joanna Newsom is petite and pale with wavy, dirty blond hair that cascades down her back.  She's Californian, but is more convincing as a Hardy heroine, with a girlish figure, a makeup-free, nearly unkempt face, and an expression of modest bewilderment also known as intense concentration.  Watching her on Monday, it was easy to see she’s a classical musician at heart: a hardworking and subdued individual with a great talent, both with words and music, that allows her to eloquently unharness emotion and passion.  Her new album is, as many have said, a masterpiece, intimidating and embracing, and something that must be embraced even (especially) by the most diehard haters of women, of female musicians other than Patti Smith, or of The Milk-Eyed Mender, her two-year-old debut. 

At Webster Hall, Newsom played each track of Ys in order and employed guitars, banjos, and a backup vocalist as her replacement Van Dyke Parks. This of course adds to the intimacy: Ys becomes less a concerto and more just another unplugged folk performance.  But it’s not fucking folk.  And it’s not ‘just another’ anything. It’s unclassifiable and stunning.

What you notice in your drunken transfixion is a) that the orchestra’s soul is still there, just missing a half dozen strings and their guts: the guitar family is minimalist and reserved, following along behind Newsom’s melodies like timid animals; and b) that the context of these songs begs understanding.  The live performance is only further enlightenment of their pretty much unknowable meaning.  My guess is: family life gone astray, romances destroyed by loss, and a life lived in ornate and peaceful landscapes, removed from cities and the boring, overcooked energy with which music about cities can be composed. 

Hence Thomas Hardy.  Newsom is not so much a fan of metaphors but, as Hardy was, the intense relationship between nature and the mind; the psychological connection between a person and his/her landscape.  This is not an oeuvre of comparisons so much as literal, concrete interactions: Newsom’s father explaining meteors; her affectionate observations of flora and fauna. (Though of course the metaphors are valuable, too.) Ys is an example of how nature transforms and helps our understanding of inward problems with which nature might have little to do.  The album is richly visual, and in a live performance Newsom’s lyrics are louder, are more substantive. It’s the same effect as being taught something in a classroom, if only one were drunk and standing in a sweaty crowd in a classroom. At a Newsom show,  you’re listless, adoring, attentive.  There are glimmers of meaning you didn’t hear before. You finally get this or that. And every subsequent listen of the album will yield more meaning.

This is why live shows exist. Not only to give the artist a little money and watch her face glow with stunned surprise at the vastness of her happy audience, but to examine the work in another light, which, by the bye, was red and blue, bright and sharp, focused directly over Newsom’s immaculate pallor, angel hair, and the majestic instruments of lady and harp.