
(Drag City)
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Those with cynicism can view it as a California story through and through -- Joanna Newsom came up as the privileged offspring of two hippie-ish doctors who forbade her from most modern media and got her classically trained on the harp. She was a Waldorf student and went to college for composition, joined a band, then dropped out and drifted and, moving to ever more elaborate harp-based folk songs, recorded a couple of crudely formed but ambitious EPs that circulated among friends and colleagues and got her a deal with the renegade indie Drag City, who released this debut album; and at barely 22, playing songs she'd been working up since she was a teenager, she managed to make a cultural splash not just in folk but in indie rock circles and generally managed to quickly become rendered as a sort of lifestyle brand by those who understood, and (just as loudly) by those who didn't. What a story, the "special" reasserting their special-ness.
Except that the record is also, thanks in part to the practice runs of those two private CDRs, an instance of everything coming together -- musically, vocally, melodically, lyrically -- in the hands of a master, and I will not apologize for calling her one nor will I ever regret doing so, whose assurance comes from not just seemingly limitless technical capacity but from a degree of maturity that isn't frequently heard in the lyrics and music of those many times her age at the time. Hers is not an intellectual, stuffy music that conjures up thoughts of purist classical ambition or (at this stage) prog rock; it is, to its core, human and fragile -- but also uncommonly poetic and emotional in ways that mine a certain richness that calls back to the basest, purest feelings of ancient songform.
Much of it is her voice: an unorthodox, colorful instrument undaunted by its technical limitations, and rendering all of her early music incredibly distinctive by default. (While more nuanced and in some ways equally powerful today, her voice has inevitably taken on a different, less strident character since she undertook surgery on her vocal chords in the late 2000s.) Like few other singers of her generation, her evocative work as a vocalist fully reframes the ideas she carefully establishes in her writing; to even call it an acquired taste is missing the point, because like that of Bjork or Yoko Ono or even Bob Dylan, that voice is part and parcel with her storytelling craft. A version of "Bridges and Balloons" sung by an ordinary, conventional singer wouldn't make any sense, because it earns so much of its power and grace from every crack and harsh modulation Newsom generates, mutating and enhancing her own stunning melody. But her generosity and singularity as a performer asserts itself elsewhere as well, as it would continue to in the remainder of her output to come; it is the brand of music, like Dylan's or Leonard Cohen's, that invites the most personal kind of relationship, and is specifically fashioned both to immensely delight its creator and also to leave enough space for highly specialized deliverance for those who are invited into it.
The almost mystical experience conjured up by "Bridges and Balloons," one of many songs on this and future records to lean upon ocean imagery, is as heavily controlled by Newsom's very consciously naive, unchecked vocal articulation of Bridge to Terabithia childhood fantasies as it is by the artful, eloquent words themselves; years later it could still be her most instantly stirring and kind recording, suffused with longing and a strange variety of wisdom to emanate from such a young person whose early life had, by all outside indicators, been relatively sheltered. Yet that very conflict seems in some way to tell the full story: it is by looking outside herself into an unfamiliar, unexplored, nonexistent worlds that Newsom acquires the experience to tell her strange, cockeyed folktale, and to hopefully include us as "the ones to've seen."
For me personally, "Bridges and Balloons" was the introduction, back in the days when I discovered music by leaving browser windows from internet radio stations open, and like everyone else I immediately found the voice jarring and compelling -- it seemed that it could be as likely that of an old woman or a young child, and part of me was disinterested in finding out which. More importantly, I was haunted by its unashamed sense of genuine beauty -- which I believe is also one reason that The Milk Eyed Mender captured the indie rock zeitgeist at the time, the fatigue from years of disaffected sneering, by then co-opted by corporate labels with the Killers and such, giving way to material like this and Funeral that opened so-called "college music" up to heretofore uncool moments of unfettered expression. It also called to mind things like Elizabeth Cotten and the Carter Family, without really resembling either (although you should notice that a version of the British-to-Appalachian folk song "Three Little Babes" is buried on this album) except in the sense that they found such beauty in an ethereal, earthy conglomeration of music and pure sound that could feel almost accidental -- as though the songs could only come from the earth itself, devised by no human, but also couldn't possibly be part of the world we knew. And it additionally seemed infinitely, wistfully, desperately sad. The song is under four minutes, but there were whole universes contained in it: glee and passion, but regret and seclusion too.
