Album of the day (#3162): Ys by Joanna Newsom

[albummaster]

Today's album of the day

Ys by Joanna Newsom (View album | Buy this album)

Year: 2006.
Country:
Overall rank: 201
Average rating: 82/100 (from 678 votes).

Thumbnail. Click to enlarge.

Tracks:
1. Emily
2. Monkey & Bear
3. Sawdust & Diamonds
4. Only Skin
5. Cosmia

About album of the day: The BestEverAlbums.com album of the day is the album appearing most prominently in member charts in the previous 24 hours. If an album, or artist, has previously been selected within a x day period, the next highest album is picked instead (and so on) to ensure a bit of variety. A full history of album of the day can be viewed here.

[RoundTheBend]

Worth a listen.

Somewhere between the most amazing record you'll ever hear and feeling "stretched" for a lack of bananas.

[Hayden]

The worst.

[baystateoftheart]

Great album. Have One On Me and Divers are better though.
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[CharlieBarley]

The music is good but why does she put on that awful faux baby voice? Her voice totally spoils it for me. Almost impossible to listen to. Pretentious. Shame because she plays her instruments well.

[pearljammer13]

[AfterHours]

Possibly the great masterpiece of this century.

It is much more subtle and profound than a casual listen will reveal.

Listen closely and consider:

-Newsom is reciting phrases as if in a theatrical unveiling of scene and character (as if up on stage in a play, opera, theatrical performance). They are lonely soliloquies, monologues, dramas, lieder, visionary poetry ... where she is all the parts.
-Her personal life is being unveiled to the public in elongated poetry and detailed mythic and metaphoric journeys, through an exhausting performance art, a winding series of narratives reenacted longingly, achingly ... perhaps postmortem odes of loss, heartbreak, etc (regardless they are performed in this way or in a similar emotional context).
-She embodies the characters, their emotions and predicaments in ever-changing assumptions of being, in an extremely deft, multi-colored, nuanced and subtle vocal performance art. Her vocal character fluctuates, endlessly malleable, shifting articulation, into and out of each state, onto the next, as the lines unravel as if a series of allusions and visions and gestures (a sort of wizardry ... almost shamanistic)
-There is a (often missed) magical balance between orchestra/harp and voice in which each seem to weave, bounce and bend and glide, mirroring or replying or coalescing with the other, in an extraordinary, nearly free-form rhythm and counterpoint, adding a background dimension of "cause and effect" to the "scenes" (as if being imagined and coming to life as she goes ... like backdrops and props coming to being and life as she recites the lines, becomes the characters and their actions)
-The lines are delivered as if she is exhausted. Her voice often cracks and sighs in tired resignation, or squirms and squeels in a sudden inspiration or lashing out. Except for occasional climaxes or outbursts, her lines tend to unravel and unwind as if the phrases are slowly dying from her mouth -- exhausting the idea instead of erecting it. The register of her voice often cracks into a nearly broken sense of tired, sunken, slumped grief as she sighs her way through her lines.
-In her phrasing and delivery there is often a palpable sense of having to gather herself after and before each line and summon the strength to exert the next. Each of the songs could be considered the visions of a protagonist who is exhausted after a long journey (or acting out elongated death scenes ... or experiencing the pressing, lonesome and tragic vision, the inevitability of such). Her visions, despite this exhaustion, must be relayed before it's too late. As Piero Scaruffi notes, they "sound like terminal confessions of a visionary whose visions have drained her soul".
-Paradoxically, there is perhaps another side to all this in that it is also in a constant state of fecundity (in other words, both very alive and fertile and of constant creation or change, but also alluding to tragedy or death).

Perhaps most essential among all of this (in case it wasnt as clear above) is that, emotionally, her voice is virtually always expressing the cusp of longing and grief (regardless of what else) whether in the forefront of her conveyance or "in the back of her throat/register", about to overflow, but just barely able to bare it and carry on through mental and visionary exhaustion (except for when it does overflow). Observing this amongst all else is probably the key to all the rest, all of which is aligned to it. Including the orchestration and harp, which haunts and drives and reacts to all this as it is happening: expressing suspense, existential quandary, lugubrious mystery, danger, and/or mirroring/conversing with the ever-changing metamorphosis of emotions in the vocals and visions of the scenography. This all carries with it the ineluctable tragedy, the inevitable sorrow, the burden of having to bare this knowing it is going to happen.
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[AfterHours]

Found this interesting interview with Newsom with the Wire, 2006 ... Though -- not surprisingly -- she's pretty ambiguous about the albums' contents it contains some interesting takes about it and some of the themes and her feelings/emotions during its recording process and so forth ...

