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Have One On Me review

In anticipation of Tuesday’s gig, here (finally) is my review of Have One On Me:

It’s been over three months of gradual (gradually becoming constant) listening and finally I’m in a position to deliver a full assessment of Have One On Me, Joanna Newsom’s latest album. My initial reactions were not very favourable – I found her newly softened voice somewhat insipid and the exhibitionist sleeve pictures off-putting – but a lot of this negativity is part of any reaction to a new work from an artist I hugely respect. When faced with change in our idols, we tend to stubbornly retrench, refusing to see anything good in the new. I was similarly cool towards Ys at first, before the spell was cast.

And this spell is the secret to Newsom’s talent. She can conceivably be compared to some contemporary singers, writers and composers, and certainly has drawn inspiration from a huge variety of sources, but like all the best artists she creates a world that is entirely unique and that can only be appreciated on its own terms. Throughout her three full-length albums she has maintained certain thematic consistencies, such as immersion in the natural world, a love of wordplay and elaborate language, a kind of timeless musical dreaminess, acute observations on key philosophical questions and an unapologetic celebration of femininity. Despite the different musical styles of the three works – The Milk-Eyed Mender, Ys and the current album – the continuity and development of these themes mark each one out as uniquely Newsomesque. This is her world, and the listener is a guest in that world.

It’s impossible not to be drawn into this world once you take the time to listen closely to her words and harp playing. Like many who inhabit a heightened, mysterious artistic sphere, Newsom seems quite normal and placid in real life. The songs on Have One On Me are more emotionally direct than anything she’s written before, and clearly inspired by real-life events, but it would be simplistic to take them as a straightforward commentary on Joanna Newsom the person. Instead they are a kind of alternative reality, where the songs’ nameless narrator sings of grandiose love, cataclysmic betrayal and the joy of sheer existence, occupying strange liminent spaces between solidity and air, music and silence, dreams and reality.

The songs vary from heavily orchestrated epics to almost silent, harp-driven elegies. There is a huge variety of instrumentation running through the album, to the point where it almost seems distorted and confused, but Newsom knows what she is doing – a complete listen, though time-consuming, reveals that not a note or a line in this work is accidental. (Headphones are also recommended for listening, part of the reason it underwhelmed me at first was the way much of the musical complexity was lost through traditional stereo speakers.)

Newsom has alluded in interviews before to her albums being inspired by a different element, and she returned to that theme in a recent interview with the Times when she said of Have One On Me that it is “earth and dirt, very grounded”. Certainly, themes of home, while strong on all her previous work, are the carrying force of this triple-CD opus. She returns again and again to the theme of pastoral home, whether in the form of an allegory like in ‘81′, or directly, as in “Occident”, where she sings ‘to leave your home and your family/for some delusion of property – well I can’t go…’.

However, home is not a place of unambigiuous peace. ‘In California’ – placed pointedly at the dead centre of the album – presents the narrator fleeing the ‘trouble and sorrow’ of the world by resolutely ‘abandoning the thought of anywhere but home’. This flight is not joyful, rather it is a denial of life’s fullness, emphasised by recurring references to loss and heartbreak and the statement ‘I am no longer afraid of anything – save the life that here awaits’. Even the most stalwart homebirds can’t hide away forever, and must face the confusion and strangeness of the wider world. The narrator loves her home, but comes to understand that: ‘I am native to it, but I’m overgrown’.

An elusive man is the next most important character in this work, after the constantly present narrator. He stars in the opening track, ‘Easy’ where the hazy joy of lying in bed with a lover is tainted by the narrator’s knowledge that her all-consuming love is not fully returned. The beloved’s ambiguity leads the narrator to ever wilder declarations of undying love ‘I was born to love, and I intend to love you’, ‘Pluck every last daisy clean, till only I may love you’ and so on. Themes of self-effacement in the name of love pop up again and again in the album, most notably in that track where she declares ‘you must meet me to see me, I am barely here’. Similarly, the narrator frequently refers to herself as a fragile creature, a ‘little clock that trembles on the hour’ in ‘In Califiornia’ and ‘your little nurse’ or a ‘princess of Kentucky’ with ‘ankles bound in gauze’ in ‘Go Long’. Yet the album as a whole does not reveal a personality that is likely to to be swallowed up by another, and sharp irony and wit, as well as affection, come to the fore in other songs that dissect that unhappy relationship.

Towards the end of the title track, after the section told from the point of view of 19th-century courtesan and dancer Lola Montez (another creative woman trying to find a balance between self-expression and love), the song swings back to the present-day narrator’s point of view, listing moments from the past that have leapt into sudden relief in her memory. She repeatedly maintains that she was ‘helpless as a child’ when her lover held her in his arms. This helpless longing is expressed musically in a gorgeously swooping vocal arrangement, the very power of which reveals to us, more than any lyrics could, that the narrator has mistaken great sex for great love, and is suffering the consequences of that mistake.

But the narrator has not lost her sense of humour to heartbreak, admitting frankly in the wonderfully rollicking ‘Good Intentions Paving Company’ that ‘I knew right away that the lay was steep, but I fell for you honey, easy as falling asleep’. She is a winning mix of sardonic and sweet in the line ‘I know you meant to show the extent to which you gave a goddang, you ranged real hot and real cold but I’m sold’. The impermanence of the love that she has banked so much on is revealed when she refers to it as ‘this thing we’ve been playing at, darling’ which will only work when the beloved is wearing his ‘staying hat’.

