FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
Joanna Newsom - Divers
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ON 18th January…
the ever-consistent, hugely talented and amazing Joanna Newsom turns forty. I might put out a playlist of her best tracks so far, as she is such an insane talent who has no equals. I have featured Newsom on my blog before, though I have been meaning to cover Divers. Released in 2015, it is her most-recent album. When thinking of the artists one would love to see release an album this year, Newsom is right near the top of my list. Divers is her fourth studio album. It seems that, with each release, she gets even better and more sublime! Her most transports you somewhere incredible and otherworldly. One of the best albums of 2015, it is one I would certainly urge people to buy on vinyl. Such a dazzling and diverse album, it is one that anyone can appreciate. Before coming to a couple of reviews, I want to introduce a 2015 interview from FADER:
“You figured out how to only do the kind of music you wanted to do, and nothing else.
I got lucky. I’d be dead in the water if I hadn’t ended up on Drag City. It’s not like I spoke to 10 labels and picked the one that was the best fit for me. I ended up with this one label that in retrospect, 12 years down the line, is the only one I could’ve been with for so long. I made Milk-Eyed Mender [in 2004], and then they basically consented to fund this weird five-song record with full orchestra recorded with tape, which I think at that point had been their most expensive record, and they never questioned it. They never questioned me making a three-record album to follow that one. They never questioned how long it took me to make this record, how many steps, how many layers. And they don’t ever ask me to do anything that’s corny. No negativity to anyone who enjoys social media, but from a marketing strategy, a lot of people feel like they have to do it. Drag City doesn’t ask that of me, or to do anything that feels wrong.
PHOTO CREDIT: Brian Vu
Is your writing process serious or fun?
What is fun for me to do with language is deadly serious for me as well. I tend to start with melody and chords, which take a while to resolve into calcified arrangements. Basic melody, basic chords—those are born from some feeling or narrative idea or both. I have the prompt for the lyrics before I have the lyrics.
Some songs, I work with placeholder lyrics for months until I find the exact wording. With certain songs, there are requirements that the lyrics have to fit. For “Leaving the City,” on Divers, the choruses have three different patterns that are interlacing. Those lyrics are somewhat simple, but they took me a really long time. They had to tell a story, but they had to incorporate these syntactic parameters. There was a straight-up chart I drew. I had to have certain rhymes that were there because they emphasized the downbeat of a contrary meter that was overlaid on the primary dominant meter of the song. Then there were contrapuntal syllabic emphases. Then there were the basic rhymes at the end of each line, which were anchor rhymes. And I needed that to happen in a way that said what we wanted to say.
What did you want to say on Divers?
If I could say it all the way, I wouldn’t have bothered making a record. I will say that there’s a thematic core of the album—every song on the record is asking some version of the same question.
The whole record is personal, but a lot of what is most personal is conveyed through pure fiction or, sometimes, even science fiction—literally sci-fi. With “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne,” I’m contrasting this British Isles sea shanty with a narrative in which I’m talking about colonizing alternate iterations of the terrestrial position in the multiverse. Colonizing time sideways, front and back, traveling in four directions through time. The subject matter is some of the heaviest and occasionally saddest I’ve ever explored. It’s linked to mortality and the idea of getting older. Time runs through every single song. But it was also the most fun to make. There’s no way to know someone except to know them”
All of Joanna Newsom’s albums have been met with praise and fascination. The Californian artist is someone who you can tell takes so much time to craft her music, to ensure that it is the finest it can possibly she. Such a wonderful creative and artist, I do hope that we hear more from her very soon. This is what Pitchfork noted in their review of Divers:
“Divers makes a landscape out of this abstract fear of loss. On the courtly "Anecdotes" and "Waltz of the 101st Lightborne", she is part of a battle fought by birds to try and wrest control of time. "You Will Not Take My Heart Alive" is the most Ren Fair piece here, on which Newsom contemplates ascension to some transcendent plane, "[severing] all strings to everyone and everything." Its sister song "A Pin-Light Bent" descends sadly back towards reason and reconciliation of her unsuccessful quest to outrun time. "In our lives is a common sense/ That relies on the common fence/ That divides and attends," she sings with palpable mourning, accepting that her life, "until the time is spent, is a pin-light, bent." Where this kind of cosmic existentialism could come off like a stoner marveling at the moon, Newsom pulls it off with balance of poetry and reason. Her fantastical world is sometimes hard to get your head around, but it brings surreal, sometimes sci-fi delight to a record that's otherwise often lyrically despairing.