(I just chose excerpts that I found the most interesting)

R: Can you tell me where 'Ys' the title comes from?

J: Yeah, I can say where that came from. Basically it's a reference to the island in Breton mythology that existed off the coast off, I forget what it was called, begins with a D, somewhere of the coast of Brittany. But it was a city built upon an island, surrounded by a wall, and the basic story was that the wall was breached and the city was flooded, but there are several myths surrounding that. The most common is that the king built the city as a present for his daughter, and then the daughter proceeded to decline into a state of complete hedonism and decadence, and the people of the city followed in her footsteps. And the most extreme version of the story that I've heard involved her taking a new lover every night. And when she's done with him, putting this mask on him... Oh, I guess she puts the mask on him in the evening, so she doesn't even have to see his face throughout. But the mask has these prongs that come out when she's done with him, and kill him. And then she throws his dead body over the walls of the city and goes about her business. And then one day a man comes to call on her, and she falls in love with him because of his great beauty - and some versions imply that he's the devil - and other versions imply that he's this messenger of righteousness, come to visit her punishment on her. But she falls in love with him, and he convinces her to take the keys to the city from her father, and she either unlocks the door, or he unlocks the door to the city. But regardless, it floods. And her father the king escapes and tries to take her with him on the back of this magical horse that can run on water, but a saint - I think - refuses to let her go, every time he lifts her onto the horse, she's forced to get off again, and is forced to stay and perish with the city. And then she becomes a harpy figure who lures sailors to their deaths with her singing.
But my reasons for choosing it as the title for my record are many. I chose it because there were five or six different layers of meaning, from superficial or circumstantial, down to extremely specific. And I don't want to align myself too closely with certain parts of the story, because some reasons for choosing that as the title have nothing to do with the story itself but more to do with my thinking surrounding the story, like, one thing I was thinking about at a certain point in the process was the inquiry into the places where Christianity came and erased a true story. Because I think when you read through this myth, you can see remnants or shadows of what it may have been in its original form, which of course would have been a pagan, Druid myth. And you can almost feel, although they're just out of reach, you can perceive distantly these spots where you can feel there used to be something else there. The story used to be different. And I think in a way maybe this record connects with what I imagine to be the actual pre-Christian myth, than I do connect with the Christianised, sterilized, morally upstanding of the myth that remains. But certainly I relate it also to the theme of the city going under the water, cos that's a pervasive theme throughout this entire record, of songs reaching their resolution - some of them don't resolve, but they reach a climax, or, they reach a point where something goes under the water, something drowns of sinks or floods, or changes beneath the water, and the water is a huge force of changing and starting over, and destruction. And also there's a big theme of fecundity and harvest and fertility, and also the excess of those things. I associate water with that as well - a flooding idea. And also, the original thing is that I was dreaming about the letter Y and the letter S, and I knew that I wanted the record title to contain those two letters - it just felt immediately right. That had to be what it was, no matter what.

R: You were dreaming about letters?

J: Yeah [laughs]. And I knew I wanted it to have one syllable, and there are very few words that have the letter Y and the letter S that have one syllable. There's like Say, and Yes, and I can't think of any others, and they're not very good record titles, and I'm like god dammit, what am I gonna name my record? It has to be this, and I know it in my heart, and then I read about Ys, and probably dropped my glass of water, was very dramatically like, Jesus, this is it! You know... And my certainty was driven home by the spooky fact of reading a line in this ficiton book, not only a reference to the city of Ys, but it also contained the line, 'It is that damnable bell', which is a line from one of my songs, and has a very particular syntax... It's weird that I would find that line in a book, it seemed like a massive coincidence.

R: You had written the song first, then you found that line repeated in a book?

J: Exactly, I had written it already, and then I just stopped in my tracks, because I read 'It is that damnable bell', which seems like, outside of the narrative that I wrote for that particular song, which is a real time narrative - it's not like 'this happened and then this happened'... It's like I'm narrating it as it is happening. And that is not a tone that is adopted in fiction very often at all. And I think that tone is required in order for that syntax to make sense and it's really awkward outside of that particular tone, and it was very strange for me to read it, and it felt like yet another confirmation. And then I read a little more about the city of Ys, and how the bells of the cathedral, you can still hear them ringing underwater on a still day, and I have yet another song about bells ringing under water. The point is, this title was the last thing to come. All the songs were already written, and I just needed a title, and couldn't think of anything that could encapsulate everything. And I didn't want a line from any of the songs, or a title of any of the songs, I didn't want to over-emphasize one of the songs over the others, and it seemed somehow inappropriate to do that, that seemed like a normal convention for an album. And I wanted to follow a different type of logic to choose a title for this record. And then I found that.