The Milk Eyed Mender thus became for me (though not until sometime in 2008) what Noah Baumbach once remembered David Bowie's Let's Dance being for him: a record on which I initially couldn't even hear a single one of the songs apart from the first one. I just couldn't get over "Bridges and Balloons," as occasionally happens to me (most recently with "Cattails" by Big Thief, and concurrently at the time with "For the Widows in Paradise, for the Fatherless in Ypsilanti" by Sufjan Stevens), and played it until I all but knew it backwards, before I could even think to move along to the other songs; and no matter, they were there when I needed them.
Once I did make it to the second track, there was more reason yet for me to celebrate. "Sprout and the Bean" immediately reasserts how far this album pushes beyond folk music into its own stunning, cordoned-off variety of soul, even as the pure pleasure and beauty of Newsom's harp playing, the curling elegance of the rhythm and melody she has written for it, and the infinite nuance in her voice represent perfectly well the outgrowth of deep inspiration from minimalism. Like many of these songs, it exclusively features herself and her harp, though her voice is tracked several times on the chorus; and like just as many, it is purely mesmerizing. The songwriting is flawless, not just the perplexing but deeply troubling lyric -- full of white coats, miserable sleeps and danger -- that's interpreted by many fans as a predecessor to her more direct abortion song "Baby Birch," but in the rhythmic trickery of the voice's intricate meddling with the harp, with the drama extracted from each careful word, with the heart-stopping downward chord shift on the second verse an unlikely peak. And, of course, Newsom's unapologetic strain that betrays so much.
It felt at the time like this was some of the most private music I'd ever heard, like a true self-exorcism, right up to the sense that some of Newsom's words had a meaning that only she could possibly reach or comprehend; there were other singer-songwriters who had done this, but nearly all with more conventional instrumentation or less elaborate compositions that lent themselves almost naturally to a more communal experience. Yet simultaneously, Newsom's records have never had the distancing effect that "fussy" music from Scott Miller to King Crimson to Dirty Projectors tends toward, more like the curious, off-kilter intensity of Brian Wilson's work, which would create new populist excitements by finding new detours, would even create new instruments by merely combining them. What's more remarkable yet is how, like Wilson, Newsom seems to render all consciousness of her ingenuity moot, in favor of the sheer joy and warmth of listening -- that's what makes this pop music rather than an intellectual exercise.
And in turn, nearly all of these songs feel now like classics, and frankly did not take long to feel like that in the first place, certainly not to me; I suppose the joys of "Cassiopeia" (like many of these songs, a reprise from one of her CDR demos) are comparatively limited, and its lyric feels atypically slight, and that the best moment of the ghostly "Swansea" is its rabbit-friendly paean to chewing. Otherwise, from the quizzical and tough "Book of Right On," exploring the contradiction of dominance and submissiveness and thereby overflowing with sensuality, to the echo chambered, impeccably judged melody "Calm, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie" that contains yet another of Newsom's subtlest, most gorgeous hooks at the end of the verse, these are songs that operate at a level of shocking confidence and virtuosity, as shown by the pride and ease with which they now stand beside much of the material of three subsequent and increasingly grand albums by the now-veteran.
Confronted with something like the lullaby "Sadie," with total unfiltered vulnerability in its vocal and lyric about death and loss, you wonder -- much as you do when hearing the melody swell up on "Cosmia" from Ys -- how a person writes stuff this beautiful. How does a person write "And all that we built, and all that we breathed / And all that we spilt, or pulled up like weeds / Is piled up in back, and it burns irrevocably / And we spoke up in turns till the silence crept over me"? That is Cries and Whispers in a couple of seconds; that is bereavement, all too well-defined. Even at her earthiest and most playful, on the vaudevillian "Inflammatory Writ," she sings about a lack of creative confidence and you just have to laugh. It all has such a supernatural, overwhelming force. The arrangements, the recording, all that is simple -- would never be so simple again, in fact, starting with the recruitment of Van Dyke Parks for strings in 2006 -- and maybe that's the essence, that the closeness we feel to these songs is born of their intimacy, which also renders it impossible to deny their nearly magical, hypnotic pull.
