Oh, Joanna

I have recently gotten really into Joanna Newsom. She performs the most literate music I have ever heard:

from Emily

Let us go! Though we know it's a hopeless endeavor
The ties that bind, they are barbed and spined and hold us close forever
Though there is nothing would help me come to grips with a sky that is gaping and yawning
There is a song I woke with on my lips as you sailed your great ship towards the morning

Come on home, the poppies are all grown knee-deep by now
Blossoms all have fallen, and the pollen ruins the plow
Peonies nod in the breeze and while they wetly bow, with
Hydrocephalitic listlessness ants mop up at their brow

And everything with wings is restless, aimless, drunk and dour
The butterflies and birds collide at hot, ungodly hours
And my clay-colored motherlessness rangily reclines
Come on home, now! All my bones are dolorous with vines

Pa pointed out to me, for the hundredth time tonight
The way the ladle leads to a dirt-red bullet of light
Squint skyward and listen -
Loving him, we move within his borders:
Just asterisms in the stars' set order

We could stand for a century
Starin'
With our heads cocked
In the broad daylight at this thing
Joy
Landlocked
In bodies that don't keep
Dumbstruck with the sweetness of being
Till we don't be
Told; take this
Eat this

Told, the meteorite is the source of the light
And the meteor's just what we see
And the meteoroid is a stone that's devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee

And the meteorite's just what causes the light
And the meteor's how it's perceived
And the meteoroid's a bone thrown from the void that lies quiet in offering to thee

Notice the references to The Love Song of J ALfred Prufrock (Let us go then you and I . . . ), The Lotus Eaters (Sailing and poppies) and Leda and the Swan (The father, all things with wings). There are some just brilliant things going on in this song. Navigating a fatalist world being the most obvious and heartwrenching.

Joanna was in Lawrence a few weeks ago. Her concert was one of the most amazing things I have ever seen. I told My Little Activist yesterday that listening to her music I am struck with how magical it must have been to visit a medieval court and hear epic lyrical music for the first time, or in ancient Greece to hear the Illiad performed. She makes suspends my disbelief in magic. I can't understand how her songs can be without magic, they are that brilliant, enchanted.

If you want to hear one of the most gifted stroy-tellers I have ever encountered check out Joanna Newsom. Her latest album is called Y's. It is unbelievably good.