New Joanna Newsom Album "Ys" Due Nov 14

I was 21 years old when this came out and I hated it so much... it wasn’t her voice which I know it’s an acquired taste but I didn’t have any problems with it on Milk Eyed Mender, in fact it would’ve probably been one of my top 10 2014 albums if I had made a list back then.

But when Ys came out the track lenghts alone seemed terribly offputting and when I tried listening to it I realize I wasn’t prepared for what sounded like tunes for a Broadway play based on a children’s book. I’ve always had an aversion to histrionism in music and this seemed to have way too many things I hate.

Oh was I wrong... it still sounds like a soundtrack to an imaginary play to my ears and I don’t know when will I ever be in the mood and find the space and time to listen to it but this is way out there in its own universe. Sorry for being a hater before, this album was worth the hype and it’s a genuine product of love.

wow, eleven years.

album not that good (ruined by Van Dyke Parks as some suggest upthread), tour supporting it was one of the best things I have ever seen.

― sleeve, Wednesday, September 26, 2007 7:57 PM (ten years ago)

that show (with "small orchestra" 6-piece band) remains one of the best live shows I have ever seen, you could have heard a pin drop in the 400+ person venue during the extended end of "Cosmia"

where is she now I wonder? seems to have retired from music.

There’s many emotions in here but the main theme does seem to be her struggle to come to terms with mortality. The scope shifts from heartbreaking to enlightening often.

xp the divers tour was less than three years ago, i'm guessing she'll be back

Van Dyke Parks arrangements are a bit meh still but she’s on another level... imagine someone line say Nico Muhly in there..

I strongly doubt she's retired. She had a baby less than a year ago, not exactly surprising that she might take a little break. Also, there was a 5 year gap between the last 2 albums.

i love the arrangements, don't understand the dislike for them in this thread at all

It’s actually more the production than the arrangements... they sound very idk... skinny?

It's a great album, I especially love the first 3 tracks, and the live version was indeed amazing. But there is a bit of fussiness to it. I prefer the pared back, naturalistic sound of HOOM, don't expect she can top that one.

it's not that I dislike the original LP arrangements, it's that seeing the songs done live with the stripped down 6-piece really made them shine for me in a way that the regular LP versions didn't.

ha kind of an xp there

But it’s also the arrangements... they give it a Disney-fied feel... a “naked” version of Joanna and her harp would sound better imho... or at least something more subtle.

Oh sleeve that’s precisely what I wanted from this album. Is there an official or good live bootleg or even youtube performance you’d recommend.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=1VuHEBxXHh4

Sawdust & Diamonds is one of the only songs that almost always makes me cry

Haaa, I just watched that one a few minutes ago. Probably my favorite song of hers. Amazing that she can tap into that emotion while simultaneously playing an absolutely bonkers, carpal tunnel inducing harp part.

It's always this verse:

I wanted to say: Why the long face?
Sparrow, perch and play songs of long face
Burro, buck and bray songs of long face!
Sing, I will swallow your sadness and eat your cold clay
Just to lift your long face;
And though it may be madness, I will take to the grave
Your precious long face
And though our bones they may break, and our souls separate —
Why the long face?
And though our bodies recoil from the grip of the soil —
Why the long face?

Also really love how she brought the toned down, breathy vocals to Bridges & Balloons. Somewhere between recording Ys and the tour, she really learned how to sing! It's like she suddenly upped her game considerably.

She had problems with nodules early on during the Ys tour and then again while working on Have One on Me. Had to take vocal rests and learn new techniques, so that definitely had an effect on her vocals.

I adore Ys, OTT arrangements included (even though I do enjoy the stripped down live versions, too). I was 16-17 when I first heard it and I fell in love with it almost instantly. Over the years I have tied many important memories to these songs.

22 years old

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfLfLNr7F10

an early adumbration of Ys! which is one of the most amazing albums of all time

Ys is GOAT

There's been a number of live sets by her popping up on dime over the last week or so.

Really wish she'd bring her solo show to Austin

Divers is her best album and one of the best albums I've ever heard ever in my life

Ys is the one that made me a fan and so I cherish it the most, but Divers is about equal. Divers has the best instrumentation.

Funny, I think HOOM is the best, but i love them all.

