Have One On Me

Joanna Newsom (Drag City, 2010)

There is plenty to loathe about the American folk-rock revival of the last decade. At its worst, the trend’s appropriation of 1960s counterculture seemed ready-made for a world in which the term ‘alternative’ has come to signify good taste as opposed to any political or aesthetic alternative – a tendency best exemplified by the use of Devendra Banhart’s ‘At the Hop’ (2004) as backing music on a British television advert for Cathedral City cheddar cheese. Mature, tasteful, dreamy, golden – that could work, in fact, as a description for both cheese and musician.

This is the milieu from which Joanna Newsom emerged, and listeners ill-disposed to the above have more than enough reasons to be wary of her. If you’ve heard Newsom’s music then the two things that stand out are probably her voice (described by one critic as ‘between Björk and a handbrake’) and her choice of Celtic harp as her main instrument. Couple this with a tendency for oblique, deeply personal lyrics that go heavy on the natural imagery and there’s every reason to dismiss her as a latter-day hippie. But that would be a mistake, as Newsom’s music is underpinned by a keen intellect and an ear for the avant-garde (she studied composition at the same San Francisco arts college as Steve Reich and Laurie Anderson). Like certain of her contemporaries – notably the late guitarist Jack Rose and the singer Josephine Foster – Newsom has used her disparate interests to breathe new life into the blues and folk forms collected by early-20th-century archivists such as Alan Lomax.

Have One On Me, her third album, is a sprawling collection of pieces that sits somewhere between the Appalachian-tinged songs of her 2004 debut The Milk-Eyed Mender and the long, murky orchestral arrangements of its follow-up, Ys (2006). At more than two hours long, it is a sprawling effort, rich in rhythm and melody, backed by piano, harp, brass and woodwind. Newsom’s voice has lost its harsher edge; it’s now a quiet moan punctuated by the occasional rise in volume that never quite breaks into a wail. The warm, bodily tones of the accompanying instruments circle around her, most strikingly on ‘You and Me Bess’, which begins with Newsom warily humming a trumpet line.

These intricate songs (most run to around seven minutes) may be easy on the ear, but they are tough, challenging creations. Instrumental flourishes at the end of phrases (runs up and down the harp on the title track, a medieval cadence on ‘81’) hint at a narrative, but the tunes twist and turn in unexpected ways. Atmospheres are evoked by hints and nudges: piano suggests a driving rock riff (‘Good Intentions Paving Company’); harp plays a sparse counterpoint or fleetingly mimics the West African kora (as on the final section of ‘Go Long’).

Gradually, over the course of the album, an inner world is sketched out. Every now and then Newsom will enunciate a line more clearly than the others, and a disturbing image will snap into focus: ‘I have died and lived to tell the tale, halleloo,’ she sings on ‘No Provenance’, in a conscious echo of pre-war blues singer Leadbelly’s funeral dirge ‘You Must Have that Pure Religion, Halleloo’. It is a reminder that intimate, personal music does not have to go hand-in-hand with chocolate-box sentiment: in fact, as Newsom shows us, it can be a deeply unsettling experience.

Daniel Trilling