A guide through Joanna Newsom's discography.
Heads up before starting: Her work is available on every streaming platform except Spotify. I personally got into her through YouTube and then bought her albums. That said, enjoy this journey!
Joanna Newsom is a Californian singer-songwriter, composer, instrumentalist and poet. Born in a family of 2 doctors who encouraged her and her siblings to explore music and literature since they’re kids. Started piano lessons since very young, although her dream was to play the harp after seeing a woman playing this instrument in a show. That was the same woman that end up teaching her how to play it. After high school, she studied composition and creative writing at college, she was the keyboardist of a band and after dropping out, she was a part of the band “Nervous Cop” as a harpist.
She’s an indie darling who’s been working for more than 2 decades now under Drag City, a very small label that signed her back in 2003/2004 when they heard some songs she’d recorded from her two EPs “Walnut Whales” and “Yarn and Glue”.
2004 saw the release of her debut album:
1. The Milk Eyed Mender.
I love comparing Joanna’s music to seasons because nature plays such an important part in her music. It’s inevitable. To me this album is like a beautiful summer day. The sun is rather amusing than uncomfortable, like a kiss in your cheek. Your heart grows in comfort and you start detailing the flora that surrounds you and suddenly you’re aware of the sound of a distant river where rocks are fighting to stand still. That’s exactly how this album feels like.
The stories and lyricism are accompanied by often just one instrument. Majorly the harp and eventually one or two songs with piano and harpsichord. For you to understand her composition style, you have to understand that Joanna’s influences are very wide. From West African music to Venezuelan harp playing styles and when it comes to her singing, she sings with a high larynx, leading to her voice breaking intentionally. In an unconventional and overwhelming way.
As her style sits with you, it gets easier to completely dive into her lore. Her particular and almost incomprehensible storytelling makes up for some of the best verses ever written:
'“This is an old song, these are old blues
And this is not my tune, but it's mine to use
And the seabirds where the fear once grew
Will flock with a fury
And they will bury what'd come for you”.From “Sadie”.
“Never get so attached to a poem
You forget truth that lacks lyricism;
And never draw so close to the heat
That you forget that you must eat, oh...”From “En Gallop”.
The Milk Eyed Mender is a folk album whose abrasiveness never ceases to surprise you. The start of what has turned out to be one of those most immense discographies in music history. And for a starting point, this is an album that manages to let you know who she is as a musician and poet, and if you dive deep enough, you’ll realize the amount of exposure through tone and attitude that showcases Joanna’s humor, fears, regrets and history.
“This was unlike the story
It was written to be
I was riding its back
When it used to ride me
And we were galloping manic
To the mouth of the source
We were swallowing panic
In the face of its force
And I am blue
I am blue and unwell
Made me bolt like a horse”
2. Ys (2006).
Everything The Milk Eyed Mender wasn’t, Ys is. As abrasive TMEM is essentially, Ys comes to you with a roaring strength that might get you off the ground and come back down after its 50 minutes worth of material.
This album takes place during the spring and you can picture the landscape with her own words:
“Come on home. The poppies are all grown knee-deep by now
Blossoms all have fallen, and the pollen ruins the plow
Peonies nod in the breeze
And while they wetly bow
With hydrocephalitic listlessness
Ants mop up their brow”.
As you can see through these lyrics, Joanna’s pen got much heavier with time. She said the density of the songs is completely intentional. Milk Eyed Mender was more of a sub-conscious flow of ideas and sentiments that Joanna herself said she doesn’t really understands (sometimes). Ys is extremely detailed, every word carry its own weight and even the most minuscule metaphor has a meaning within the song, the verse and the line itself.
Her admiration of authors like Shakespeare and Nabokov (and classic literature in general) shone through the writing of these 5 songs. They’re her most personal work yet and the different characters we meet through this journey range from constellations to animals in fables, her sister, birds, mountains, rivers and friends who are not longer with her. She found the sweet spot between her very poetic speech with a fantastical world that exists centuries apart from now in our very same world.
“Though we felt the spray of the waves
We decided to stay till the tide rose too far
We weren't afraid, 'cause we know what you are
And you know that we know what you areAwful atoll
Oh, incalculable indiscreetness and sorrow
Bawl, bellow
Sibyl sea-cow, all done up in a bowToddle and roll
Teeth an impalpable bit of leather
While yarrow, heather and hollyhock
Awkwardly molt along the shore”.
Its an album that despite its fantastical nature, what really makes it as unique and beautiful is its humanity. The amount of emotion portrayed by Joanna’s vocals, which in this occasion are paired with elongated melodies and strings that sob and flow through her words enhancing every metaphor and story being told. By the way, this album is just her voice and harp with a 32 piece orchestra. All of the arrangements were done by the legend himself Van Dyke Parks, whose collaborative effort with Joanna stretched to almost 6 months in the recording process.