Where Newsom's second and third records each overhauled what came before, Divers is a refinement that draws on elements of each of its predecessors. The shapes of her records often get misinterpreted as concepts themselves, rather than the sign of a writer attuned to her work's needs. Ys from 2006 was the five-song suite; Have One on Me from 2010, the three-disc opus. On its surface Divers is more conventional, a single disc where nine of its 11 songs are under six minutes long, but it also happens to be a wild, genuine concept album. The final song, "Time, As a Symptom", ends with Newsom in raptures, commanding white stars, birds, and ships to "transcend!" On the very last burst, she clips the word to "trans—". The first word on opener "Anecdotes" is "sending." It is a perfect loop.
Most artists on their fourth album settle into atrophy, or at least comfort, Newsom delivers such complex, nuanced music, filled with arcane constructions, that she is only her own yardstick. (In a recent interview about Divers, David Longstreth cited The Milk-Eyed Mender as one of the reasons he quit college: "[What] am I doing here if someone is already out there making music like this, on this level?") Her consummate craft is a given; what surprises every time is her ceaselessly renewing sensitivity for life's vicissitudes and the fantastic ways she finds to express them. D**ivers is not a puzzle to crack, but a dialog that generously articulates the intimate chasm of loss, the way it's both irrational and very real. Nothing will stem the fear of a loved one's death, which western culture does little to prepare us for until the very end, but by pulling at the prospect of mortality from every angle, Newsom emerges straighter-spined, and invites you to stand alongside her”.
Prior to finish up, I am going to quote AllMusic. They are always insightful when it comes to albums and what makes particular ones special. That is definitely the case with their take on Divers:
“If music is a time machine, able to transport listeners to different places and eras as well as deep into memories, then Joanna Newsom steers Divers as deftly as Jules Verne. She flits to and from 18th century chamber music, 19th century American folk music, '70s singer/songwriter pop, and other sounds and eras with the lightness of a bird, one of the main motifs of her fourth full-length. Her on-the-wing approach is a perfect fit for Divers' themes: Newsom explores "the question of what's available to us as part of the human experience that isn't subject to the sovereignty of time," as she described it in a Rolling Stone interview. It's a huge subject, and even though she worked with several different arrangers -- including Dirty Projectors' David Longstreth and Nico Muhly -- she crystallizes Have One on Me's triple-album ambition into 11 urgent songs that still allow her plenty of variety. "Leaving the City," with its linear beat and electric guitar, is the closest she's come to an actual rock song; "You Will Not Take My Heart Alive" could pass for medieval music, despite its mention of "capillaries glowing with cars."
While Divers is musically dense, it may be even more packed with ideas and vivid imagery; its lyrics sheet reads like a libretto (and is a necessary reference while listening). The bird calls that bookend the album -- and the way its final word ("trans-") flows into its first ("sending") -- hint at the album's looping, eternal yet fleeting nature, while "Anecdotes" introduces how each track feels like a microcosm (or parallel universe) dealing with war, love, and loss in slightly different ways. "Waltz of the 101st Lightborne," in which time-traveling soldiers end up fighting their own ghosts, highlights Divers' sci-fi undercurrent, which is all the more intriguing paired with its largely acoustic sounds. Newsom combines these contrasts between theatricality and intimacy, and city and country, splendidly on "Sapokanikan," named for the Native American settlement located where Greenwich Village stands. As she layers the ghosts and memories of old Dutch masters, potter's fields, Tammany Hall, and allusions to Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ozymandias, the music nods to ragtime and other vintage American styles; it could be overwhelming if she didn't return to the simple, poignant refrain: "Do you love me? Will you remember?" Indeed, despite its literacy and embellishments, Newsom's music is never just an academic exercise. The album's emotional power grows as it unfolds: "Divers" itself reaches deep, bringing the album's longing to the surface. "A Pin-Light Bent" finds Newsom accepting that time is indeed finite with a quiet, riveting intensity, building to the majestic finale "Time, As a Symptom," where the personal, historical, and cosmic experiences of time she's pondered seem to unite as she realizes, "Time is just a symptom of love." Newsom can make her audience work almost as hard as she does, but the rewards are worth it: Dazzling, profound, and affecting, Divers' explorations of time only grow richer the more time listeners spend with them”.
An amazing album from a talent like no other, make sure that you check out Joanna Newsom’s Divers. It such a phenomenal album that you will not want to…
BE without.