During an interview at a kitchen table in Soho sometime last month, Will Oldham mentioned Joanna Newsom as one of his favorite storytellers. At the time, I'd only passingly listened to her two self-released EPs, and was more familiar with her keyboard work with San Francisco's The Pleased and harp contributions to the Deerhoof/Hella side project Nervous Cop. But that's changed with the release of her first long player, The Milk-Eyed Mender. Here, the words to her meandering stories-- disarming in their formal purity, but still highly individualized and eccentric-- elaborate on an aesthetic that evokes French coins, dark maroon leaves, shafts of wheat, and ostrich feathers as much as it references them directly.
Born in Nevada City and currently residing in San Francisco, Newsom's yarns summon a deep, rustic South. A line in the buoyant "Bridges and Balloons" uses e.e. cummings neologisms and Omoo's breezy prosody to impart the tale of a winter's day on a fallible ship: "The sight of bridge and balloon/ Makes calm canaries irritable/ They caw and claw all afternoon/ 'Catenaries and dirigibles/ Brace and buoy the living room/ A loom of metal, warp-woof-wimble/ And a thimblesworth of milky moon/ Can touch hearts larger than a thimble." In "Sadie", the title character is asked to accept a pinecone and a bone, talismans to ward off death. Really, they're the gentlest tokens that mark the beginning of a relationship, and later reaffirm the love despite an inevitable move towards taciturnity.
Newsom's wonderfully detailed romanticism ("Your skin is something that I stir into my tea"), homespun wisdom ("Never get so attached to a poem, you forget truth that lacks lyricism"), idiosyncratic flourishes ("See him fashion a cap from a page of Camus"), and insights into the prosaic ("There are some mornings/ When the sky looks like a road") infuse each track with the weightiness of an embroidered travel narrative and a private field-recording.
She wields a joyful trill reminiscent of Texas Gladden on her "Devil and the Farmer's Wife", while her often childlike intonation also recalls Linda Hagood of the early '90s Uncle Wiggly-related trio, Smackdab, saturated with the air of '60s English folkie Vashti Bunyan. Showing an appreciation for Appalachian folk and the experimental composer/folksong scholar Ruth Crawford Seeger, her spare arrangements-- harp, Wurlitzer electronic piano, harpsichord, piano, and slide-guitar on two tracks-- unwind like early Homestead oddity, The Supreme Dicks.
Creating avant-garde American music for the back porch, she expands upon tradition without losing authenticity. In this sense, her practice could be linked to Devendra Banhart, a friend and kindred spirit. Both map a pile of eccentricities that tumble together to create something useful, familiar, and nearly sacred. Here's hoping to a duet for the new folk future. Perhaps Kenny-and-Dolly style?
