#its also revised in that it went from 23rd favorite to 24th

[kevins-hortatory-hub]

milk-eyed mender review (extra subheaders)

i think it would be absolutely great to have these songs exist in a playlist (for the most part they are strong vibe-producers and have nice beginning and ending moments) but good luck putting them anywhere

i promise that she is a better harp player than I would ever expect to be, even in 2004, and her voice is perfectly inimitable, again in the sense that i would never be able to imitate it. like usually i can imitate women's voices and sound somewhat convincing to my own biased ears, but i can't do that with joanna. otherwise i would describe the songwriting as mostly functional – it's really enjoyable to listen to in a pop sort of way, but if you're hoping for jazz chords and key changes i don't think you'll really find many bones to chew on.

yea baby!

you are out walking in the spring or the fall, either listening to the album with headphones or via pushing joanna newsom and her harp in a wheelbarrow while she is performing the music. you can use the sidewalk, though you should ambitiously move onto the grass once you see somebody else walking in the opposite direction. joanna newsom is not capable of contracting the disease, but there is no reason that you should be unmasked. vinyl is probably also fine, i have not yet been able to try it.

you shouldn't worry too much about having a particularly correct and comprehensive understanding of what is being said in these songs. don't bother with things like genius lyrics either – i imagine it's possible that some of the lyric transcriptions are explicitly wrong since i'm unaware of an official publication of the lyrics (for instance, they write "sending the first scouts over" for the first line of anecdotes off of the 2015 album, whereas it is -obviously- "sending the first cats over") ("/ back from the place beyond the darn"), and the annotations are often misguided (joanna newsom voice). i think much of what she has to say is pretty apparent, and in any case i have found it fun to try to paint the picture of her words in my head as i listen to the songs more and more. this all being said, you should take my interpretations of the songs as truth because i am very good at understanding lyrics

it is fun to hear joanna newsom sing words. for this album in particular, she took her human essence and ground it into dust which is mixed in so deeply to the music that you will keep coughing and sneezing violently while you listen to it

this is the album of mrs. newsom's with the compositional style that is best suited for me. the later albums supposedly have the arrangement and language that demonstrate her divine ancestry and whatnot – i think those albums are great. the milk-eyed mender reads to me as a profoundly earthly document – not by virtue of perfectly describing the world, but rather by working hard in an attempt to place its characteristics. you should think of this album as folk-appropriating pop music – she makes statements like "you take no jam on your bread", but i'm sure that when she gets fast food she's not going to tell them to schmear the top bun of her burger or whatever. her stylistic choices seem to me to be an attempt at making fundamental statements that are also unmarred by a weighty colloquial understanding of terms – ideas like "shall we go outside, shall we break some bread" and "bury this bone to gnaw on it later" offer a simple visceral interpretation, which form the building blocks of the narratives. i imagine that to be the purpose served by a lot of Folksy language on the album – inflammatory writ is worded like an angry anonymous essay posted on the doors of a small town church in the 19th century, and it uses analogies of bugs and bread and candles because that's all she can count on the other citizens to be familiar with. but surely and inescapably the song is written by a modern musician trying to warn a modern audience against artistic stagnation (or whatever). at that, i think the album also forms a beautiful little monument to instinctual songwriting. necessarily, she spent time crafting a voice that is somewhat artificial (in live performances you can see her mouth contorting to produce it) and a lot of the word choices could not ever come from someone's default mindset unless they spent a lot of time reviewing encyclopedias and whatnot to prepare for it. and yet a lot of qualities of the music point to a composition process emerging from the gut and the heart. i would single out peach plum pear for its sincerity and balladry – lines like "and the gathering floozies /afford to be choosy" are probably born from a desire to rhyme the word "floozy", but the desire cleanly coexists with the most poetic and faithful wordsmithing effort. i think the song is an unmatched gorgeousness of language, where a desire to evocatively tell a story is seasoned gently with efforts to form a distinctive singing voice and impressive vocabulary. i would say the album succeeds (and professes) to contain the real concepts aimed at by its words. even failing that, the pure vibe-journey is enough to make for an entertaining listen.