water though it’s frozen

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.