"This Side of the Blue" is my favorite Joanna Newsom song; it saved my life sometime in 2009. That may be a slight exaggeration; I don't think I was that close to the brink -- but I still instinctively finding myself wanting to credit it, because the night it suddenly reached me felt very very important. Without having a close line-by-line understanding of its sly commentary on existentialism (Newsom dropped out of college; I didn't go in the first place), its basic point still got through and throttled me: its laughing over the sheer absurdity of reality while accepting its limitations and the limits that handicap every one of us in embracing the totality of our weird experience of life, the shrug in Newsom's voice when she announces that "it's all that you can do." It felt like it transcended day-to-day life while somehow processing, digesting, challenging every bit of it. Like the art for which I felt the most gratitude as a teenager, it penetrated an apathetic bubble and completely refocused me. I was inarticulate in the face of it, but deep down I knew what it was telling me. It is the kind of work, like a Hopper painting, that causes you to see the banalities of life altogether differently, or to approach the source of one's despair with a kind of philosophical fearlessness. The song felt smarter, braver than everything; and its relative modesty made it more so. ("'En Gallop" betrays a similar fixation upon acceptance -- in contrast to the later desperation to preserve and persevere on Divers, an album in which the fact of love is present over and above the wondering about it -- and also boasts one of Newsom's most beautiful pieces of rhythmic experimentation, but there's an odd sense that thanks to that extra flourishing, it can't quite compare.)
Newsom's albums always come fitted with handy climaxes, although this one may come slightly too early: "Peach, Plum, Pear" is perhaps the most immaculately constructed of all her creations in the sense of arrangement and recording, advancing leaps and bounds over her earlier, much more tentative demo of the same song; on 2002's Walnut Whales it's keyboard-driven and functions as a bit of a simpler (and rather amateurishly sung) distraction between two more elaborate compositions, but in its revised form -- with a hypnotic, high-pitched, cheerfully strange chord progression repeated endlessly on her harp, and with vocals audibly overcome with the very emotional openness carefully sidestepped on "This Side of the Blue" -- it is, for an artist to whom language remains so important, a recording that renders language nearly obsolete. You needn't study its witty, sharp, erotically suggestive and eventually quite raw lyric to uncover its yearning for a long-gone love affair, whose origins are clearer -- as they always are -- than its evolution and murky finish, despite the nursery-rhyme irony of the title and closing phrase. Every misplaced use of "childlike" or "elvish" or whatever else in armchair analyses by outsiders to Newsom's work disappears in any kind of relevance when presented with the enthusiastic pain and directness of every word she sings roughly from "I am blue / and unwell" onward; and to this day, her low, wounded, melodically heartbreaking reading of "you've changed / soooome" may be her greatest moment as a singer -- and for me, one of the most deeply touching moments in music of this century.
Beyond these rationalizations, The Milk Eyed Mender conjures up these memories -- as does all of Newsom's music, but none of it with this degree of built-in nostalgia and pining -- because it is designed to cultivate that kind of a rapport. It's extraordinary because nearly all of its tracks are rendered as simultaneously sophisticated, infinite in their depth of curiosity, and tremendously pleasurable and immediate in their impact; the sizable cottage industry of lyrical analysis that's sprung up around Newsom is amusing because, as with Bob Dylan or John Darnielle, it serves a worthy purpose while also kind of missing the point: that the cornucopia of words and music, the way these words are sung, tells us infinitely more than any annotation could. Newsom delivers her imagery as much through sound, voice, music as through her words, as fiercely provocative as those words can be. As a result The Milk Eyed Mender is mysterious and alluring but never distancing or pretentious; more importantly, to return to it is to experience a whole cycle of evocative thrills, with so much still yet to discover, so much life left for it to illuminate. As if I weren't already grateful enough.