¤ milky moon ¤

I think this song might be about Bill Calahan?

We saw goose-eggs in Baby Birch, too. That could be significant, if you're right.

But then she also called Will Oldham a silly goose in Go Long... But I think the eggs part is important here.

This song is so pretty. My favorite track, about 20 album listens in.

"A goose, alone, I suppose, can know the loneliness of geese,
who never find their peace,
whether north, or south, or west, or east; west or east"

This is my favorite track so far, too. I immediately loved it and have listened to it more than any other song. It seems to be one of the favorites of all of the superfans I know, but I've noticed that some of my friends who are only kind of into Joanna single it out as the track they aren't really into. I wonder what's up with that.

Also, Andrew, same @ those faces at those lines. Ha.

Really not into these personal readings of who it might be about, though.

This track floored me as the most impressive and exciting upon first listen.

I was just thinking about the last verse of Anecdotes and it gaining another meaning for me as our eldest daughter will be leaving home soon, and I thought to myself: the first to leave the nest! And that resonated so strongly with the bird images in Anecdotes all of a sudden. The line about only just being born into open air somehow reminds me of Esmé.
I sense a strong longing for motherhood in the album, I believe Joanna once said in an interview (I think around the release of HOOM?) that a child would be her biggest achievement or something along those lines? If there really is a theme of not being able to conceive and it's autobiographical, that would be really tough for her...

I don't think any of Joanna's songs can be pinned down as being about any one thing, and I do try not to assume that she's always talking about Bill Callahan since their relationship ended a long-ass time ago, but I couldn't help thinking about him in this bit:

A goose, alone, I suppose, can know the loneliness of geese,
who never find their peace,
whether north, or south, or west, or east; west or east

It just reminded me a lot of this passage from Bill's song "Too Many Birds":

Oh black bird, over black rain burns
This is not where you last knew rest
You fly all night to sleep on stone
The heartless rest that in the morn will be gone
You fly all night to sleep on stone
To return to the tree with too many birds

Which isn't to say I necessarily think it's an intentional reference, it just came to mind. I think the fact that both of them very clearly wrote about one another in songs during and after their relationship makes it easy to make these connections even if they don't actually exist. Especially for folks like me who love both of them and listen to them constantly.

Interesting connection, Claire. I'm also a fan of Bill Callahan's music and you're right that when one listens to both it is easy to find overlapping imagery and word choices. But it may all be coincidence. Especially since both of them have long used nature/animal imagery in their respective work, even prior to having known one another. Someone on the fb group posted a video of Javelin Unlanding under the Divers video. I have to admit there are striking similarities between the two. At the same time, the Divers was a collaboration that involved at least two other people (Keever and PTA) so I can't imagine the similarities were intentional. It is uncanny though how it begins with Callahan in the centre of a distant landscape (as the moon) and how later in the song black "smoke" erupts from a volcano that is clearly relying on a dye-in-water effect. It left me wondering to say the least.

Tracing the connections can be fun and add another layer of meaning to the songs. What bothers me is when some people on the Internet express total certainty that all of Joanna's songs are about him, even when there is little convincing evidence to go on. This bothers me, not so much because it can't be known and is personal to those individuals' experience, but more because presuming that all Joanna writes about is romantic love (Whether its about Bill or anyone else) is really reductive of how expansive her work is. She writes amazingly complex songs about romantic love, but also about the widest gamut of human relationships. I don't like how some people seen to narrow the scope of her work based on their own preoccupations.

I guess that is one way that people are able to connect with the songs though?

Anyway, if any song is about Bill on this album it would be Goose Eggs in my opinion. But the perspective is clearly a retrospective one, reflecting at a distance. This would fit with the emphasis on memory on this album.

Yeah, I think it's kind of lazy to go right to "That one's about Bill, that one's about Noah, that one's about Andy" because there's so much going on in her music. But at the same time it's not a secret that there's a lot of Bill in Have One On Me (just as there's a lot of Joanna in Woke on a Whaleheart, Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle and even Apocalypse). I don't like when people try to reduce her songs to being just about the very surface-level things we know about her romantic relationships but it also bugs me when people act like those relationships aren't part of her music. Like, what do you think Does Not Suffice is about if not the end of a specific romantic relationship? One of the great things about Joanna's lyrics is that they're so complex that they can encompass a lot of things all at once. Why shouldn't her relationships be part of that tapestry?

