Day 387: Joanna Newsom – Ys
Today, it’s time for another plugging up of a major hole in my music knowledge. Joanna Newsom is one of those artists who you hear about a whole lot but who I haven’t gotten around to yet, and today I thought it would be the perfect time to explore something I don’t really have any idea about. I’m going in blind, let’s listen to Ys.
Album cover courtesy of Drag City
Joanna Newsom is a harpist and multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter from California, who’s known for highly unique and ethereal progressive folk that’s accompanied by her orchestral harp. Also, fun fact, she’s married to Andy Samberg of the Lonely Island – nice to think that the musical output of that household ranges from the beautiful, poetic 12-minute epic “Emily” to the other side of the musical spectrum with "Dick in a Box”, I bet they’re an interesting pair.
Ys was released in 2006 as Newsom’s second album, and it was her first album to chart on the Billboard 200. It features an unusually large variety of instruments, and occasionally a full orchestra, with orchestral arrangements by Van Dyke Parks. It’s also engineered by Steve Albini and mixed by Jim O'Rourke. And just in case you need to avoid embarrassing yourself in front of your hipster pals, it’s pronounced “ees”.
The first thing I noticed was that Ys is lyrically so thick and dense that there’s no chance for me to follow just by listening – the album opens with “The meadowlark and the chim-choo-ree and the sparrow / Set to the sky in a flying spree / For the sport over the pharaoh / Little while later the Pharisees dragged comb through the meadow”, so it’s not the sort of stuff that most people could unravel at a glance. But that’s probably the fun part of her lyricism, trying to figure out the mythology and the references and the meaning. Her music is heavy, but in a good way, almost feeling like a puzzle.
And it’s as complex sonically as it is lyrically, it’s by no means an easy listen. It’s orchestral and complex, but at the same time, it kind of sounds like medieval Björk if she was banging out the tunes in a tavern – so much so that I even occasionally thought I detected a hint of an Icelandic accent. It only consists of five tracks, but there’s so much variety in them that you never really know what’s coming next, she keeps you guessing throughout the record. And despite the obvious comparison, it’s unique enough that it’s hard to think of a direct contemporary for this album, she’s very much doing her own thing.
This is a very hard one to rank because while I had time to listen to it, I didn’t have time to really sit with it today, and in any case it’s an album that you’d probably have to listen to multiple times to really appreciate. It’s dense enough to not be easy to access if you’ve only heard it once. It sounds beautiful, but I’m honestly inclined to give it an 8.5/10 on the first listen, with a heavy disclaimer that I’m diving into it again and it could go up.