In the course of their writerly duties, reviewers sometimes like to recommend when and where and how a given album ought to be listened to for maximum enjoyment: on a road trip; at a party; on vinyl, with a few discerning friends and a bottle of wine. The listening instructions took a turn toward the emphatic last month when Joanna Newsom released her latest, Have One on Me. The general consensus? This album should be listened to with effortful attention and absolutely no distractions. Which, of course, is not how music is usually experienced these days.
For one thing, Newsom's newest is a triple album, and it clocks in at just past the two-hour mark. (She gave the media comparatively little heads-up about those odd-for-2010 details, or the fact that she was getting ready to release a project at all.) The length — not to mention the songs' strategic distribution over three discs, when two would have sufficed — indicated right off that hearing all of it, in order, would require serious commitment. But the nature of the songs is what really calls for focus: If you're in the middle of a track and anything else steals your attention away for even a moment, you can't just find your place again the next time the song's chorus comes around. There are no choruses. Newsom, the fantastical California indie-folk bard whose primary instrument is harp, and second is piano, has never gotten in the habit of writing them — not on her debut, The Milk-Eyed Mender, not on the follow-up, Ys, which brimmed with busy orchestral arrangements by Brian Wilson collaborator Van Dyke Parks, and not now. Song structure, for Newsom, is an open-ended thing, and it never resolves in a completed circle. Often, it arrives at far-flung musical points. That transportive quality is one of her songs' virtues.
If the term "accessible" applies to Have One on Me, it does so mostly in the context of Newsom's unconventional body of work. It's not as though, in the four years since Ys, she decided to start courting radio airplay — the new album's title track is a winding 11 minutes. But the sizable set does hold surprises, chief among them "Good Intentions Paving Co.," a song sprinkled with swooping, cursive R&B melodies that are flat-out catchy, and a reasonably danceable groove that blends pumping piano pop with an insistent bossa nova. It's unlike anything we've heard from her before.
The difference in Newsom's singing this time around can't be overestimated. During bits and pieces of "Good Intentions," she glides ticklishly between notes like a distant elfin cousin of Sam Cooke. While making the album, she lost her voice to nodes on her vocal cords and had to go without singing or talking for a couple months. Whether it's due to the physical changes her body underwent as a result of that, or a conscious retraining of her voice after hearing it characterized as shrill one too many times, or some combination of both, what you find on her new album is a pearlescent warble, suppler in its movements, but still not tamed into a commonplace instrument. All these are good things. Singing "On a Bad Day," a Celtic-tinged ballad and one of the simplest, shortest and finest cuts, she glides over, around and through the crisp melody in soft curlicues.
That Newsom's singing retains such a lithe touch is pretty remarkable, considering the actual words coming out of her mouth — hefty, descriptive zingers like the oft-mentioned "etiolated" — and the fact that on paper, her lyrics read like 19th century poetry, thanks to the attention she pays to novel pastoral imagery, meter and rhyme scheme. (With her word choice and aversion to choruses, it's safe to say we're not going to see Newsom sit down and co-write with a Nashville songwriter anytime soon.) The way she delivers those lyrics doesn't feel cumbersome at all, but flighty and musical, so much so that you'd never be able to make many of them out without consulting the lengthy booklet.
If it used to seem unlikely — considering the resemblance Newsom's songs bore to medieval fables — that she could approach anything close to emotional directness, she's moved in that direction. Across these three discs, she plays the part of a romantic soul, contorting herself for the sake of love: "Easy" opens the album with a formidable pledge of affection; at the album's midpoint, "Jackrabbits," she pleads with her lover to let her throw herself into rekindling the flame; by the final song, "Does Not Suffice," the affair has reached an absolute and unambiguous end, and all signs of her presence have been dramatically scrubbed from the place. Quite a journey. It takes a little patience to catch her drift, is all.
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