Joanna Newsom
Joanna Newsom played at End Of The Road Festival 2011.
Joanna Newsom fans: don’t look now, but Joanna’s about to let her hair down — and that’s a consider- able task these days! Of course, to the demure Mme. Newsom, the 125 minutes-worth of songs is nothing more than a new album, entitled Have One On Me.
Pundits claim that the record album as it has been known to us for the past half-century is dead or dying. With this in mind, dig Joanna’s incredible expanding album. At the end of the forty-four minutes that comprise Have One On Me’s first disc, you’re just getting started, the space within you just beginning to become filled. It’s a record, it’s a virtual experience, it’s a new friendship — the record album of the future!
Length is tempered with instrumental color throughout Have One On Me, which was arranged by Ryan Francesconi. Ryan’s work with brass and woodwind ensembles lends a fresh air to the tunes — and his own string playing, on instru- ments including acoustic guitar, banjo, Bulgarian tambura mandolin and kaval, matches well with Joanna’s harp arrangements. Neal Morgan places percussive strikes thoughout the album with deep spiritual conviction. Joanna’s harp is the center, tapping the bones of the song, then cutting wider, in the company of the accompanying ensemble foliage, making way for her growing voice: cooing, crooning, belting, sounding as like a horn. And Joanna’s touch at the piano is as deep and moving as at the harp.
Joanna Newsom’s songs are rolled with passion, playfulness,history, humor, journal entries — everything she can get in there without sacrificing musicality. This occasionally demands a rewiring of the accepted lines of song structure, but that’s a wheel that’s been reinflated before. Joanna delights in her role as singer-songwriter; as such she’s inclined to curve perspectives, singing not just of herself and her feelings but embodying others’, some of whom she knows and some of whom she may know wherefore of they speak. Listeners, we ask, who is singing, and to whom? There’s a diversity of relations here, life measured through stimulating dialog and a disconcerting directness of inquest.
Linearity is also jogged on Have One On Me, upending tradi- tional narrative direction in favor of an allusive rippling effect that ebbs and flows over the course of the three discs. The blessed contractions of time and space that allow for albums to honestly account for the circumference of the world in a day or report of intensities in ten cities, or of a road that goes on forever, allow also for the back-and-forth action of Have One On Me. It is Joanna’s winding path that we walk down, butnothere’snosprawltoit—instead,anorderlyquality, rolling in and out of wild country, extending into infinity.
Through the course of Have One On Me’s eighteen songs, Joanna visits ditties, weepies, court dances, rump-bumpers, epics and moments of panavision fantasia upon us. Once you’re done digging through this lot, another few years will have passed and it’ll be time for another new one. By then, the world’ll be ready for the twenty-four hour album, right?
Listen to Joanna Newsom:
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