I’ve been meaning to start this series for a while now but i struggled choosing who to start with. I needed to choose what i consider to be the very best so i could continue with more artists that inspire my writing everyday. And how would i not give that spot to my favorite storyteller ever?
Through this issue, i’ll explore and analyze the brilliance of Joanna Newsom. The song i picked is not even my favorite by her but its narrative allows me to showcase my favorite literary devices she uses in her music.
Emily is the first song i ever heard from Joanna. I remember stumbling across a stunning album cover on Instagram that grabbed my attention and as i found out the album (Ys) and her music in general wasn’t in Spotify, i decided to check it out on Youtube. After my first listen, i immediately bought it on iTunes and i’ve been listening non-stop since.
This is a very dense song. It’s 12 minutes long but i’ve never felt it was unnecessarily lengthy . The storytelling keeps you on your toes the entire time. Even if you don’t understand the poetic speech, you can tell the amount of emotion this song carries with.
Emily is Joanna’s sister. This song is centered around their relationship, its ups and its downs but it’s also about an specific event and how it impacted Joanna’s life.
The song starts with an image being painted:
“The meadowlark and the chim-choo-ree and the sparrow
Set to the sky in a flying spree, for the sport of the pharaoh”
You might notice how there’s two widely known bird species being mentioned but the chim-choo-ree is not a real bird. The meadowlark is often used in literature to symbolize friendship and loyalty and sparrows signify community, team work and protection. The chim-choo-ree is pure fiction. Joanna’s using this to enhance her work as a poet. She allows herself to create because everything is possible in paper. It´s a human device to imagine, but a writer’s job to make it feel real.
These birds were flying because someone else is making them to. Someone of authority is “letting” them fly so he can hunt them. It’s an attempt against nature.
“Little while later the Pharisees dragged a comb through the meadow
Do you remember what they called up to you and me, in our window?”
Once again, nature is disrupted by a group of people who represented some sort of authority too. Emily and Joanna watched from their window all of this happen during their childhood.
“There is a rusty light on the pines tonight;
Sun pouring wine, lord, or marrow, into the
Bones of the birches, and the spires of the churches, jutting out from the shadows;”
It’s often that Joanna personifies objects. Here, she describes the sun pouring its light and shadows being created by this phenomenon. Either it is through the “bones” of the birches or the spires of the churches. We see, once again, how she contrasts wine, lord and marrow. Wine is obtained through a very specific process but at the end of the day it’s natural, marrows are too part of nature, lords are product of a social construct. It seems like authority and the choices made by people in power had an impact in Joanna’s early years.
“The yoke, and the axe, and the old smokestacks, and the bale, and the barrow
And everything sloped, like it was dragged from a rope, in the mouth of the south below”
She’s picturing rural elements that made a part of her upcoming in California.
“We've seen those mountains kneeling, felten and grey
We thought our very hearts would up and melt away
From that snow in the nighttime
Just going and going
And the stirring of wind chimes
In the morning
In the morning
Helps me find my way back in
From the place where I have been—”
All of the landscaping that’s been built into the song so far comes from a place of nostalgia. She’s describing childhood memories but now we get a hint of her being somewhere dark. She’s walking towards a better place and being home again is what’s helped her gain strength towards the path she’s slowly chasing.
That snow in the nighttime is her grief and sorrow thanks to an event that changed life as she knew it.
“And, Emily, I saw you last night by the river
I dreamed you were skipping little stones across the surface of the water—
Frowning at the angle where they were lost, and slipped under forever
In a mud-cloud, mica-spangled, like the sky'd been breathing on a mirror”
At this point, we get introduced to the main character of this story. Perception is fundamental to the core of this song, Emily is an astrophysicist and Joanna is a poet. The way they perceive the same event is completely different. While Emily is frowning at the angle those rocks made, Joanna was paying attention to the bigger picture. Her interest is on the image, the simile, the rhyme.
“Anyhow, I sat by your side, by the water
You taught me the names of the stars overhead, that I wrote down in my ledger—
Though all I knew of the rote universe were those Pleiades, loosed in December
I promised you I'd set them to verse so I'd always remember”
According to this vulture article: “the Pleiades are a bright cluster of stars that form part of the constellation Taurus. In the northern hemisphere, they first appear in the night sky in the winter, which has given them mythological significance in many cultures”.
