joanna newsom

A Week With Joanna Newsom's "Ys": Day 4

12 November 2006
tell your friends... tell your friends...

Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Amanda Walker
The search for meanings in this recording, generously heaped with dynamic interplay, is a long, winding, mostly gravel road with undulating slopes, surrounded on both sides by orchards or open spaces. It’s an album, like a porcupine, covered with well-placed quills, a tactic to at least impede you getting to the flesh or the heart of the animal with any kind of easy manner. Someday, Continuum will have to devote an 80-book installment to its 33 1/3 series of album analyses to Ys and even The Milk-Eyed Mender because so many writers will fawn over the chance to investigate them further, though none will believe with any kind of certainty that they’ve come close to solving these brilliantly insoluble records. Ys is a true masterpiece in every form—the robust orchestral arrangements of Van Dyke Parks, the meticulously constructed framework of emotion, and it would deserve all of the attentive ears. Newsom has fast become as important as any working wordsmith. Say what you might about her voice (it’s tempered on Ys) and her cloaked points, but they are unequivocably wondrous and the narrative is particularly stirring on this fourth track, “Only Skin,” which is easy to claim as the year’s most labyrinthine love song. The end alone, with Smog’s Bill Callahan—Newsom’s sweetheart—lending harmonies to a moving passage near the end of the nearly 17-minute song that can almost make you sick with the very real sadness that Newsom finds herself closing with. She compares fire to love and it’s never seemed more appropriate. Fires move away. They start and end, sometimes through no human fault or assistance. The fire between the two lovers in this song has moved on but one cannot let the other go, for she knows the fickleness of love. She realizes that she can’t count on those new flames dying down to ashes and soot, but she knows that there is a chance and she’s not giving up. It’s not a pitiful display, but one of the resiliency of the emotion. She’s not really getting trod upon. She’s not unable to move on. She just isn’t going to move on because it’s not up to her. It’s not up to you to be drawn in by a story as old as dirt and reimagined with dauntless new beauty that leaves you fairly numb.

Drag City Records

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