joanna newsom

A Week With Joanna Newsom's "Ys": Day 3

10 November 2006
tell your friends... tell your friends...

Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Amanda Walker
My mouth tastes like saltine crackers, dry and chalky, as if it had just been loitering, gaping in front of an operating vacuum cleaner hose for 10 minutes or more. It’s not just because I’m halfway through a package of saltine crackers. This would have happened anyway. Listening to Ys makes inherent bodily functions slow, sometimes to a stop. Everything in you wants to hear. Your salivary glands dry up like a creek bed in the late summer mostly because you can’t get your set of teeth to close up. You won’t know you’re doing it. You won’t know your pupils have gone big and converted into spirographed circles, just as would be seen on a hypnotized cartoon character. This happens because Newsom’s taken us so lovingly beyond belief. Hearing “Sawdust and Diamonds,” for me, is the same as discovering water for the first time, as if you’ve never been quenched by such coolness, such wetness, such sublime nature. Three songs into this record and it’s thus revealing itself to be without porosity. It’s as sturdy as an oak with 200-year-old roots cutting through the earth below and tickling the underside of Japan. Her unbreakable stories and their telling seems to be made of or born out of fire. On The Milk-Eyed Mender, even with lyrics that obviously suggested she was otherwise, there were times when Newsom was cute, very cute. She’s very much made a serious and bold statement with Ys that goes beyond music. What that means, I don’t know, but I think it might mean that this record could do more good for mankind than space travel ever will. During one passage of this fevery song—with allusions to taxidermy (the sawdust and diamonds are the stuffings of choice for a poor dove) depression—as she does a few times in the song, Newsom proceeds with a Celtic lilt and sings the gorgeous lines, “I wasn’t born of a whistle, or milked from a thistle at twilight/No, I was all horns and thorns, sprung out fully formed, knock-kneed and upright/So enough of this terror/We deserve to know light, and grow evermore lighter and lighter/You would have seen me through, but I could not undo that desire.” Words like this, sung by this miraculously tender young woman, is what falling in love all over again feels like.

Drag City Records

share on facebook digg this seed newsvine delicious bookmarks seed magnolia

commenting closed for this article

Recent Progressive Reviews

A Week With Bonnie Prince Billy's "Lie Down In The Light"
    Day: 6   5   4   3   2   1  
A Week With Wolf Parade's "At Mount Zoomer"
    Day: 5   4   3   2   1  
A Week With Death Cab For Cutie's "Narrow Stairs
    Day: 5   4  
A Week With Death Cab For Cutie's "Narrow Stairs"
    Day: 3  
A Week With Death Cab For Cutie's "Narrow Stairs
    Day: 2  
A Week With Death Cab For Cutie's "Narrow Stairs"
    Day: 1  
A Week With Destroyer's "Trouble In Dreams"
    Day: 5   4   3   2   1  
A Week With Wu-Tang Clan's "8 Diagrams"
    Day: 4   3   2   1  
A Week With The Mountain Goats' "Heretic Pride"
    Day: 5   4   3   2   1  
A Week With Radiohead's "In Rainbows"
    Day: 3   2   1  
A Week With P.J. Harvey's "White Chalk"
    Day: 5   4   3   2   1  
A Week With Okkervil River's "The Stage Names"
    Day: 1  
A Week With Bill Callahan's "Woke On A Whaleheart"
    Day: 5  
A Week With Bill Callahan's "Woke One A Whaleheart"
    Day: 4  
A Week With Bill Callahan's "Woke On A Whaleheart"
    Day: 3   2   1  
A Week With The White Stripes' "Icky Thump"
    Day: 2   1  
A Week With Handsome Furs' "Plague Park"
    Day: 5   4   3   2  
A Week With The Handsome Furs' "Plague Park"
    Day: 1  
A Week With Bjork's "Volta"
    Day: 2   1  
A Week With Panda Bear's "Person Pitch"
    Day: 3   2   1  
A Week With Winterpills' "The Light Divides"
    Day: 5   4   3   2   1  
A Week With Modest Mouse's "We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank"
    Day: 5   4   3   2   1  
A Week With Arcade Fire's "Neon Bible"
    Day: 4   3   2   1  
A Week With Deerhoof's "Friend Opportunity"
    Day: 3   2   1  
A Week With The Shins' "Wincing The Night Away"
    Day: 5   4   3   2   1  
A Week With Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's "Some Loud Thunder"
    Day: 4   3   2   1  
A Week With Nellie McKay's "Pretty Little Head"
    Day: 5   4   3   2   1  
A Week With Luke Temple's "Snowbeast"
    Day: 5   4   3   2   1  
A Week With The Skygreen Leopards' "Disciples of California"
    Day: 5   4   3   2   1  
A Week With The Brak Show
    Day: 3   2   1  




Subscribe to our newsletter:




info@daytrotter.com