This is my current favorite Joanna Newsom story, not about her:

on line at the joanna newsom concert and bjork appears at will call with her hair in enormous buns and full velvet dress and a lavender lace mask woven with flowers and the guy at the booth asks for her ID

— Lauren Friedlander (@la_friedlander) September 16, 2019

the best part is, when asked, she patted at her pocketless velvet bodice and whispered "i...do not have it" before someone whisked her off

— Lauren Friedlander (@la_friedlander) September 16, 2019

I find it to be impossible to pick one fave, they're all extremely special to me, each in their own way.

xp lol

xxxxp Wow i had never heard that version of Sawdust.. !

The ILX massive's first taste upthread is very ILX; questioning what the Pitch4k review will be, people saying they 'get it' but don't like it, someone suggesting it's an insincere 'indie rock sham', me griping that you can't dance to any of it, some folk analysing the words before hearing the songs..

I am and was a full-bore stan for "The Milk-Eyed Mender" and I found "Ys" to be off-putting, when I downloaded it illegally as we all did.

I appreciated that Newsom, with "Ys", wished to create a "world" akin to "Song Cycle", but ironically did not think that Van Dyke Parks was the best arranger for that job, despite being.. the guy who made "Song Cycle". My feelings about "Ys" were and are more in-line with the Wire review at the time, which described Parks' arrangements as being like "Disney characters appearing and disappearing without any rhyme or reason" (paraphrased from memory, I think they were nicer about it). I adore the songs themselves, in particular "Cosmia" and "Emily", but the album itself never clicked for me.

When "Have One On Me" came out, I adored the shorter pieces, and certain longer pieces like "Go Long", but found that the moment-to-moment pacing of the album was very, very slow. "Baby Birch" in particular, although I realize it is a favourite for many, sounds interminable to me when I try and engage with it. Other songs ("On A Good Day", in particular) are among my favourites.

Considering how roundly celebrated Newsom is for Ys and HOOM, and the fact that when I listened to the first single off "Divers" I sneezed when I heard her sing "ozymandian" and switched it off, it took me a couple of years to approach "Divers"-- this, despite having every homo in my proximity crowing about how fantastic and essential it is. When I finally listened to it, I was flattened. It's a perfect record, "ozymandian" included.

i need to go back to divers

hoom is a total masterpiece imo

things that will never happen to me: getting through “in california” without crying

Yeah that song is monstrously good. I once was drunk and mentally drawing parallels between her four albums to date and Dubliners - Artist - Ulysses - Wake but that was probably just sophomoric bullshit on my end.

fgti otm, as per usual. "The Milk-Eyed Mender" is Joanna at her rawest and nakedest, a perfect Debut - like Björk's Debut - as a seed promising a flower, promising new directions after. Fantastic in its own right but even more fantastic because it holds such promise (promises that would eventually be kept).

I did download 'Ys' at the time (RIP Oink) but never thought it a bore. I was spellbound from the get-go. I found VDP's involvement distracted a lot of reviewers, but I didn't let that distract me.

"22 years old"

Erm, 32 actually. Still amazing. But..

Born 1982

Ys and Divers are my favourites.

... if you were born in 1982 you were 22 in 2004

yea 22 in that performance

fgti I agree about VDP's arrangements on Ys, and Song Cycle is my favorite album of all time. maybe that's why the only song I come back to on this record is "Sawdust & Diamonds," which is just voice and harp. "Cosmia" is a great song and probably suffers the least from the Parksian potpourri. But "Sawdust & Diamonds" is such a stunning achievement that it elevates the album for me.

"On a Good Day" is a perfect short song just as S&D is a perfect long song.

divers is pretty easily her weakest but it still has some of her best work on it, especially "sapokanikan" and "divers". it doesn't quite hold together as well as her other albums, i think due to the variety of collaborators she worked with for the arrangements, and "goose eggs" and "waltz of the 101st lightborne" are melodically grating to me in a way that her work isn't usually. idk what it is about those but something pushes them into territory where i finally understand people who find her work generally insufferable.

ys is a masterpiece and i adore the arrangements

I mean, also: I read an interview that I will not source right now wherein (iirc) Newsom spoke about how they had to scale back Parks' arrangements. I did not know if they meant that they asked him to scale things back in the writing stage, or if they did so during the mixing stage, but it sounds at certain points-- in particular, when the orchestra gets frenzied and disjointed on "Emily" and then suddenly disappears and there is a mouth harp in its place-- as if these were decisions that were made in mixing. I'm intimately familiar with Parks' arrangement-style, both in the "Song Cycle" era (I once transcribed "Palm Desert" as an exercise, so that I might learn the master's secrets), and the modern era, and he writes wall-to-wall, complicated, brilliant writing. Oftentimes it's Absolutely Incredible-- my favourite latter-day arrangement of his is "Wasting My Time" by Sam Phillips-- and other times it sounds like a very thick soup that requires some watering down to be digestible, which means that as an arranger he's extremely doing his job-- it's a far better approach to write dense and thin it out later rather than write sparsely and leave the client with not-enough-material.

