A Week With Joanna Newsom's "Ys": Day 2
8 November 2006
tell your friends...
Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Amanda Walker
This is the manifesto for all circus animals and petting zoo dwellers. Inside the walls of this reasonably clear plan of escape is a love story between a bear and something else. It could be a monkey or it could be a woman named Ursala or it could be both. What’s it matter? Love is love no matter how it’s shared. These two animals have reached the breaking point. They cannot “answer to that heartless hay-monger, nor be his accomplice” but they recognize that without their masters, they would be without food. They wish to reach a land without fences, where the milk and the honey can be squeezed directly out of thin air and the walkable ground. Newsom makes the plight of these two animals feel so urgent and the revving of that urgency snakes into her voice as she plays all the parts, something thus far evident on both songs. She’s showing that she can put these lengthy story-songs to bed—tuck them in and kiss them on the forehead and all that junk. But as they lie there—this one in particular—you stare back at their shut off faces and think there are things they’re not telling you. These stories are so restless it hurts—kindly—in a way that makes you empathsize, however irrationally, with them and all they’ve got to go through. The theatrical way in which “Monkey & Bear” unfolds is happy to go on causing your headaches—or maybe that’s just spilling. You feel like you’re never fully soaking these songs into your body because they ask so much of you. “Monkey & Bear,” just as “Emily” before it, is advanced placement songwriting that we should be allowed to pinch, just to see if it’s really happening. Ys in just two days could have a guy thinking that he doesn’t know squat about song. Never seen one until these came along. And maybe it has something to do with personal density, but I want to believe that the bear commits a figurative suicide at the end of the song where it just lets itself go—like we all do—where we become resigned to out specific lot in life. Newsom sings, “Now her coat drags through the water, bagging/With a life’s-worth of hunger, limitless minnows/In the magnetic embrace/Balletic and glacial/Of bear’s insatiable shadow.” It dances, it does the dance that’s expected of it, stepping over the remainder of its spirit. Then there’s the forboding finally line that suggests the bear will snap when its neighbor is least ready. This is the same as when the elephant decides that it doesn’t want to go down on one knee anymore. It wants to tear down the road and stomp on a few children, just to send a message.
Joanna Newsom
Drag City Records
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