The New York Times
Posted: 04 Jun 2010, 14:58http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/22/arts/ ... 2choi.html
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: February 21, 2010
JOANNA NEWSOM
“Have One on Me”
(Drag City)
Maybe it’s preposterous to suggest that Joanna Newsom’s three-CD, two-hour album, “Have One on Me,” is in any way stripped down. Along the way its songs deploy horns and strings, electric guitar and African and Balkan instruments alongside Ms. Newsom’s own harp and piano. The title song, which muses on the international intrigues and inner desires of the 19th-century courtesan Lola Montez, runs 11 minutes. Yet there’s good reason for both the length of the album and its occasional lavish moments. Ms. Newsom has discovered how to open up her music: to let it whisper and swell, to be swept into the purely musical pleasures of an ingenious arrangement or to let simplicity and silence speak for her.
Her melodies often have the lilt of Celtic ballads and waltzes along with their potential for incantation, carrying a narrative in a repeated phrase. They also hint at hymns, medieval music and Joni Mitchell. The lyrics, as on her previous albums, hold historical references along with images of nature that can be blissful or dangerous. “There is a spring, not far from here/The water runs both sweet and clear,” she sings in “Ribbon Bows.” “Both sweet and clear, and cold/could crack your bones with veins of gold.”
Ms. Newsom has peeled away some of her past whimsy and opacity. Her rhapsodic songs spill over with ideas; in “You and Me, Bess” the narrator is executed for stealing a horse, while in “ ’81” she finds “a little plot of land in the Garden of Eden.” But song after song considers love: “Easy, easy, my man and me” are the album’s first words, though of course that doesn’t come true. “On a good day, you can see the end from here,” she sings in “On a Good Day.” She sings about distance and loss, about decisions and regrets, about love that persists despite her better instincts, about the love of parents, children and God. She can be intimate — “I fell for you, honey/ Easy as falling asleep,” she sings in “Good Intentions Paving Company” — or metaphysical.
For much of the album Ms. Newsom uses only her harp for accompaniment, as she did on “The Milk-Eyed Mender” (2004). Then her voice was piping and insistent, and she plucked harp patterns with the steady, relentless momentum she learned from West African music. Her monumental 2006 album, “Ys,” added lush orchestral arrangements by Van Dyke Parks, bringing dense musical allusions to lyrics that arrived in torrents.
The spaciousness of the songs in “Have One on Me” makes her music differently three dimensional. Ms. Newsom has grown into her voice, which is now many voices. She can still be witchy or childlike, but she can also be sly or flirtatious and can lean toward madrigal, country twang or torch song. The larger-scale arrangements loom up and disappear like mirages. Cascades of plucked African kora briefly and dizzyingly spin off her harp in “Go Long.” As she mourns a lost child in “Baby Birch,” at first alone with her harp, other instruments, including a distorted electric guitar, float in like glimmers of what might have been.
Through the album Ms. Newsom takes her time without squandering it. (Presenting it as three CDs when it could fit on two is one way of telling listeners not to rush.) Time is very much on her mind throughout “Have One on Me,” as the essence of both music and life. “Kingfisher,” the album’s penultimate song, ponders eternity: “Stand here and name the one you love, beneath the drifting ashes,” she sings, “and, in naming, rise about time, as it, flashing, passes.”
Even as Ms. Newsom’s songs stretch out, they reach inward, and out to those she has loved.
JON PARELES
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: February 21, 2010
JOANNA NEWSOM
“Have One on Me”
(Drag City)
Maybe it’s preposterous to suggest that Joanna Newsom’s three-CD, two-hour album, “Have One on Me,” is in any way stripped down. Along the way its songs deploy horns and strings, electric guitar and African and Balkan instruments alongside Ms. Newsom’s own harp and piano. The title song, which muses on the international intrigues and inner desires of the 19th-century courtesan Lola Montez, runs 11 minutes. Yet there’s good reason for both the length of the album and its occasional lavish moments. Ms. Newsom has discovered how to open up her music: to let it whisper and swell, to be swept into the purely musical pleasures of an ingenious arrangement or to let simplicity and silence speak for her.
Her melodies often have the lilt of Celtic ballads and waltzes along with their potential for incantation, carrying a narrative in a repeated phrase. They also hint at hymns, medieval music and Joni Mitchell. The lyrics, as on her previous albums, hold historical references along with images of nature that can be blissful or dangerous. “There is a spring, not far from here/The water runs both sweet and clear,” she sings in “Ribbon Bows.” “Both sweet and clear, and cold/could crack your bones with veins of gold.”
Ms. Newsom has peeled away some of her past whimsy and opacity. Her rhapsodic songs spill over with ideas; in “You and Me, Bess” the narrator is executed for stealing a horse, while in “ ’81” she finds “a little plot of land in the Garden of Eden.” But song after song considers love: “Easy, easy, my man and me” are the album’s first words, though of course that doesn’t come true. “On a good day, you can see the end from here,” she sings in “On a Good Day.” She sings about distance and loss, about decisions and regrets, about love that persists despite her better instincts, about the love of parents, children and God. She can be intimate — “I fell for you, honey/ Easy as falling asleep,” she sings in “Good Intentions Paving Company” — or metaphysical.
For much of the album Ms. Newsom uses only her harp for accompaniment, as she did on “The Milk-Eyed Mender” (2004). Then her voice was piping and insistent, and she plucked harp patterns with the steady, relentless momentum she learned from West African music. Her monumental 2006 album, “Ys,” added lush orchestral arrangements by Van Dyke Parks, bringing dense musical allusions to lyrics that arrived in torrents.
The spaciousness of the songs in “Have One on Me” makes her music differently three dimensional. Ms. Newsom has grown into her voice, which is now many voices. She can still be witchy or childlike, but she can also be sly or flirtatious and can lean toward madrigal, country twang or torch song. The larger-scale arrangements loom up and disappear like mirages. Cascades of plucked African kora briefly and dizzyingly spin off her harp in “Go Long.” As she mourns a lost child in “Baby Birch,” at first alone with her harp, other instruments, including a distorted electric guitar, float in like glimmers of what might have been.
Through the album Ms. Newsom takes her time without squandering it. (Presenting it as three CDs when it could fit on two is one way of telling listeners not to rush.) Time is very much on her mind throughout “Have One on Me,” as the essence of both music and life. “Kingfisher,” the album’s penultimate song, ponders eternity: “Stand here and name the one you love, beneath the drifting ashes,” she sings, “and, in naming, rise about time, as it, flashing, passes.”
Even as Ms. Newsom’s songs stretch out, they reach inward, and out to those she has loved.
JON PARELES