I never intended for this blog to be a venue for music recommendations. Music is a huge part of my life, though (as per the Mix Tape post down the row here).
I find that often I conceptualize albums as short novels. Oddly enough, one of my favorite bands, the Decemberists, released their Hazards of Love album last year as a novel, but it felt disjointed to me. The epic, fatal love story, and a cast of characters that included a gorgeous Queen and a haunting choir of children who drowned....well, I know that it was supposed to be a rock opera of sorts. A few songs spoke to me; I never related to the product as a whole. But their Crane Wife album from a couple of years before, that one read like a solemn fairytale to me. Love found, love lost, love spoken through ancient allegories. The song "Yankee Bayonet" was this environmental history of the Civil War, "the sea-swelled Carolinas" and a "sun-bright swallow that sings upon the birch bough high," but did you see "all the dead of Manassas, all the bellies and the bones and the bile." Or O, Valencia!, a more modern tale of deceit and goin' all crazy over a girl. It was like one man's love-journey through time.
Wow, am I digressing big-time. Apologies. The main point of this short post is to recommend, with fervor, Joanna Newsom's new album Have One on Me. I was first introduced to Newsom through my friend/music rec guru Tore, who threw her older stuff on a mix CD (see?!) for me because he knew I loved female singer-singwriters in a bit of an older tradition. I fell in love with her sound immediately, which is hauntingly reminiscent of Joni Mitchell's but edgier, a little more nervous-sounding. Newsom is young (only in her late twenties), but her voice has the tension of an ancient soul who has seen much, still fears much, and has a lot to say. Her influences feel often southern, even though she's from California, and I've read in several reviews that she does admit to "Appalachian folk" inspirations. It's all a unique mix of this southern gothic and a distinctly-avant-gardish modernism.
If you're to sample just one song before committing to the album (three discs, with six longish songs apiece), download "Good Intentions Paving Company" for an upbeat peek. I've been streaming this one for days. Lyrics like: steeling the "will to remain for the duration" and getting, like a "bump on a log," "into a fist-fight with the fog."
I'm increasingly convinced that the tradition of southern gothic literature is now found more in musicians like these than in anything being published by a press.
I find that often I conceptualize albums as short novels. Oddly enough, one of my favorite bands, the Decemberists, released their Hazards of Love album last year as a novel, but it felt disjointed to me. The epic, fatal love story, and a cast of characters that included a gorgeous Queen and a haunting choir of children who drowned....well, I know that it was supposed to be a rock opera of sorts. A few songs spoke to me; I never related to the product as a whole. But their Crane Wife album from a couple of years before, that one read like a solemn fairytale to me. Love found, love lost, love spoken through ancient allegories. The song "Yankee Bayonet" was this environmental history of the Civil War, "the sea-swelled Carolinas" and a "sun-bright swallow that sings upon the birch bough high," but did you see "all the dead of Manassas, all the bellies and the bones and the bile." Or O, Valencia!, a more modern tale of deceit and goin' all crazy over a girl. It was like one man's love-journey through time.
Wow, am I digressing big-time. Apologies. The main point of this short post is to recommend, with fervor, Joanna Newsom's new album Have One on Me. I was first introduced to Newsom through my friend/music rec guru Tore, who threw her older stuff on a mix CD (see?!) for me because he knew I loved female singer-singwriters in a bit of an older tradition. I fell in love with her sound immediately, which is hauntingly reminiscent of Joni Mitchell's but edgier, a little more nervous-sounding. Newsom is young (only in her late twenties), but her voice has the tension of an ancient soul who has seen much, still fears much, and has a lot to say. Her influences feel often southern, even though she's from California, and I've read in several reviews that she does admit to "Appalachian folk" inspirations. It's all a unique mix of this southern gothic and a distinctly-avant-gardish modernism.
If you're to sample just one song before committing to the album (three discs, with six longish songs apiece), download "Good Intentions Paving Company" for an upbeat peek. I've been streaming this one for days. Lyrics like: steeling the "will to remain for the duration" and getting, like a "bump on a log," "into a fist-fight with the fog."
I'm increasingly convinced that the tradition of southern gothic literature is now found more in musicians like these than in anything being published by a press.
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