It’s a unique listening experience because even though the tracks are lengthy, her storytelling is so engaging that you are able to focus on her words rather than the melodies being catchy or the lack of a traditional structure. Thanks to its themes, it’s very easy to connect with Joanna- of course, as the lyrics unravel slowly in front of your eyes as you analyze them-. Either it is through the heartfelt and wonderful “Emily” where she talks about her relationship with her sister, the difference between their points of view regarding the same event, the consequences that brought to their relationship and how at the end, their love proving to be stronger than whichever trial and tribulation they could go through.
“Monkey & Bear” is a gut-wrenching fable about an abusive relationship based on exploitation and selfishness that ends in a somehow ambiguous note (which is up to you to determine), “Sawdust and Diamonds” has some of the most complex harp playing in the entire record with heartbreaking lyrics about loss and grief and “Cosmia” is a tribute Joanna wrote for a friend who passed away when they’re young (of the same name).
And then there’s “Only Skin”, a monstruous track with 17 minutes of length where she reunites 5 events that changed her life as she knew it during the year before she wrote the album. This specific song took 2 years for it to be finished and you can literally see the amount of effort through its perfect structure and also, detailed and mind-blowing lyricism.
Ys was a triumph for Joanna on all ends. It’s considered a cult classic and one of the best albums of the 2000’s by renown magazines and critics. How could she follow this up?
3. Have One On Me (2010).
Joanna toured for Ys, released an EP with an original song (PLEASE check this one out, it’s called “Colleen”) and 2 new versions of previously released tracks in 2007 with the Ys’ Street Band. After she finished, thanks to her unique and idiosyncratic singing style, she ended up damaging her vocal chords. This lead to an entire year where she worked on the piano and harp arrangements for a new album with recurrent collaborator Ryan Francesconi and after her recovery (with intense vocal lessons), she adapted a new technique for her singing and recorded what was about to be her upcoming project.
Have One On Me is a 3 discs album that’s a complete departure from Ys sonically. In its entire runtime (2 hours and 4 minutes), we’ve got for one instance, a great bunch of the tracks with piano as the main instrument and shades of blues and jazz sprinkled all over them. Folk is still the main genre but Joanna borrows motifs, chord progressions and elements from those two genres that make this a much more somber and subdue record.
The vast length allowed her to explore common themes about the cycle of a relationship. From the premonition and insecurity portrayed through tracks like “Easy”, “In California” and “No Provenance” to the haunting and brutal “Go Long” or “Have One On Me”, these tracks carry emotions that are tangible.
“We both want the very same thing
We are praying
I am the one to save you
But you don't even own
Your own violence
Run away from home
Your beard is still blue
With the loneliness of you mighty men
With your jaws, and fists, and guitars
And pens, and your sugar lip
But I've never been to the firepits with you mighty men”
There are completely devastating songs like ‘Baby Birch’, that speak of the loss of a child while also representing the end of the relationship. “Occident”. “Soft As Chalk” and “Does Not Suffice” contextualize us on what this relationship was to her while depicting what the lack of it has done to her soul. Some people call this her “Drunk at midnight” album because that’s how most of this story feels., a writer picking up the pieces they’ve left along the way and putting them together to form one coherent body of work.
This is the closest we’ve gotten to a winter album from Joanna. It’s still very October-early November in its colors and textures. There’s a song called ‘Autumn’ so i literally have no other option!
At its core, this is probably an album you need to sit down for. If your attention span doesn’t helps, consume it in the way she presented it as: A triple album. Listen to each of the 6 tracks separately, process them and allow yourself to be surrounded by the density of each of them. Some tracks will stand out more as you come back to them, you’ll understand the meaning of some of the lyrics as you walk through them and time will let you know how personal and special this album truly is.
Also, there are some bangers here! Ys was very regal and sacred so it didn’t leave many room for Joanna’s silliness and humor. On songs like “Good Intentions Paving Company”, you’ll get to enjoy a Joanna full of personality and you can tell how much fun she had while making it.
“And I regret, I regret
How I said to you
Honey, just open your heart
When I've got trouble
Even opening a honey jar
And that, right there, is where we are”
Divers (2015)
If you didn’t know, Joanna is married to Andy Samberg. They started dating while she was still making Have One On Me and this new relationship brought a new fear to her life. She explained in an interview with Uncut:
“Everyone’s getting older. When I crossed that line in my mind where I knew I was with the person that I wanted to marry, it was a very heavy thing, because you’re inviting death into your life. You know that that’s hopefully after many, many, many, many years, but the idea of death stops being abstract, because there is someone you can’t bear to lose. when it registers as true, it’s like a little shade of grief that comes in when love is its most real version. Then it contains death inside of it, and then that death contains love inside of it.”