But I posted upthread, some fourteen years ago, that "Song Cycle" is a marvellous benchmark for a musician to aspire toward, but that ironically... Parks would not be my first choice in achieving that goal. Chris Thile, yes. Rob Moose (who plays violin on Divers), yes. Rihm, no, (I don't know where that thought came from, I think I'd just been listening to his stuff a lot that week.) And with Divers, Newsom achieved it and surpassed it, with exquisitely wrought arrangements from Muhly and Longstreth, her fantastic list of collaborators, I think it is a stunning achievement and I frankly cower before it.

I do agree that Sawdust And Diamonds is a miraculous song, I listened to the live performance in 2006 before Ys was even announced and was blown away. "Emily" is one of her best songs, but I don't think the arrangement works (aside from that glorious moment when the strings start dextrously doubling Newsom's vocal line up an octave, that is a freakishly gorgeous moment). "Cosmia" is amazing, too. "Monkey And Bear" doesn't work as a piece of songwriting for me, but I think it's the best of the Parks-Newsom collaborations as a recording. "Only Skin" I realize is a favourite but I'd have to revisit it, I'm remembering a lot of big words and not much else.

It is absolutely bananas that she wrote songs like these at 22, 23, 24. I'm more impressed with her than I am with Brian Wilson in this regard.

I don't think Milk-Eyed Mender gets nearly enough love in the world. "Crab, Clam, Cockle, Cowrie" is a perfect song on an album of perfect songs. I can live without "Inflammatory Writ" but the rest is essential to my existence

Clam, Crab, that is. Goddamn:

That means no
Where I come from

The greatest opening couplet in songwriting, and also:

It's why I love this town
Well, just look around
To see me serenaded hourly, celebrated sourly
Dedicated dourly, waltzing with the open sea
Clam, crab, cockle, cowrie
Will you just look at me?

oh yeah i can't get through that one without crying either

your skin is something that i stir into my tea

the kicker of "does not suffice" also really goes

Think my favourite lyric right now is the final few stanzas of "Anecdotes".

it is wild how jealous i was of newsom's writing when i was like... 19. i thought, "wow, i'll never be that good." and then she got better

i like ys and divers alright, but i've always absolutely loved this heavy-handed attempted takedown from trouser press. it's just so unneccessarily mean ffs and i often wonder if jn herself has ever seen it:

The acclaim seemed to go to Newsom's head, and the follow-up reeks of ambition with a capital ART. Gone are the simple, beguiling tunes of the debut, replaced with defiantly overlong opuses — five compositions totaling nearly an hour, though each seems about that long. Song length wouldn't be an issue if Newsom had bothered with anything resembling structure. (At least when old school poppers-turned-proggers Stackridge spent 20 minutes going on about the horrific Slark, they set it to a right jaunty little tune.) On Ys, whose Renaissance Fayre-style painting on the cover recalls the grand old days of Kansas (yikes) and is named for a mythical Celtic kingdom (yegads), Newsom does listeners no such favors, and instead strands them in a meandering hell. She plunks away at her harp and seemingly free-associates lyrics while Van Dyke Parks (an old master at landing work bearing no relation to rock music in the rock section of record stores) provides aimless orchestral squiggles and noodles in the background. It's like being stuck in the seat next to a chatty, batshit backwoods pixie for an 18-hour plane ride. All hope is abandoned after the first five minutes or so of the opener "Emily," which begins promisingly and is moderately mesmerizing until Newsom begins caterwauling about meteorites. After that, the album becomes an exercise in looking at one's watch and wondering how long the damn thing is going to go on. (The presence of Steve Albini and Jim O'Rourke shows that somewhere along the line either Newsom or Drag City worried enough about alt-rock credibility to put their indie-god ass-prints on the studio furniture.) As excruciating as The Milk-Eyed Mender was magical, Ys buckles under the hefty weight of its aspirations.

"indie-god ass-prints" like fr? lol