¤ milky moon ¤

Hi all. Long-time lurker, infrequent poster here.

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It seems to me that the Joanna Newsom web-o-verse is getting more and more spread apart and harder to keep up with. Time was that Milky Moon was the hub of it, containing in-depth discussion of songs, useful references such as track listings and lyrics, links to interviews, and so forth. Now, there isn't a great deal of activity on here: much analysis of the lyrics is now found on Genius; Facebook and Tumblr house much of the ephermal discussion and external content aggregation; official lyrics and limited information on the albums is on the JN Lyrics website.

I was thinking we could do with a go-to reference website that brings many of these things back into one place and hopefully gives them a longer-term home. This is especially true for information around Divers, such as the tour set lists, which often never made it further than the Facebook group and are now a pain to track down. I'm taking as inspiration here sites like , , , , .

The one thing I would definitely like to exist is a 'Diamonds in the Lines'-type section* as I think there are a lot of intriguing 'diamonds' in interviews that don't get enough airing. And imagine if we had a page like for the Ys album artwork, or like for Sapokanikan. Then there is the matter of unreleased or unofficial things like the Good Intentions music video or the early EPs that could easily get forgotten unless we give them a proper write-up.



I am posting this here because I think the people who still frequent this forum are the ones who will most see the merit in a project like this. I understand that there are problems with the admin set-up here and I am worried how long it might be before this site is only accessible through divination of the entrails at . (eg. I tried to make a new account in order to make this post and it kept throwing an error up.)

Anyhow, this is just a first testing-of-the-water. Please let me know a) if you think this is a good idea or not, and b) if you would be willing to contribute in some way (and if so, how).

Personally, I would be able to contribute a fair deal of time to getting this off the ground over the summer and am happy to take the lead with regard to the technical side. I am going to let this discussion (if indeed there is one) brew for a few weeks as I'm pretty busy IRL right now. Just thought I would submit the idea while it was fresh.

~ Adam

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* 'Sawdust and Diamonds in the Lines', if you will

I love this idea. I am new, new, new to Joanna since the winter and I've been furiously scouring the web for information. this board has been great in some ways, but I can only imagine how much was lost during the transition to this new board a couple of years ago. I hate that Facebook now takes the place of message boards, which I grew up using and found so helpful, but they've kind of lost their way in a lot of ways for many artists. Not sure what the heck I could do to be of any help with this except adamantly support it here in this post. But huzzah!

Hi Adam

I share your concerns about the lack of a go-to site for all things Newsom, and about the sad decline of Milky Moon. Over my long period of membership here, I've got to know at least two of the administrators to a degree, and know that they're intelligent and motivated people, but I guess maintaining the site became somewhat unrewarding owing to the small amount of traffic here.

I don't do Facebook or twitter, and in a universe where everything seems ephemeral, I feel that a site like this is better suited to being a repository for information - if only people would use it! It's a downward spiral, though, as only traffic will generate traffic.

That said, I would be interested to read more of what you have in mind, and would like to contribute in some way if I can.

And I do intend to run another JNST, probably starting in June, and would welcome more votersvthan in 2015.

Good luck
-Steve

PS. just realised I didn't exactly address the rest of your comments.
Steve, do you know if the admins/moderators or owner check in here at all any more? (I don't know squat about running a forum so I don't know what could be done here. The FB group is still quite active.)

followerofmen, the old forum is , if you're interested. Beware that a lot of it isn't archived, and other parts rely on PHP code that doesn't work properly within the Wayback Machine.

Hi again Adam

Thank you for setting out your thoughts - they look very comprehensive and include everything I thought of and more!

I believe Jordan~ still comes here, and I would start with him as the most active of the moderators.

Well done on tracking down the old forum! One project might be to rescue whatever posts on it were of continuing relevance, and get them duplicated here, even if unsorted on an archive page.

Not a post escapes my notice. That's not to say I always read them, but I am here!

I'm not sure what the outbox thing is about (I think it doesn't move to sent until the recipient logs in), but I got it and replied!

I guess it just seems like everyone's migrated to FB for discussion (much of it a little pointless), Genius for song annotation, other sites for lyrics. It is a shame, but I'm not really sure that changing this site will really bring the community back.

Yeah, I think we still have kind of a niche - transcribing lyrics and analysing songs immediately before and after the release of a new album. That's fine, really.