This was the thought process that drove the writing of a very dense album. Unlike Ys and Have One On Me, Divers is very concerned about one single topic: Time. In all of its representations and effects, in its nature and meaning. This is not a collection of tracks, it’s a full body of work exploring the same topic from different perspectives, asking a lot of questions in a story that never ends.
Joanna studied a lot of scholars, history and it’s not a coincidence that New York is the scenario where this tale develops. Thanks to Andy’s job in SNL, Joanna wrote almost all of this album in NYC. She spoke about this experience in a VOGUE interview:
“I was in Central Park today, and I was thinking: So many times, I had a dentist appointment like far in the 60s, and I would walk all the way home to the West Village because I just couldn’t stand the thought of getting in a cab or taking the subway. Everything was so loud and stinky and intense and jostling. I know there’s amazing, wonderful, beautiful things about New York, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t find them. It’s the way I’m wired.”
Divers, at the end of the day, is an album about love and its constant battle with time. There are 11 tracks that are not longer than 6 minutes and it took years for her to bring these songs together because they’re very layered and even connected with eachother. “Time, As a Symptom” finishes with ´trans´ and the opening word of “Anecdotes” is ´sending´. And that’s just an example, because track 2 is as well connected with track 10, track 3 with track 9, etc. She even made every song finish in the same key as the beginning of the next one to made them flow perfectly!
The only song that stands alone is the title track, which is a song that asks a lot of questions regarding the role women play in society, seeing her diver phosphoresce in the sea, questioning why is the pain of birth reduced compare to the pain of death. And just like “Divers”, there are some characters that make this story even more engaging. “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne” is a sci-fi, beyond time and space story about a woman who lost the love of her life during the 4th World War and he comes back as a ghost to visit her and tell her that he’s still fighting. At the end, we get a reference of a man referenced 3 different times on this album: John Purroy Mitchell.
Although on this song it’s technically a reference to a 19th century sea shanty, the name John is one we became familiar with thanks to “Sapokanikan”. Which is a song about how time will pass and we’ll all be forgotten, basically. She uses the famous poem Ozymandias, which speaks about someone’s legacy fading and compares it with the story of Sapokanikan, which “was the name of one of several Lenape villages that archaeologists have identified as existing on Manhattan Island prior to the coming of Europeans.” She speaks about the passing of time and different people and events that went through the “map of Sapokanikan”, which is Manhattan.
Through this song, she references a New York mayor called John Purroy Mitchell, who died after he joined the Air Service, during a training exercise when he fell from a plane due to an unfastened seatbelt. She also references Florry Walker, monuments in New York, portraits that were painted over time. Historic events and people who were once recognized and perceived as something important but their memory obsolesces as times passes by.
“And the records they left are cryptic at best
Lost in obsolescence
The text will not yield, nor x-ray reveal
With any fluorescence
Where the hand of the master begins and ends”.
It’s one of my favorite songs ever written. undoubtedly.
During the second half of the album we get some brief tracks that keep the narrative going but as we reach the end, we get “Pin-Light Bent” which details the moment where John crashed with some revelations about life Joanna experienced and it is key for the final act of the album: “Time, As a Symptom”. After all the questioning and roaming, after all the nihilism and yearning, Joanna brings us to what she learned from this journey:
“And it pains me to say, I was wrong
Love is not a symptom of time
Time is just a symptom of love”
As opposed to being scared and concerned about time, she became even more confident in what it represents to her. At the end of the day, life is a never-ending story. She understands time as a cycle, as a series of events that are connected and meaningful, as they’re subjective and substantial.
“But stand brave, life-liver
Bleeding out your days
In the river of time
Stand brave:
Time moves both ways”.
Joanna is a very profound and intentional artist. There are references that you might need to look up for you to fully understand and although Genius is a great tool to get into some of the interpretations of her lyrics, i would recommend you to thread carefully because at the end of the day, it is you who define its meaning.
What do we know about JNew 5? She performed 5 new songs in a surprise appearance she did in a Fleet Foxes show in march of this year. They’re all in Youtube but i would recommend for you to check out her discography first so you don’t feel lost when getting into these tracks. It’s rumored that we’ll get a 2024/2025 release but with Joanna we can only sit and wait.
Now, if you want to get into her through songs i would recommend: “En Gallop”, “Emily”, “In California”, “Go Long”, “Time, As A Symptom” and “Colleen”. If you want to get into her albums, Have One On Me is a very good starting point (but as i said, listen to each of the 6 tracks separately if the runtime is a problem for you).
If you have any questions, reach out to me! I love discussing Joanna’s music with as many people as i can. I hope you enjoyed this issue and if you have listened to Joanna, which are your favorite songs and albums? Which lyric stands out for you in her discography? Would love you read your thoughts.