R: When you were talking about the city of Ys, you mentioned the word decadence, and I was going to bring that word up - it seems that although a lot of people talk about a childlike quality of your music, to me it seems like decadent is a better word - you give yourself the luxury to indulge yourself in song, it's opulent.

J: [Laughs] Sure, I think that's definitely true. It's a tone that's voluntary - it needs to be a prerequisite for allowing myself to write songs in a way that they came about for this record, but it was also an aesthetic choice - for example I wanted the presence of an orchestra, the cover art, which took my friend a year to make, I wanted there to be an opulence and a level of detail and care that was really consistent throughout, so it made a lot of sense for me to do it that way. But the third and for me, probably the most significant role that decadence plays, is in the narrative itself, like, decadence figures very prominently. Either the idea of decadence, or I guess a searching or longing or wondering that is rooted in a desire for any self-gratification, selfishness, self-centered-ness, which is a sort of decadence I guess. I try to convey that by using language which places as the goal this over the top thing, you know, like fiefs and that sort of thing. [laughs]
[page break]
R: That antique quality in some of the words you use... you use 'thee' occasionally...

J: That's not so much a conscious aesthetic choice as it is an attempt to say what I mean to say in the most musical way possible. And the use of 'thee' I think only happens once, in "Emily", that particularly made sense to me because it was part of the three-part singsongy sort of rhyme, and that made sense to put thee in there, because within that tiny little section it seemed really appropriate for the tone. But I don't know if I would have used it elsewhere in the record, it was really specific to that moment. I mean, there's a real singsongyness to describing the three states of a meteor, and the three states for those and what they describe, and it was almost a singsongy rhyme that you would use as a mnemonic device to remember the differences between all of those things, and so it had to have thee in there, if that makes any sense! But I don't go out of my way to use 'antique' or archaic words, in fact I find it really distasteful when I hear music where I feel like that's intentionally done, where someone could have said something a different way, and they said it that way specifically because they wanted to make a period piece. I'm not interested at all in 'period indie music', I find it to be often really cheap and actually not very intelligent. In this case, I really wasn't intending to do that, but occasionally there was a certain type of word that I felt was entirely necessary. And I truly felt like, if anybody took me to task and went through the lyrics and questioned me on every word that seemed archaic to them, I could justify the use of that word over any other word. I've thought so hard about the lyrics that I truly feel that I could sit down and argue for my use of every single word on this record.

RY: The line about the damnable bell makes me think of Poe...

J: Yeah, definitely!

RY: And The Rime of the Ancient Mariner... the lines are long and it's moving towards the post-romantic...

J: And I think another similarity to that period of time that is less overt, is the pacing, because these songs were written from the ground up, with the knowledge that they were going to be long. And I think the same is true for a lot of poetry from that period, and short stories, they carried themselves in a different way from a lot of other poetry that I've read, each line seems to be written with the knowledge that it was going to be part of a longer one, like an epic poem, "Quoth the raven, never more!" - those are long pieces and they pace differently, and they select the moments in which they are going to repeat themselves, based on a different set of values, because they're framed differently. And I definitely relate to that. I had to re-frame my writing style based on the fact that it was going to be contained within this longer form. The pacing of the ideas, the rate at which the ideas develop and unfold, it was all going to be different, because the songs were going to be long, from the first line I wrote.

R: "Emily", there's a reference to your sister, is it also addressed to Emily Dickinson?

J:: No, although maybe I shouldn't say no, because that's an interesting interpretation. I certainly appreciate that, but that wasn't what I intended. It's certainly about more than just my sister, but the Emily referred to is my sister, yeah. And the use of the start and the cosmic imagery has a lot to do with the fact that my sister is an astrophysicist, and I wanted to express the ideas I was interested in with the song in not necessarily her language, because it would be awfully ignorant of me to think that I was speaking an astrophysicist's language, but at least I was taking a symbolic bow towards what she studies and the way her brain works.

R: So you write the lyrics separate to the music, and you work hard on the words aside from that? They don't evolve while you're playing harp?

J: No, I'd say some words do evolve while I'm writing the music, but what also happens is that I'll map it out, I'll have a lot of lines that're just bracketed by parentheses that retain a sentiment or an idea or a thought, but they're not worded yet. And I know that that will be paired with a particular musical phrase or a musical section, but I haven't been able to fill it out yet, with words that'll say precisely what I need them to say and say it with the set of sounds that are gonna agree musically with each line of instumentation. So it often takes me a lot of time to fill in all the chinks and cracks in each song. But sometimes a certain line of music will instantly call to mind a lyric and I'll know very quickly what I want to say there. And the melody, the sung melody, often comes quickly also. I often know the sound of what I'll be singing before I actually have it articulated with the words.

