Have One On Me

Nevada City native Joanna Newsom’s much acclaimed second album, the Van Dyke Parks-arranged Ys, was the coffee table album of choice for folk whose boho boltholes couldn’t hold a coffee table. For the follow-up she’s delivered a mammoth three CD set that will, no doubt, sort out the tourists from the true believers.
Any caricaturist might sketch Ms Newsom prettily pruning Kate Bush’s tree of knowledge and transplanting the snippings to her goldmine hometown via Appalachian airs. She does little to dispel the impression on tunes like ‘Easy’ or ‘No Provenance’, which set Lionheart melodies against stately strings, flute, soft soap drums and piano. But there’s more here than meets the ear. For a start, her vocal style has matured, with fewer nails-on-blackboard moments, and songs like ‘Jackrabbits’ splice lullaby melodies with words pitched perfectly between the prose poem and the utilitarian love song (“You can take my hand in the darkness darlin’, like a length of rope”).
More often than not, Have One On Me conjures visions of Cornish shut-ins dropped on Plymouth Rock, or maybe West Virginian mountain musicians sequestered in Findhorn. Here’s music for maverick social experiments dedicated to preserving Victorian values in the present day, or utopian communes on the turn. The eight-minute ‘Baby Birch’ begins as bare bones woodsy before ambient Americana guitar poisons the well, resulting in what sounds like a rather lovely and lengthy dispatch from a lost century.
Elsewhere, the title tune is a ten-minute epic that opens with Joni mezzo-soprano set against harp and autoharp arpeggios before morphing into witchy and hill-rambling Wicker Man folk, with sweeping fiddle, swooping vocals, hand drums and mad-as-a-bat word pictures.
Newsom’s songs turn the clock back to when the puritans landed in the new world (“Hello my old country, hello,” she chirps in a crone voice on the handclappy ‘Good Intentions Paving Company’) to find a roadmap that read Here Be Monsters. It could, without much of a stretch, soundtrack the lives of the cloistered community terrorised by nocturnal forest dwellers in M Night Shyamalan’s The Village. Whether that sounds like bliss or torment is the listener’s business. Me, I’m still reeling.
Key track: ‘Baby Birch’