Anyhow, going into this album I would not have expected there to be even a whiff of Bill since they broke up nearly 10 years ago but I'm not going to deny that I see the Goose Eggs connection.

The more I think about it, the more the "infertility" hypothesis rings true. I even think there might be hints of a miscarriage woven through the tapestry. Very speculative, I know, but it would be a very ironic twist of fate if she had an abortion with Bill and now has trouble having children with her husband?

Ick. I almost want to ban that kind of speculation because it sort of grosses me out: that's her business and no one else's, surely? If we were meant to know, she'd have told us. She has let some personal information go: about her friend's death being the inspiration for Cosmia, for example. Evidently, she thinks that what we know already is enough for us to interpret her songs. I mean, go nuts, but it is a little bit creepy to speculate about strangers' reproductive health.

Just to be clear: although I raised an interpretation relating to infertility, I nowhere stated that this narrative theme was personal to Joanna. I would certainly hope that is not the case! She has stated that each song on divers takes the perspective of a different character or approach to a common theme, so I take this to mean there is quite a bit of distance between the stories on this album and her own personal life. The narrator on the song Divers states "never will I wed" whereas in reality, of course Joanna is married. So obviously the themes and characters on the album aren't meant to be taken as autobiography.

I acknowledge that my "infertility" interpretations could be way off. I'm only just starting to get to know the lyrics and tentatively putting some ideas out there. That said, I think the lines I referred to from Goose Eggs could easily lead to this interpretation. It might be wrong, but its certainly not a totally arbitrary reading. The choice to call the track Goose Eggs after a line in Baby Birch, which pretty explicitly deals with some kind of child desire/loss is a pretty intentional narrative connection to say the least.

I'm sorry if anyone interpreted my comments as implying anything personal about joanna. At the same time I would hope that a fan forum of her work would allow a degree of freedom for various interpretations of songs and not be quick to censor people's ideas just because the subject matter is uncomfortable or contentious.

I think reading infertility as a theme into the lyrics is absolutely legitimate: maternity, pregnancy, etc. are, to me, very clear themes in Joanna's work. What I'm objecting to isn't analysis of those themes, but rather, the reading into the lyrics of speculative autobiographical details (which I'm not accusing you of!). The songs aren't necessarily confessional: war is a persistent theme, too, but no one speculates that Joanna fought in Iraq. An artist shouldn't have to feel intimately exposed as a result of their work, unless they want to, which I don't believe we have any indication that she does. What should be of interest to us is not her life, except insofar as she chooses to reveal it to us, but her work on its own.

Don't worry, I'm not going to censor anyone! Even if I wanted to, procedurally, the introduction of a rule would require first the support of two of three admins (I'm the only one here, so I'd have to call the other two in, and they almost certainly wouldn't support it, and, supposing I turned tyrant, they could remove my admin status if they did show up), and then the compilation of an up-to-date electoral roll and a referendum.

Oops, sorry for speeding the discussion and Headless Caboose's words into "gossip territory". After reading what she wrote here and in the Leaving The City thread, I suddenly saw this theme emerge all over the album too, and the most obvious thing would be to relate it to Joanna's personal life, especially recalling that interview line... And what Claire said about "unless she specifically sings about it": true, but I think that's just the point, she might be singing about this, though in a coded way?
In my mind Only Skin and Baby Birch are connected to each other, and partly touching upon the same subject. The illustration that accompanies the lyrics for Only Skin in the Ys booklet is of water and sky and birds flying in a V formation, which to me strengthens the association of those two songs with Goose Eggs...

Fair enough about associating the two songs, and so on, but is it necessary to associate them then to Joanna's biography? By all means, associate them thematically, or as related parts of an abstract narrative about no one in particular, but I don't think it's necessary to treat them as evidence of the unrevealed details of a stranger's private life.