The evolution of Ys: Joanna Newsom says her songs ‘sure as shit’ have changed

By Sheba White
Published: September 22nd, 2008 | 9:16am

In the spring of 2004, Drag City released a dozen tracks under the title Milk-Eyed Mender by a then relatively unknown California-based vocalist-harpist named Joanna Newsom. The album’s cover art — with its delicately embroidered tapestry of fish, fowl, flight, and field elements — visually summarized the predominantly dismissive critiques that soon followed. This shy, bronze-haired instrumentalist with her creaking vocal clatter and bustling harp was antiquated, gimmicky, and saddled with a terribly precious poetic façade, the less attentive deemed. Most at question was the issue of authenticity, a purely abstract notion whose rules and rigors seemingly haunt a number of critics. Was this Newsom character for real or fraud? Affected or artistic?

Curiously, these slights retained the same rotting whiff to them as that of the criticism surrounding Emily Dickinson, whose poems and persona one Atlantic reviewer commented on as being “obviously the work of an oversensitive, coy, ill-disciplined, well-bred, hysterical spinster.”

When in the late fall of 2006 Newsom released another masterpiece, this time titled Ys (an equally critic-damning allusion to the mythical French version of Atlantis — further evidence of her quaint affectation, they agreed), authenticity questions still burbled beneath the brook of critics’ banter. Called to question were not Newsom’s vocals, which had clearly showcased a non-argumentative lustrous timbre for the Ys song cycle, or her obvious lyrical deftness — a stream-of-consciousness fare pricked with mythology — or the stunning allure of the compositions with their sweeping Van Dyke Parks–produced Asiatic swirls, but rather the use of what one reviewer criticized as “too much string arrangement” from the harpist.

Perhaps this is one of the many reasons why Newsom decided to take her songs to a more enlightened arena. In fall 2007, Newsom began sporadically performing the entirety of the Ys song cycle with a 20-plus orchestra. She has since performed the five-song album in places as far-reaching as Tokyo and Sydney as well as North American dates in Milwaukee and Austin. “I do feel that it holds together real nice in the context of a live orchestra,” Newsom said of the choice, just prior to her August 2008 performance with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. “That feat lies in the strength of Van Dyke Parks' arrangements, as well as Jim O'Rourke's mixing, which was actually taken into account in these live performances.”

As to the reason behind the beginning-to-end performance of Ys in its 54.58-minute entirety, Newsom agrees with the conclusion that the song cycle is meant to be played as originally recorded, not pulled apart. One gets the sense that the album’s song cycle is telling a multilayered story that must play out in chapters in order to be understood. But like any good book with multiple chapters, each song is a story within itself. According to Newsom, each one also incorporates aspects of tumultuous personal events — never revealed so as not to sully the audience’s interpretation, she has said — that deeply affected her within the course of a year. When writing Ys, she said, every line and bar reflected a certain mood, scene, color, or image, yet even these elements are mutable.

“Over time, the meanings of the songs have all shifted slightly for me,” Newsom said. “Especially this is true for the Ys songs, because they are seeded throughout with so much autobiography, which is, of course, an untrustworthy and glacially, incrementally shifting source of information. Sometimes, I feel like when I turn my back, the songs are making faces at me. And then when I turn around again, I can't quite put my finger on what has changed, but something sure as shit has.”

Having played the Ys song cycle in this manner for close to a year, you’d think all concerns would be put to rest over the questions surrounding the harpist’s authenticity. On stage during the Chicago performance, Newsom was relaxed and accessible with an enormous Lyon & Healy pedal harp nestled between her legs and 27 funereally clad musicians staring at her spring-attired form with studied expectation. While she plucked through the 16.53-minute length of “Only Skin,” Newsom seemed determined but not distressed — her neck swanlike over the harp’s unfinished blonde frame and a sheen of organic creativity, not structured artificiality, about her.

Of the new criticism now surrounding her, the paternalistic veneer has finally been scraped to reveal one last remaining slight against the vocalist-harpist: Newsom doesn’t live up to the innocent, lyre-playing nymph that certain listeners once dismissed (but simultaneously and covetously embraced) as a persona of eccentric infantilism. One such critic, for instance, dramatically detailed a low-cut gown worn onstage during a previous orchestra performance and his slightly perturbed revelation that the harpist remained undaunted by her own sexual allure. In essence, he deemed, she is too preening for most tastes.

Perhaps, for critics’ sakes, Newsom should remain a distilled beautiful object blissfully floating behind the glass jar wall of authenticity for such critics to pluck their own feathers out over with inane classifications, instead of being an artist creating songs that are both challenging and familiar, structured and defiant, whimsical and very real.

With nary a hint of the backlash that she has weathered, Newsom’s focus remains on the future of her art. “I'm just hoping I can write some good songs, and I can capture good and accurate recordings of them,” she said. “And that if I end up orchestrating or accompanying them, then I hope those choices would serve rather than detract from the songs. It sounds real simple. But hoo-boy does it get a body in the habit of losing sleep.”