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I didn't connect Prufrock and Only Skin before. Interesting. I know what you mean about the songs taking place in their own worlds, except I think a lot of songs have entirely their own little world. Like Only Skin happens in one world, Monkey & Bear in another, and so on. I feel like I could almost draw a map of the worlds of those two songs, especially, with all the places mentioned in them.
I get a real sense of place from a lot of her songs; even places that aren't explicitly mentioned - like, when I listen to Have One On Me, I think of Lola Montez getting drunk backstage after a show in Castlemaine (the one where she pissed off the audience, maybe) and telling her dresser about when she was the mistress of the King of Bavaria. I think if I was making a music video for it, I'd have it start with that scene, with flashbacks and all of the 'action' taking the form of a sort of slow, balletic dance - like, in the first part of the song, the wine taster would fall and then there'd be a graceful beheading of the accused poisoner, or a chorus of Ultramontanes denouncing Lola at Ludwig's side later in the song. And then the train bit would have a sort of drunken ballet in a freight carriage. And when she sings, "Helpless as a child when you held me in your arms and I knew that no other could ever love me," she's remembering Ludwig with his arms wrapped around her, it zooms in, and fades to her clutching herself in the dressing room in Castlemaine. And then the cukooing is a sequence of the train moving, seen from outside, with the door slid slightly open and Lola just visible, and the light shifting past the crack in the door, the way the light moves over you when you're in a car at night driving under streetlights. In black and white.
Maybe we should have a "If I was directing a Joanna Newsom music video..." thread.
More from Pale Fire. These are influences moreso than references. Or really, potential influences. All from MEM.
- "a thimblesworth of milky moon" Pale Fire has the word "thimbleful", and the title Pale Fire means moonlight.
- "the signifieds butt head with the signifiers/ and we all fall down slack-jawed to marvel at words" From PF: "We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery...we take it for granted...I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable"
- "warp-woof-wimble" vs PF's "see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web" (also, the "system of strings" from Sawdust & Diamonds?)
When Nick Drake died, there was a copy of 'The Myth of Sisyphus' by Albert Camus beside him. cf Only Skin and This Side of the Blue. Coincidence? Probably.
Haha fair enough. I'm a big Camus fan, La Peste is particularly brilliant. Also of all the existentialists his personal philosophy seems the most sensible and workable to me. Less mopey.
I wasn't being flippant - no offence intended. I just know very little about him other than that he was a goalkeeper in Algeria before he turned to writing. And since the book is implicated in Drake's final hours, I wouldn't want to risk it if I was feeling down! But I am reading something at the moment, and am already thinking what to follow it up with, so I will seriously keep him in mind. It'd have to be in translation, though - my Mancunian French won't serve me very well for the original!
"Rock-a-bye, baby, In the tree top. When the wind blows, The cradle will rock. When the bough breaks, The cradle will fall, And down will come baby, Cradle and all"
The end of this kind of harks back to the narrator in only skin taking the brown bird 'to a higher place' (up in the tree house). What do y'all think?
"The American roots of this odd rhyme come from a young pilgrim who saw Native American mothers hanging cradles in trees. When the wind blew, the cradles would rock and the babies in them would sleep."
This thread is really amazing, so many sharp eyes and ears on this forum! Thank you so much to all who have contributed.
I love the book Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin and I remember noticing words and events in the book that made me think of Joanna's music. Might just be grasping at straws by someone who wants to connect two of her favourite things (*cough*) but nevertheless..
Words that jumped at me from the book: estuaries, kingfishers, monkey, sawdust, landlocked, booming, (un)perturbed, listlessly, meteor & meteorite, jackrabbit, the pleiades, cassiopeia.
- A long, black and heavy whale and its baleen.
- Peter Lake's "little dittie" about Anarinda: "In you my bell shall toll, Anarinda, Anarinda, darling of the bay."
- Beverly's love of the sky and the constellations. (Emily)
- In the book, Reverend Mootfowl "lived steel, iron, and timber. -- He was a mad craftsman, a genius of tools" and he lived to build things. He lost an opportunity to build a great bridge and he became "deeply despondent, and lay all day, dejected". He then started working on something and summoned young Peter Lake, who was instructed to hit a bar with a sledgehammer. What Peter Lake did not know was that as he struck, the contraption Mootfowl had built drove a wooden log straight through Mootfowl's heart. (vs. "drove a murdering stake in and cleft me right down through my center" in Sawdust & Diamonds.)
- The book begins with Athansor (the white horse) getting loose (like horses getting loose in Monkey & Bear).
Sort of a "reverse reference", but I didn't want to start a new thread just for this.
I spent a good couple of hours last night, immersing myself in the wonderful song that is "En Gallop". I listened to, and watched on YouTube a variety of recordings by Joanna and covers by others. There's a 3-year old singing it, and even this weirdly distorted version () that somehow reminds me of BSU's version of "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?", and yet even in this distorted, stripped, and played-for-laughs (I think) rendition, the beauty and originality of the composition shines through.
When I got up this morning, one of the first things I read in the paper was an article by Mark Salisbury about a forthcoming stop-motion film called Frankenweenie. It included the following [my italics]:
"... in the affectionately named "Puppet Hospital", its shelves lined with disembodied heads and strange creatures, a team of technicians lovingly repair the film's puppet cast."
"And though I die, magpie, this I bequeath: by any other name, a jay is still blue."
In Romeo & Juliet there's the infamous "by any other name a rose would smell as sweet" (Or something like that; I don't remember exactly at the moment.)
I don't know how much of a reference this is, but in In California there's "watching the fox pick off my goldfish from their sorry golden state". California's nickname is the "golden state".
This one's perhaps so obvious to those of you in America, but I only realised it today, and for the sake of completeness, here goes:
Singing in the home is largely a thing of the past here now, but it did occur when a harp tune called "Oh Shenandoah" came on the radio, and I was surprised to hear the words "Across the wide Missouri"... Now I think back, I vaguely recall learning this song at my junior school. Anyway, according to Wikipedia, it's a traditional American song. There are many versions of its lyrics, any of which could have provided the quotes for Joanna's Erin. Here's one by Tennessee Ernie Ford:
Oh Shenandoah, I hear you calling, Hi-Ho, You rolling river. Oh Shenandoah, I long to hear you, Hi-Ho, I'm bound Away. 'Cross the wide, Missouri. Miss-ou-ri, She's a mighty river, Hi-Ho, You rolling River. When she rolls down, Her topsoils shiver, Hi-Ho, I'm bound Away, 'Cross the wide, Missouri. Farwell my Dearest, I'm bound to leave you, Hi-Ho, You rolling river. Oh Shenandoah, I'll not Deceive you, Hi-Ho, I'm bound Away. 'Cross the wide Missouri.
There is a huge database of thousands of English-language folk songs from around the world, and this one is numbered 324, which indicates that it is well-known.