R: So the record is framed as a series of fables - the booklet looks like a book of Victorian adventure stories... when you live in these songs, they don't feel like the fairy tales or nursery rhymes that people talk about - but there is that framing device that you've used... how do you think about these songs - it's like they're not quite made for this world...

J: [laughs]

R: Are they a retreat, or a way of confronting the world...?

J: No, I mean, this is a really big world - I think there's room for just about everything, every idea you have. I do think they don't quite fit... I was very much prepared - mournfully resigned - to my expectation that this record would be very poorly received! There was not a single damn thing I wanted to change, I was so happy with it, but I didn't think that it necessarily had a place within the context of recorded music, that people would bring home and listen to. I just didn't know what was going to happen, I couldn't hear it, it was the first time, I was a stranger, there was no way of knowing what it would sound like to someone else. But I don't feel like it's a retreat from this world; I feel like it's maybe an invocation of some larger ideas that I've been scared to touch in conversation, or in previous songs, or whatnot, and those ideas are very much of this world. I don't feel that I'm writing for a time that hasn't existed yet, or that has existed previously, or anything like that, I don't feel conflicted in that way...

J: ...Basically I felt like I was in an environment where I was able to sing the songs the way they were when I wrote them. Which isn't always the easiest thing when recording. Sometimes I can do that when I'm performing; there's something about the heightened energy of performing focuses me and brings me back to the place I was in when I wrote those songs, but I've never been able to record very easily without changing the energy of the songs, and there's something about the way Steve recorded me and the environment in which it was done, there was a sense of closeness and spontaneity, and I felt extremely emotionally on edge, and I went through these vocal takes, I was just like wrecked afterwards because it was such an emotional experience. But it was really good, that I was able to do that, because then we went into about five or six months of working on the arrangements. And I got so much more technical in my brain during that process, and I think it would have been much more cumbersome, if I had tried to record all the harp parts in that mindset. And it was really hard work - I was using a different part of my brain, so I was glad to have gotten that stuff out of the way.

R: "Monkey And Bear" suggests concern with tension between artistic freedom and the obligations in the day to day world...

J: I'd say actually, believe it or not, the motif of the performing bear, the dancing bear who's just being egged on throughout has nothing to do with my experience of being a performer. In a way, the song is obviously a surreal narrative that goes away from the story of the record - in my mind I was still talking about the same set of ideas, and one of the most important things for me when I was thinking about the story of the song, was that this monkey and bear had been in captivity in the beginning, and they had still been a dancing bear and an organ grinding monkey, but they had been in captivity, in the possession of a farmer - it's supposed to be slightly unclear exactly what the situation was. But I thought it was an interesting story to tell, of what happens when they get free, and they're still in captivity because they're wild animals and there's no place for them to be wild, and they're in search of self-gratification, the idea of decadence I was interested in. And it's basically a fucked-up love story, like, I was interested in the relationship between the monkey and the bear, and a few other things [I'm sorry, I have to blow my nose again!]
I think the idea of performance in this song has more to do with the relationship between the monkey and the bear than anything else, like conditional love - the monkey's saying, if you just dance a little bit longer and if you keep those chains on, and if you keep that costume on, then under those conditions then I'll continue to love you. So that's much more like a smaller comment I'm making than any comment on the idea of being a musician. And there's a bunch of things that go on in that story. The whole story is a set up for an end, which is supposed to be totally, 100 per cent different, and it's supposed to be scary and strange and disorienting and it's not supposed to be clear what's happening. One thing that is supposed to be clear is I'm hoping it'll reiterate again the idea of just searching and searching and searching for gratification, in the image of the bear, what's left of the bear after the bear removes itself from itself, dragging its coat through the water trying to catch minnows with its own fur as a net. But it's really meant to be ambiguous, whether it represents death, or rebirth, or a triumph on the part of the bear, or a complete absolute resignment on the part of the bear, it's supposed to be pretty unclear. I have certain ideas myself, intentions for what I meant there, that I thought it would be a much better passage if I thought there were several interpretations. I wanted it to be surreal, I wanted it to be juxtaposed with the baroque, very simple story, it was supposed to feel simple at first, then I wanted it to break down into this weird scenario...
[page break]
R: "Sawdust & Diamonds", using images of puppets... it made me think, as a harpist, the instrument turns you into a kind of marionette, doesn it?

