Buy Or Don’t Buy

I first realized I liked Joanna Newsom when I listened to “Colleen” and thought it sounded a lot like Kate Bush; I first realized I loved Joanna Newsom when I looked up the lyrics to “Colleen” and discovered it was about a woman in Victorian England coming to grips with the fact that she used to be a whale.

But for her being one of my favorite musicians, Newsom’s LPs always left me the slightest bit cold. I couldn’t get into her debut, The Milk-Eyed Mender, for a mixture of good and bad reasons. I can’t hear beyond the frog-child squawk of her early vocals, but beyond that the songs on the album seem to me like cute little arts and crafts projects you appreciate, buy and then leave on a shelf and never think of again. And while her 2006 follow-up Ys is a beautiful album, it’s also extremely heavy (the ending of “Monkey & Bear” still puts me in a weird place) and a little bit distant. Its 11-minute behemoths feel more like museum exhibits than songs: You can admire them from afar, but they’re definitely Joanna Newsom’s songs, not yours.

It wasn’t until I stumbled around Hype Machine and found some live tracks that I discovered my favorite Newsom song, a new track called “Esme”:

“Esme” is no doubt her prettiest song, and also one of her simplest. The tone and tempo don’t shift anywhere near as dramatically as the tracks on Ys. The harp runs sound a lot like what our notion of a harp should sound like. The lyrics bounce on the sweet swaying rhythms of a nursery rhyme: “It’s a beautiful town / With the rain coming down / Blackberry, rosemary, jimmy-crack-corn.” (Not that intellect is any vice in music, but sometimes it’s nice to not need a dictionary when you listen to a song.) And her voice reaches heights I didn’t know she could hit. When she scales the “But if you are scared / If you are blue” climax, a part of me melts every time.

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All of this is a roundabout way of saying that for two years I had but one hope for the new Joanna Newsom album, and that was that it contained some version of “Esme.” So when I heard that Have One on Me, her latest, would be a two-hour, three-CD opus, well, that was reason for optimism.

As it turns out, “Esme” is on the album, along with 17 other songs. Yes, that’s right: 18 songs, with an average song length of seven minutes. This is a long, long, LONG album — only 40 minutes shorter than Avatar — and it is work to slog through it all. But not as hard as you might think

The baroque tidal wave of orchestration that enveloped much of Ys is gone and the result is a much more relaxed album. There’s more space between the instruments here, and more variety in them too: piano, horn, electric guitar and I swear even a harmonica buried deep in the mix at places. And apart from the title track, written from the perspective of 19th-century courtesan Lola Montez — that’s our Joanna — the historical/metaphysical/astrological angles get short shrift here. Instead, Newsom’s talkin’ ’bout love: romantic love, violent love, break-up love, niece-and-nephew love.

The standout is “Good Intentions Paving Co.”, an ode to a new relationship gradually turning serious, and the most infectiously exuberant new song I’ve heard since “Two Weeks.” Riding a bouncy soul piano, Newsom sounds more gleeful than ever thought possible: “And I’ve been fessing double-fast / Addressing questions nobody asked / I’ll get this joy off of my chest at last / And I will love you ’til the noise has long since passed.” And after a crooning breakdown, the songs ends with an instrumental fade-out as the piano and trumpet play a lazy duel; it’s probably the grooviest minute-and-a-half she’s ever recorded. Some R&B artist somewhere needs to pull a Solange and cover this, immediately: instant crossover smash!

The rest of the album never reaches those heights, although it’s maybe unfair to expect it to. “Soft as Chalk,” the only other ‘fast’ song, dances its way around two awesome piano riffs but never is able to lock in and turn things up to 11. The rest are slow songs in Newsom’s familiar key/tempo range, but the best of these still reveal secret depths. “Easy” starts off as an lumbering ballad before periodically unveiling a hidden sexy side. The break-up ballad “Does Not Suffice” wrings more meaning than it should be able to out of re-purposing the piano part from “In California”, the long-distance love story that came nine tracks before. And Newsom begins “Kingfisher” by gently asking “Whose is the hand that I will hold?” and ends with something much more macabre: “And I saw that my blood had no bounds / spreading in a circle like an atom bomb / soaking and felling everything in its path.”

Elsewhere the pleasure are simpler. “Baby Birch” and “Ribbon Bows” both weave gorgeous vocal melodies, while “‘81″ offers a spare harp part and this very Newsonian appreciation of agriculture: “I found a little plot of land in the Garden of Eden / It was dirt and dirt is all the same.”

But compared to other epic-length albums, Have One on Me suffers from a relative lack of stylistic adventurousness. The reason the album feels longer than, say, Sandinista!, is that Newsom can only go so far. I’ve listened to the whole thing five or six times through and I’m still not quite able to tell apart “Go Long,” “Occident,” “No Provenence” and “Autumn,” other than that I’m pretty sure I like the first two and dislike the latter. On another album, four songs that sound similar might not be that big of a deal, but here that’s nearly half an hour of slow, spare and vaguely downbeat music with obtuse meaning.

Ironically though, for the most part even the lack of ambition — and yes, this is probably the only two-hour album you could call ‘unambitious’ — works, in a strange way. The phrasings of the music and lyrics don’t follow as strict a syntax as they did on Ys (listen to “Have One on Me” again, comparing it to “Emily”), but the end result is a much looser and freer album. You don’t get the feeling that these are songs that have had all the life meticulously plotted out of them. These are songs that, with enough listens, could be yours.

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And as for “Esme”? As I wrote before, it’s here, near the end. Like a few of the songs on the album, I prefer the live version; the recorded version is a touch slower and softer and that makes all the difference. Stuffed into this huge album, it’s easy to forget that’s it’s coming. Odd that the song I waited years for turned into an afterthought.