Later in the album,’Soft As Chalk’ looks at the affair with the wryly detached eye of someone who has realised she spent a great deal of time falling in love by herself, as the narrator frankly admits that back in the heady days when she and her man would ‘talk as soft as chalk till morning came, pale as a pearl’, ‘time was just a line that you fed me when you wanted to stay’. That song ends with her calmly wishing her old love well, but acknowledging that her own life must move on:- ‘I have to catch a cab and my bags are at the carousel – and then, lord knows, time will only tell’.

In all these tracks wonderful tunes, arresting lyrical imagery and intriguing musical arrangements breath new life into what is probably the oldest of poetic themes. The only track that could be considered anything resembling a classic ‘f**k you’, is the spooky ‘Go Long’, where frightening images of broken ankles, rooms made of ‘the gold teeth of the women who loved you’ and a burning river are offset by perhaps the most heartbreakingly direct admonishments of the whole album: ‘Who is going to bear your beautiful children…Who will take care of you when you’re old and dying?’. Musically, that track pays homage to the West African influences of Newsom’s early work with a pitch-perfect collaboration between her harp and the Malian kora.

The main story arc of this album is the tale of this ultimately unrequited love, and it’s fitting that the last track, ‘Does Not Suffice’ closes the book on that story. The narrator catalogues the possessions she packs up as she leaves the home she and her man have shared, the ‘pretty dresses…sparkling rings….coats of boucle, jacquard and cashmere’ – a veritable junk-shop of belongings that remind her lover of how ‘easy I was not’  (a line that ties in nicely with the opening track). She goes on to imagine her newly freed lover ‘stretching out’ on a ‘boundless bed’ and sadly tells him ‘everywhere I tried to love you/is yours again, and only yours.’ Sad, but not despairing – the narrator may have initially wanted to immolate her identity and replace it with that of her beloved’s, but has come to learn that real love is the meeting of two equal individuals, not the absorption of one into another.

The narrator’s sense of self is reaffirmed by her celebrations of home, friendship and her femininity. Newsom celebrates motherhood, both that of others and her potential own – the latter in ‘Baby Birch’ a beautiful hymn to a dreamed baby daughter, and the former in the exquisite ‘Esme’, a celebration of the joy a child brings to everyone. She links themes of motherhood, home and creativity together in a way that seems both ancient and thrillingly new, in a piece of art that is firmly, unselfconsciously female in its aesthetic. Newsom’s artistic world does not and cannot define itself in relation to a male prototype. She sings on Go Long  of ‘the loneliness of you mighty men, with your jaws and fists and guitars and pens, and your sugarlip – but I’ve never been to the firepits with you mighty men’. It’s clear that that the world of the ‘mighty men’ is a different world to hers, with a different aesthetic, and even the narrator’s love for one man does not cause her to turn her back on or lose pride in her femaleness. She does not criticise or denigrate the male world, but simply takes for granted that it is different, and not suitable to her mode of creative expression.

The musical feel of this album is quite different to the medieval-style arrangements of its predecessor or the minimalism of her debut, though it shares the common Newsomian themes of rich instrumentation and experimental tunes. Newsom has said of this album that its sound is supposed to evoke a hedonistic, 1920s atmosphere, but the musical styles are broader than that, taking in 70s Californian rock, 60s folk, avant-garde composition and any number of other influences. Colloborators Ryan Francesconi and Neal Morgan bring wonderful warmth to the string and percussion arrangements respectively. Francesconi contributes guitar, banjo, mandolin and the beautifully rich-sounding Bulgarian tambura, used to great effect on the title track. Morgan’s clattering drumwork provides the backbone to some of the best tracks, including ‘Have One On Me’, ‘Good Intentions Paving Company’ and ‘Soft as Chalk’, but his percussion is more than just a backdrop – he plays the drums as a fully realised instrument. Combined with Newsom’s harp – more accomplished than ever – her increased use of piano, and the talent of the many other musicians playing on the album, the informally named ‘Ys Street Band’ are the heart and soul of the most soulful of Newsom’s albums to date.

At over two hours long, naturally not all tracks are top-drawer – the recorders on ‘Kingfisher’ are a little too reminiscent of Pentangle for my tastes, and Newsom has always been prone to cringey lyrics – the title of Good Intentions Paving Company being the most obvious example, though the song’s charm more than makes up for that. Newsom needs to be accepted on her own terms or else her music can be difficult to understand, but the extra effort required pays off enormously. This is a magnificent piece of art, encompassing enormous themes of life, death and meaning, but also small celebrations of the joy of everyday existence. ‘Ribbon Bows’ explores the eternal question ‘God – no God?’ without coming down conclusively on one side or the other, but a powerful sense of transcendence and faith in humanity permeates this whole work – even in despair, the narrator is never nihilistic. Perhaps Newsom’s spiritual beliefs can best be summed up in this wish-blessing from ‘Esme’:

‘May kindness, kindness, kindness abound’.

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Construction no.128 (1920)

"There are so many interesting things to do in life. And we waste our time emptily and keep dreaming about something...And this dream isn’t worth anything. But what’s been actually done, even poorly – is worthwhile"

Aleksander Rodchenko

Blue on Blue

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