Truly, Joanna Newsom just don’t give a fucc, and all the non-musical details that accumulate around her persona like so much space junk are actually pretty interesting. Weird harp-toting Ren-Fair space cadet, but one who’s sort of a fashion plate? A babe, basically, and one with a command of language and meter so complete it intimidates the blood right out of your face? One who’s dating Andy from SNL?!
In a recent interview Newsom revealed that prior to recording her just-released triple album, she couldn’t speak for two months. When her voice returned it had grown into something a little more polished, and less like an uncanny cross between a grandma and a nine-year old. It could’ve been a tale straight from one of her songs, which tend to fixate on unexpected metamorphoses. Skin is only…skin for her, a casing to be scraped off, stirred into tea, stuffed with sawdust, or removed in water. The things hidden within her characters–whales, bees, dreams–are the real objects of interest.
Joanna Newsom — “On a Good Day”
Which is why “On a Good Day” off the new album is so numb and so fuckin…sad. Newsom is firmly in Frosty New England territory here, stopping by a frozen lake to consider a couple of roads not taken. Unlike the sprawling opuses she tends to write, this is the barest sketch of a song. It addresses an ex-lover and the life they had started, how she had “just begun to fill in the lines, right down to what we’d name her.” But metamorphosis isn’t part of this universe–drearily, “nature does not change by will.” Inside she’s the same substance she was before, unable to return or move forward, just frozen still by the winter that befell her.
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