Isaiah's The World Today Just Nuts "
Barack Renews The Patriot Act" went up last night. Also going up this weekend were my reviews: "
Kat's Korner: The ultimate torch singer Sade" and "
Kat's Korner: Joanna Newsom's triumph." So that's two.
And no offense but "What are you going to review next?" I was asked in an e-mail already and my attitude is, "What? I just did two reviews."
On Joanna Newsom,
Claire Suddath (Time magazine) interviews her today:
Why did you keep your new album, Have One on Me, such a secret? No one even knew it was coming until about a month ago.
I didn't want to announce it and have it be delayed. There'd been so many setbacks along the way that I wanted to make sure the album was in the can and completely ready to go. Also, we were trying to prevent it from being leaked.
The album's over two hours long and spread out over three discs. It seems designed to be listened to as one complete product and not as a series of separate songs. Why did you make something in this format?
I tried to sequence it so that it could be listened to in its entirety and had a progression that felt thematically logical and natural. In a way, the three records are like chapters in a book. Unless you're serializing a book you wouldn't separate the chapters, but they're also meant to be these little self-contained segments within the narrative.
My favorite song on there is "Good Intentions Paving Co." but it feels a little bit poppier than your other work. Actually, a lot of the album does.
I think part of it was a reaction to the previous record, Ys. The experience of making Ys was quite intense and formal for me. I paid such close attention to every tiny little detail — the syntax, the lyrics, the distribution of syllabic entropies, the interior and exterior rhyme patterns — there was a lot of activity and it felt a little frenetic. When I was done with it all, I was pretty tired. I really wanted to allow my brain to approach music a little differently. When making this record, I had the feeling of being a little kid coming home from church. I was in my tight, scratchy sailor dress and my tight, scratchy patent-leather shoes. It was the feeling of tearing it all off and running around outside in my underwear.
I love, love Joanna Newsom's album. But don't ever say I don't highlight people I disagree with because I am so very gracious and loving. So
here's an asshole named Jay Bennett at Pheonix News Times:
March begins with one of the most-talked-about artists going right now: Joanna Newsom, a singing harp player from California. She's a darling in the eyes of most critics, and it's easy to see why: She's a one-of-a-kind artist with a clear vision and a seemingly endless wellspring of ideas. Soooooo many ideas, in fact, that she just had to put them all into a two-hour-long triple album, one that listens more like a symphony than a rock record.
And Sexist Jay just goes downhill from there. Or, as I'm sure so many of his former girlfriends would put it, he petered out quickly. Again, I'm all about the love here, all about the love.
Laura Snapes reviewed it yesterday for England's NME:
For the most part, this is a terribly sad record, full of never-mawkish ballads that affect and still absorb with simple expression and a hundred different nuances of voice – an instrument that she’s learned to control as artfully as she does her harp. Final track ‘Does Not Suffice’ narrates her packing to permanently leave a lover’s house, ‘Jackrabbits’ recovering from a period of drunken sorrow to love again, but most affecting of all is ‘Baby Birch’.With its devastating maternal lament of “[i]This is the song of Baby Birch/Oh, I will never know you”, sparse, resonant harp and raw shards of electric guitar, it hauls gobstopper-sized lumps up to the throat that stick around for ‘On A Good Day’. “I saw life and I called it mine/I saw it drawn so sweet and fine/And I had begun to fill in all the lines/Right down to what we’d name her”, she sings, its two-minute brevity recalling Ernest Hemingway’s fabled six-word micro-story, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn”.It’s only ‘Good Intentions Paving Company’ that really breaks the reverential tone, swinging like a party of banjo-wielding hooligans invading New York’s Brill Building, and featuring some of the record’s canniest lyrics: “And I regret, I regret/How I said to you, ‘Honey, just open your heart’/When I’ve got trouble even opening a honey jar”. Evidently, Newsom doesn’t record natural successors, but this would have made sense as a matured follow-up to her 2004 debut album ‘The Milk-Eyed Mender’, distilling her lyrical trickery and polarising kook into an untouchable realignment of conventional song structure.
Simmy Richman (Independent of London) also reviewed it yesterday:
It is a monumental work in more ways than one. "Good Intentions Paving Company", to use just one song to illustrate a point, is like a road movie of the mind that, in its seven minutes and two seconds, takes the listener into a car with Newsom and her partner. They are driving to a show and have "20 miles left". Over this distance, Newsom ponders her relationship to the man who is driving. "I did not mean to shout/ Just drive.../ For the time being all is well/ Won't you love me a spell/ There is blindness, beyond all conceiving/ While behind us, the road is leaving/ And leaving, and falling back/ Like a rope gone slack."
It is an epic song that ends, heartbreakingly, with Newsom admitting "I only want you to pull over/ And hold me/ Till I can't remember my name." And that's one song of 18. Will you last the distance? Only Newsom could make you even ponder such a thing.
I love all the reviews (except for sexist ass Jay) and another one I really enjoy is
Patrick Gage Kelley's review for The Tartan:
The difficulty in enduring a three-disc album is lightened partially by Newsom sticking to somewhat simpler lyrics, though her eccentric touch still lingers: the storytelling in “Baby Birch” (“A tarantula’s mounting Countess Lansfeld’s handsome brassiere, while they all cheer”), the title track explorations (“I roam around the tidy grounds of my dappled sanatorium”), or the obviousness of “her faultlessly etiolated fishbelly-face.” But even with these examples (and trust me, there are more) withstanding, this is Newsom’s most inviting effort yet. Each of these songs has a story, has lyrical and musical constructions that won’t be exposed on the first listen. I have no doubt that this album will in time earn its highly regarded and deserved place in Newsom’s growing canon, but to believe that, you may have to give it days of your time. I can only try to make you believe that it is worth it.
I won’t end with some sort of meta-lecture on how it is possible to transcend the cliche that is the concept album, bucking traditional three-and-a-half-minute songs, and producing something that is musically and artistically rewarding. I won’t do that; I will just mention it so you know it is true and that it is your responsibility as an indie connoisseur, a university hipster, or a harpist to listen to this album (all of it), and when you find it grating, to listen to it again for me. And then one more time — the last one is on her.
That's the end of his review, I like all that comes before better but that would have been harder to excerpt (read in full and you'll see what I mean). He's writing for the student newspaper of Carnegie Mellon University. England's
The Metro today picks the album as the album of the week:
When no one spends money on albums any more, what is the dumbest thing a resolutely radio-unfriendly artist could do?
How about making your long-awaited third album 18 songs, three compact discs and 125 minutes long?
Fans of the current indie-folk scene believe that Californian singer/songwriter Joanna Newsom is The Special One – an artist so unique and gifted that she has no need to follow pop’s rules. Have One On Me proves their point and multiplies it by three.
So what does all this say? It says you should pick up the album. It says that in 20 years, people are going to ask you, "Wow? You listened to Joanna Newsom?" This is an artist who is going to be around because she is an artist. She's the real deal and those don't come along very often. So make sure you're listening now. (It will impress your kids and grandkids in the future!)
Do you know the
Democratic Policy Committee? The chair is Byron Dorgan. I will not note everything they do video wise. For example, I have no interest in whoring myself to sell BamaCare. Forget it. That thing needs to die. Universal single-payer health care. No gifts to Big Pharma, no gifts to the insurance lobbyies. But I will note this video by Dick Durbin.