Have One on Me
Mid-Winter Spring asked me to post my thoughts about Joanna Newsom's new album, Have One on Me. So here I oblige. I don't know how intelligently I can speak about it, and further, although I've listened to it quite a lot, I've still only had it for five days, and, as was proven by Ravel's Piano Concerto in G, I can love something to bits only to feel cold toward it after I get to know it too well, and am no longer seduced by it, and want something with more formal perfection. I don't know if I'll ever feel this way with regard to Have One on Me; time will tell. It certainly is very beautiful, in a way similar to the way in which Ravel is beautiful. But anyway; this is all just to say, "Don't listen to me."
But on to the album. I do love it, I love it very very much. The orchestration - Ryan Fransesconi's, chamber-size, dominated by guitars, banjos, violins, and drums, but with some wind here and there and some miscellaneous peculiar instruments too - is superb. Neal Morgan's drums sound like Morgan had never before heard drums played, and just went at them as would a child. Or in other words, they don't sound like he has a drumkit from which he has picked his sounds, but that he listened to the music, heard "big deep sound" in his head, and invented anew the floor tom. They're hardly ever used to give a beat, instead being textural; and they're used much like classical percussion, in that they are only brought in at important moments, and leave the music just as easily as classical percussion does (by contrast, if a pop song goes without drums for a long time, virtually the only time they enter is to bring the song to a fuller conclusion, on the last chorus or whatever; once they're in, they stay in). The other instruments are generally used in fairly standard ways, but not always; "Baby Birch" has an electric guitar used in a way completely new to me, and extremely effective; guitars are never strummed but rather play single notes with their own peculiar colour; and there're even some timpani on "In California." It all sounds very natural, and very Appalachian, or whatever the word for that distinctive sound is.
Chord progressions, melodies, and so on, are not often experimental; but they are idiosyncratic, and very beautiful. Newsom's voice, as has been much commented on, has much matured; I think that this is, at worst, no worse than no change, and, at best, as good as maturity is in people, which is, to my mind, very good.
But what really struck me about this album is that Newsom appears more interested in writing poetry than music. In the only ten-minute songs I've ever heard, they are made that long by instrumental intros and outros, and extended instrumental bridge sections. Not so here: songs often start and finish with her singing, and there is rarely an instrumental section of more than a minute (in fact, I wouldn't be too surprised to find that there were none at all). It is nice, given this, that the orchestration and musical structure of songs is perhaps the most sophisticated I've ever heard on a pop/rock album, because I'm not very good at listening to lyrics. I made an attempt here, for more or less the first time. I think she's probably a very good lyricist indeed. (I wonder what she'll do next? After this album of poetry, which reminds me almost of Greek bards, will she change direction? or write an album consisting of one hour-long song, bringing her even closer to a bard? This latter seems almost a natural progression. I would probably lap it up.) (Also, her emphasis being where it is seems to explain away many critics' criticism of this album that it has insufficient internal variation. Why should it, given that it's about the words? I can't imagine that this criticism would be made if they were put in a book of poetry. But then, I know nothing about poetry.)
Perhaps it says a lot about this album that I feel unable to say that it is good but for this feature, or that it is as good as this album but worse than that; it seems that these statements would all cheapen it, for more or less the same reason that it would cheapen Beethoven's 8th symphony to say that it was really nice, but not what we were hoping for from the man who gave us the 3rd. Each symphony is, I think, a genuine artistic statement (by which I mean, I guess, something that is in its ideal form written from an inner compulsion without thought of release dates or commercial/critical appeal or what is expected of one, and is importantly unified in some way; presumably very few artworks live up to this ideal, but those that come close can be called genuine, I think (I know this is all very vague; I'm not sure how to better elucidate the thought)), and that is all that needs really be said of it. So with Have One on Me. It is just a great album, a genuine artistic statement. So yeah. That's what I think of it.
But on to the album. I do love it, I love it very very much. The orchestration - Ryan Fransesconi's, chamber-size, dominated by guitars, banjos, violins, and drums, but with some wind here and there and some miscellaneous peculiar instruments too - is superb. Neal Morgan's drums sound like Morgan had never before heard drums played, and just went at them as would a child. Or in other words, they don't sound like he has a drumkit from which he has picked his sounds, but that he listened to the music, heard "big deep sound" in his head, and invented anew the floor tom. They're hardly ever used to give a beat, instead being textural; and they're used much like classical percussion, in that they are only brought in at important moments, and leave the music just as easily as classical percussion does (by contrast, if a pop song goes without drums for a long time, virtually the only time they enter is to bring the song to a fuller conclusion, on the last chorus or whatever; once they're in, they stay in). The other instruments are generally used in fairly standard ways, but not always; "Baby Birch" has an electric guitar used in a way completely new to me, and extremely effective; guitars are never strummed but rather play single notes with their own peculiar colour; and there're even some timpani on "In California." It all sounds very natural, and very Appalachian, or whatever the word for that distinctive sound is.
Chord progressions, melodies, and so on, are not often experimental; but they are idiosyncratic, and very beautiful. Newsom's voice, as has been much commented on, has much matured; I think that this is, at worst, no worse than no change, and, at best, as good as maturity is in people, which is, to my mind, very good.
But what really struck me about this album is that Newsom appears more interested in writing poetry than music. In the only ten-minute songs I've ever heard, they are made that long by instrumental intros and outros, and extended instrumental bridge sections. Not so here: songs often start and finish with her singing, and there is rarely an instrumental section of more than a minute (in fact, I wouldn't be too surprised to find that there were none at all). It is nice, given this, that the orchestration and musical structure of songs is perhaps the most sophisticated I've ever heard on a pop/rock album, because I'm not very good at listening to lyrics. I made an attempt here, for more or less the first time. I think she's probably a very good lyricist indeed. (I wonder what she'll do next? After this album of poetry, which reminds me almost of Greek bards, will she change direction? or write an album consisting of one hour-long song, bringing her even closer to a bard? This latter seems almost a natural progression. I would probably lap it up.) (Also, her emphasis being where it is seems to explain away many critics' criticism of this album that it has insufficient internal variation. Why should it, given that it's about the words? I can't imagine that this criticism would be made if they were put in a book of poetry. But then, I know nothing about poetry.)
Perhaps it says a lot about this album that I feel unable to say that it is good but for this feature, or that it is as good as this album but worse than that; it seems that these statements would all cheapen it, for more or less the same reason that it would cheapen Beethoven's 8th symphony to say that it was really nice, but not what we were hoping for from the man who gave us the 3rd. Each symphony is, I think, a genuine artistic statement (by which I mean, I guess, something that is in its ideal form written from an inner compulsion without thought of release dates or commercial/critical appeal or what is expected of one, and is importantly unified in some way; presumably very few artworks live up to this ideal, but those that come close can be called genuine, I think (I know this is all very vague; I'm not sure how to better elucidate the thought)), and that is all that needs really be said of it. So with Have One on Me. It is just a great album, a genuine artistic statement. So yeah. That's what I think of it.