J: [laughs] I really like all of your interpretations, I feel bad saying no, because I don't want to close doors for anybody, but I can say that, again my intention there was pretty far removed from the experience of my own performance. It was more supposed to be a larger comment - "Monkey and the Bear" was very small and specific, this type of performance I was referring to was a larger social one. That refers to everybody, not just people who get on a stage. But certainly you're right interpreting the strings as marionette strings, that was intended, and the lights in the wings are supposed to be the wings of a theatre, not the wings of a bird... But that line set off more about spectatorship and scrutiny, and the collective gaze of these things, more than he idea of me playing harp in front of some people.

R: You mentioned about the interest in pagan stories, where does that interest come from?

J: It comes in part as a nod to the friend for whom many parts of this record were written, who I can't talk about very much. But I basically did some reading and studying specifically, I guess, in honour of her - I don't particularly like that expression but I don't know a better one. Sorry to be so cryptic!

R: Is there any conneciton, you've talked about your idyllic sounding upbringing in Nevada... you made a lot of music with your family?

J: I think that has actually been pretty over-emphasised or exaggerated. We had this little thing when I was way younger, and my mum led a little children's band for Christmas shows when I was little, like, me on a tiny little harp and my sister on a tiny cello, and a few other people. We all played music to some extent, but we didn't sit around evening times and like jam together or anything like that. We all had very differnet experiences in music; my brother's a great musician; he plays piano and guitar but all the time I was growing up he was this insane drummer. We have a drum room at my parents' house, that was built for him and my mum, cos she's an African drummer and she could have her classes meet up there. But my brother would go into the drum room and play every waking hour, when he wasn't he was eating or being forced to do homework. And that was similar to the way I was with harp, only I was in another little room, making up weird little stuff. And then my sister was much more classical, she was a cellist and my mom would play with her, cos a lot of her cello suites need a pianist. There was music happening all the time, but we didn't sit around together singing "koombaya" or anything like that.
There was music playing around the house a lot, but I feel like a lot of people have that experience. Mine probably wasn't totally unique in that regard at all.

R: Beyond this record, you suggested that there's a sense of a quest about this record, so do you feel that you reached a certain point that you were trying to reach, or if there's still stuff that's out of reach... Where do you think you might be led next?

J: Yeah... hmmm... Well I feel like conceptually, in terms of the ideas I was struggling with, and then writing about, in some ways I feel I reached a certain resolution, and in other ways I felt like I had reached some extremity, some point where I felt I couldn't feel worse, or I couldn't feel better, depending on what we are talking about... And crested this hill, and there was endless mountain ranges stretching out before me. I think there's certain heights or depths that the more you think about them and the more you go into them and write about them, the more boundless and paralysingly huge they seem. So, I feel like I certainly am different because of thinking and working the way that I did on these songs, but I don't know if that change carries with it a great deal of resolution, or whether it's a different kind of restlessness, a new way of being restless. But musically, I don't really know... I feel this is a real self-contained project and whatever I do next will exist completely separately of this project. It'll be either very simple again, or very complicated but in a totally different way of being complicated. I feel this is a complete work or idea for me, and it's building something really delicate... And this is an image I hate to use, because it reminds me of thinigs people say about my music that I like the least, but the image that came into my mind was something very detailed and delicate, like a doll house built out of toothpicks or something like that, and it took me months and months, and I had a bunch of other people helping, like I had an architect, and a draftsperson and a contractor, and all these, Jim O'Rourke, Steve Albini, Van Dyke Parks, and my label who helped me so much, and the orchestral players... I had so many things in place that allowed me to make this little house, and when I was done I couldn't help, I was just bellowing and weeping for weeks after I finished this project because it was just so huge for me, and I was so overwhelmed by how everything had come together, and it was exaxctly the way I wanted it to be, and now it's this object that so much work and attention has been put into, but it's contained. Nothing else to do on it, and whatever I do next is going to be pretty separate from that. I don't know what I'm going to be interested in talking about next, and what I'm going to be writing next...

R: difficult one to repeat..

J: Yeah. Well, especially because it requires a great deal of force and motivation, and emotional pressure to do it, and all of that stuff got released into this work. I can't conjure up the motivation to do anything nearly this hard unless I have a new reason to do anything different - that's just as hard, because it's just... done!
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[Skinny]

Remember when it was super cool to like this?
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2021 in full effect. Come drop me some recs. Y'all know what I like.

[SleepDealer]

Bought the CD back in the day on the basis of the Pitchfork review without having heard it, and it immediately clicked. A particularly immersive listen - near perfect amalgamation of stories, lyrics, voice and music. I've been slightly disappointed in her releases since, but only slightly
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