Now let’s see what she wrote down in that ledger of hers…
“That the meteorite is the source of the light
And the meteor's just what we see;
And the meteoroid is a stone that's devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee
And the meteorite’s just what causes the light
And the meteor’s how it’s perceived;
And the meteoroid’s a bone thrown from the void, that lies quiet in offering to thee”
Remember the stones that were skipping across the surface of the water? The thing is… what i previously said about perception works for these lines too. This is not scientifically accurate. According to National Geographic, the meteorite is the last stage in the existence of these type of space rocks. These are the ones that fall to earth’s surface. The meteoroids are a lump of rock or metal that orbit the sun, these become meteors when they crash into the Earth’s atmosphere and the gases surrounding them briefly light up as “shooting stars”.
While Emily was explaining all of this to Joanna, Joanna didn’t care about setting them up to verse in the same way she was told. She was already painting the picture in her head about how this could serve as a metaphor.
The meteorite represents our soul, the meteor’s our body and the meteoroid is the result of what our soul has to offer. Words, choices, suffering, joy. The meteoroid serves as the projection of what we have inside of us. It’s the manifestation of what we think, what we love, what we feel! And this is very important because in this story, it’s the meteoroid what causes damage to Emily’s and Joanna’s relationship.
“You came and lay a cold compress upon the mess I'm in;
Threw the windows wide and cried, "Amen! Amen! Amen!"
The whole world stopped to hear you hollering
You looked down, and saw, now, what was happening:”
Joanna suffered a miscarriage when she was very young, there are no details about it outside of two songs (Sawdust and Diamonds and Baby Birch) that she’s released. This is none of our business either way but it is important to the narrative of the song. This event brought an immense amount of pain to Joanna’s life and through this verse we see how Emily supported her, but she made a mistake. She told several people about it and this hurt Joanna deeply. Emily wasn’t aware of the damage she’d done until “she looked down and saw what was happening”.
What hurt Joanna the most is that she admired Emily. Feeling betrayed or disappointed by her was not a common element in their relationship.
“The lines are fading in my kingdom
(Though I have never known the way to border them in);
So the muddy mouths of baboons and sows, and the grouse, and the horse, and the hen
Grope at the gate of the looming lake that was once a tidy pen
And the mail is late, and the great estates are not lit from within
The talk in town's becoming downright sickening”
Joanna wasn’t a really private person, but this situation caused repercussions thanks to her being put in the spotlight and not for a good reason. That “looming lake that was once a tidy pen” was her belly. Everyone surrounding her made her feel even worse with every whisper, grouse and judgmental look.
“In due time we will see the far buttes lit by a flare
I've seen your bravery, and I will follow you there”.
These lines are stunning to me! Joanna describes Emily as her rock. This was a dark moment but she believed in a brighter future for their relationship.
“And row through the nighttime
So healthy
Gone healthy all of a sudden
In search of a midwife
Who can help me
Who can help me
Help me find my way back in
And there are worries where I've been”
The lines where she describes "going healthy all of the sudden” could allude to her losing her baby. Pregnancy comes with a lot of symptoms and feeling healthy may be a sign of an abortion. “In search of a midwife” is a literal sentence to me. She’s seeking for help, guidance and comfort from the worries that she felt.
“And say, say, say, in the lee of the bay
Don't be bothered
Leave your troubles here
Where the tugboats shear the water from the water
(Flanked by furrows, curling back, like a match held up to a newspaper)”
Emily made another mistake. Her approach to this situation was really cold. I don’t think she intended to harm her sister with her words, but in here we see how at some point, while Joanna’s grieving, she tells her “Don’t be bothered” and encourages her to let it go like it was that easy.
I love the biblical imagery of shearing “the water from the water” here, also how she builds up the simile of the furrows curling back, referencing those waves the tugboat provokes in its movement.
“Emily, they'll follow your lead by the letter
And I make this claim, and I'm not ashamed to say I knew you better
What they've seen is just a beam of your sun that banishes winter”
She depicts Emily as a leader, but all those people that surround her will never know her as Joanna does. She’s even proud of her flaws! She’s shared and seen more to see above that “beam of her sun that banishes winter”. Which is just a stunning way to say it.
“Let us go! Though we know it's a hopeless endeavor
The ties that bind, they are barbed and spined, and hold us close forever
Though there is nothing would help me come to grips with
A sky that is gaping and yawning
There is a song I woke with on my lips
As you sailed your great ship towards the morning”
Joanna’s aware that her loss and pain cannot keep setting her apart from her sister. The ties might be barbed and spined but they hold them close. Emily makes her feel better and whilst the sky is gaping and yawning (Flooding her thoughts and drowning her with feelings) she relies on who she loves the most.
From this point on, the song gets more and more dense. Joanna yearns for her sister to come home.
