
20. Divers (2015)
“And in an infinite regress / Tell me, why is the pain of birth / Lighter borne than the pain of death?” Joanna Newsom sings on the elegant, kaleidoscopic title track to 2015’s time-obsessed Divers, its nesting cascades of strings and piano echoing the album’s premise, that life contains death, which contains life, and on and on to ∞ …
19. Sapokanikan (2015)
The jaunty piano and sweetly rambling verses of Sapokanikan belie the profound depth of history hidden within Divers’ lead single, which contemplates the passing of time in the palimpsest of landscapes and paintings rich with secrets. The song peaks in a sort of ecstatic existential panic: “Look and despair,” Newsom sings once it settles.
18. Peach, Plum, Pear (2004)
Since 2006’s Ys, Newsom’s albums have been so conceptually staggering that her simpler debut can seem juvenile by proxy. But it’s still obvious why anyone who heard 2004’s The Milk-Eyed Mender fell in love. Here, as her rattling harpsichord drives an urgent, anxious account of attraction and rejection, the sweetness of her voice and accompanying spurts of a children’s choir make the hurt sting even more.
17. You Will Not Take My Heart Alive (2015)
Newsom’s narrator manically fights to defy mortality: “Beyond recall, you severed all strings / To everyone, and everything,” she sings amid shards of harp and distorted organ. The beauty of this song lies in the devastating way she repeats the title, crushed as if by the force of protecting her heart.
16. Easy (2010)
From the monumental triple album Have One on Me, there is slyness in the beauty of Easy, which drains the colour from its beatific scenes of domestic bliss, in bed and fairytale glades, to reveal the strain and indignity of loving someone who resists it. It shifts from gentle piano and strings to something more courtly – maybe the forced ritual of love – as Newsom gradually makes her pained indignation plain.
15. Only Skin (2006)
The futility of care also drives Only Skin, the 17-minute showstopper of Ys (clock the last letter of Only and the first of Skin), which billows with hope and desperation. Frankly, you could rank the top 20 moments in this song alone: Van Dyke Parks’ grave, pristine string arrangements as Newsom exclaims “being a woman!” at 7:38 pip it for me.
14. Sawdust & Diamonds (2006)
Ys’s (comparatively) simplest moment strips back Parks’ arrangements and puts its other collaborator, engineer Steve Albini, in the spotlight, making a virtue of his aptitude for capturing performance: just Newsom, her harp and a heart-stoppingly determined vocal performance that dives into fathomless loss and pain. Her repeated shrieks of “o, desire!” rip the fabric of the universe.
13. Does Not Suffice (2010)
On the coda to Easy, Newsom packs her silky, cashmere things “and everything that could remind you / Of how easy I was not”, and pictures her cold former lover enjoying his empty palace. With just Newsom and her fingers slipping around the piano, the tone is bittersweet but stunned (and echoes the refrain from In California). It appears to end on a valedictory “la la la” – until the final minute cracks into telling, stormy dissonance.
12. Good Intentions Paving Co (2010)
Parks didn’t return for Have One on Me, but the rollicking Good Intentions evokes the playful, questing Americana of his debut album, 1967’s Song Cycle. The beauty of Newsom’s lyrics, meanwhile, lies in the contrast between the struggle to make a relationship work and the simplicity of her own desire: “I only want for you to pull over and hold me / Till I can’t remember my own name” is an all-timer.
11. In California (2010)
Almost every song on Have One on Me is a mini suite unto itself, moving through patches of conversational delivery, ridiculously beautiful melodies and baroque arrangements. Often the best parts are when Newsom’s equanimity boils over and the arrangements become frenzied, fraught: the “cuckoo, cuckoo-koo” cries here are piercingly lonely.
10. Cosmia (2006)
The incomprehensibility of loss – not being able to prevent it, nor survive it – radiates through Ys’s closing track, a dedication to a friend who died while Newsom was touring her debut. Her harp and Parks’ arrangements swell and search, climaxing in her wrenching attempt to reconcile pain with the soul’s release: “And I miss your precious heart,” she howls, over and over.
9. On a Good Day (2010)
The shortest song in Newsom’s catalogue may be her most brutal. Widely interpreted as being about a lost pregnancy, as well as the end of a relationship, it features just her and her harp casting holy light on the most terrible of disappointments.
8. Time, as a Symptom (2015)
As much as loss beats through Newsom’s catalogue, so does her absolute belief in beauty, love, the point of it all. “Stand brave, life-liver / Bleeding out your days / In the river of time,” she instructs in the rapturous ending to Divers (though the album’s final word, “trans-”, links to its first, “sending”, escaping linearity and conclusions in a perfect, unending loop).
7. Leaving the City (2015)
Newsom may have one of the most finely detailed catalogues in popular music, although her work never feels airless. The incantatory attack of the chorus to Leaving the City is maybe the closest she has sounded to reckless abandon, breaking free from the calculated materialism and glory her lyrics indict.
6. Anecdotes (2015)
Newsom joins an army of birds (“hotdogging loon!”) in a war against the tyranny of time, craving a “temporal infidelity” and immortality that doesn’t depend on surrendering our “borrowed bones” come life’s end. She’s a stalwart, stirring commander in the first half, before it skews prismatic and awesome, as if high on the possibilities of life beyond earthly constraint.
5. Emily (2006)
One of the most symphonically beautiful songs in Newsom’s catalogue is a tribute to her astrophysicist sister and her metaphysical and corporeal guidance. In a catalogue that should already have received the Pulitzer prize, describing shallow water as “a mud-cloud, mica-spangled, like the sky’d been breathing on a mirror” is especially wondrous.
4. Jackrabbits (2010)
Newsom sings in a crushed murmur on Jackrabbits, as if not wanting to own up to her proposal that, in the wake of grievous loss, she and her estranged lover might give things another go. Hearing this poetic writer sing something as tangibly mundane and despondent as “I was tired of being drunk” hits extra hard.
3. Monkey & Bear (2006)
A fable about exploitation and the toll of performance, this is the best storytelling in Newsom’s catalogue, with a depth of reference to nature, the cosmos and the gods unmatched by anyone. The menace that comes into her voice as the monkey realises the bear is set to escape is startling, piqued by leaping woodwinds.
2. Baby Birch (2010)
The simple lilt of harp at the outset of Baby Birch echoes the childlike beauty of Newsom’s debut single, Sprout and the Bean, which only adds to the agony of another song that clearly concerns pregnancy loss. Six minutes in, the weather darkens and the pace quickens, creating an utterly gut-punching sense of futile panic.
1. Go Long (2010)
Touching on the story of Bluebeard and the chamber of murdered past brides that he reveals to his next victim – “gilded with the gold teeth of the women who loved you” – the exquisite Go Long excoriates the male pride, violence and stubbornness that condemns such figures to loneliness at the expense of those who try to love them. It’s one of Newsom’s finest-spun performances, her harp a reverberant synaptic tingle, her grave delivery flaring with contempt and pity. Of all her admonitions, about war and regal hauteur, the sorriness in her voice as she observes “you are badly hurt, you’re a silly goose” may be the most cutting of all.
• Joanna Newsom’s catalogue is available on Bandcamp