“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”
Poppies posses a symbolic meaning. In Victorian culture, they were attributed to the consolation of a loss or death within a family. The growth of these represent an improvement in Joanna’s health, both physical and mentally. She’s open to be with her sister and leaving the past behind.
The way she describes how the Peonies bow is unbelievable. According to Genius, Hydrocephalus is a disease wherein an abnormal amount of cerebrospinal fluid accumulates in the brain. In this context, she’s referring to the way the ants are attracted to the peony buds. She’s basically describing the picture below:
Peonies are often gifted to express goodwill and joy. She’s still recovering but in a stage of her grief that allows her to be resilient.
“And everything with wings is restless, aimless, drunk and dour;
The butterflies and birds collide at hot, ungodly hours
And my clay-colored motherlessness rangily reclines—
Come on home, now! All my bones are dolorous with vines”.
Due to Emily’s absence, nature is behaving in ways Joanna has never seen before. There’s a yearning for her to be present to restore what has been damaged. Joanna’s urge for her to come home has made her anxious and desperate.
Although her body is healing, she still feels the unbearable weight of loss. Her “clay-colored motherlessness” is still present but her soul, bones and body are agonizing awaiting for this conflict to be over.
“Pa pointed out to me, for the hundredth time tonight
The way the ladle leads to a dirt-red bullet of light
Squint skyward and listen—
Loving him, we move within his borders:
Just asterisms in the stars' set order”
Another astrology reference! This genius annotation explains:
“The ladle of the big dipper does indeed lead right to a very radiant red star. The bright blue globes lead right to the red one completing the big dipper”
She’s stargazing with her dad and she reflects on how we are just like asterisms that move within “his” borders. This pronoun is ambiguous. She’s no longer speaking about her dad, it probably is god. We see how she views those asterisms in the sky:
“Asterisms are patterns of stars that are visible from a certain vantage point on Earth, but the stars of which are not always physically related and are often at varying distances from Earth. We’re all just different patterns or perspectives in the universes' set design”.
“We could stand for a century
Staring
With our heads cocked
In the broad daylight at this thing:
Joy
Landlocked in bodies that don’t keep—
Dumbstruck with the sweetness of being,
Till we don’t be
Told: take this
Eat this”
She gets even more existential here. She’s recognizing the beauty in being able to experience joy, even if her body is unable to keep it. Life can be so brief and she’s admitting to be dumbstruck by it. That event made her cherish the privilege of being alive.
She continues to reference religion with the very common catholic ritual where they eat the body of christ (bread) and drink his blood (wine). It’s very sacred because it represents the real meaning of his death: Forgiveness.
Joanna has took the step towards forgiveness. She’s forgiving herself for what happened but also sharing this gift it with her sister.
“Told: the meteorite is the source of the light
And the meteor's just what we see;
And the meteoroid is a stone that's devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee
And the meteorite’s just what causes the light
And the meteor’s how it’s perceived;
And the meteoroid’s a bone thrown from the void that lies quiet in offering to thee”.
You might think she’s just singing the refrain again… well, no! This poem takes a new meaning now that we have heard about every event that lead into the making of this song. These verses are referring to an even’t cause, its perception and what is left after its over.
I’m taking this from Genius because it’s perfectly explained:
“The narrator experienced a traumatic event (meteorite) and Emily revealed this, leading to negative perceptions of the narrator (meteor). Afterwards, it resulted in the narrator’s “clay-colored motherlessness” (meteoroid). Later, the narrator marvels at the mysteries of existence (meteorite), noting we’re “just asterisms in the stars' set order” (meteor) and will be “until we don’t be” because we are “landlocked in bodies that won’t keep” (meteoroid)”.
The amount of wisdom and emotion put into this singular song is outstanding. She’s 24 when she released this! I believe this to be one of the best songs ever written. Joanna’s way with words and ability to tell a story is not defined by her skill, what makes this song special is her unique and raw way to display emotion. Either it is through its landscaping or orchestral flourishes.
I’m thankful for this song because it’s taught me to appreciate life and my loved ones even when their mistakes might cause permanent damage to my life. Forgiving is one’s choice and when healing from trauma you give the best you can and my best is loving. And i’ve learned love in its purest form is forgiveness. I’m not saying that you NEED to do it, no. It’s the way i confront life and how i’ve learned to walk through it.
Today’s Joanna’s 41st birthday so i’m delighted to be able to put this out today. I hope she knows how loved and admired she is!
Thank you so much for reading! If you have any other interpretation or if you caught anything else listening to the song and studying its lyrics, i’m 100% open to hear it. I love talking about Joanna!