#joanna newsom: a little shade of grief comes in when love is its most real version.

[septembersghost]

me watching any piece of media ever made: how can i make the thesis here about the wondrous, fulfilling, frightening, destroying, restorative, glimmering thrall of, and tragic inevitability of grief within, any and every form of love?

elvis (2022): *very first thing we hear* oh, let our love survive... *later*: love song i've known since childhood used in a dark, ominous way and a desperately tender one: some things are meant to be. take my hand, take my whole life too, for i can't help falling in love... *later still*: it was love. *last*: i need your love...

ah. okay. so you just made my job too easy. i don't even have to search for it. thank you. guess i'll go insane.

[whiteshipnightjar]

When Joanna Newsom said: "Everyone’s getting older. When I crossed that line in my mind where I knew I was with the person that I wanted to marry, it was a very heavy thing, because you’re inviting death into your life. You know that that’s hopefully after many, many, many, many years, but the idea of death stops being abstract, because there is someone you can’t bear to lose. When it registers as true, it’s like a little shade of grief that comes in when love is its most real version. Then it contains death inside of it, and then that death contains love inside of it."

And when Andy Samberg said: "For me, my family is the most important thing in my life. Everything in my career could go away and I would still be happy because I’m just blessed in my family. I’m so happy and I love them so much. And it means everything to me. You know, I’ve experienced career success before when I wasn’t in that situation in my personal life and it was much more empty. It doesn’t really mean as much for me personally if I don’t have anyone to share that with. And certainly that has been the case with Joanna and now our daughter. So, I don’t know, I think it’s what works for me, it’s what’s important to me, it’s the way that I like to run it. We are a lot more private I think than a lot of other people which is also just our choice."

Happy 10th wedding anniversary to the loveliest Andy and Joanna!

[eurosleazarchive]

joanna newsom marrying andy samberg gave us the quote “when i crossed that line in my mind where i knew i was with the person that i wanted to marry, it was a very heavy thing, because you’re inviting death into your life. you know that that’s hopefully after many, many, many, many years, but the idea of death stops being abstract, because there is someone you can’t bear to lose. when it registers as true, it’s like a little shade of grief that comes in when love is its most real version. then it contains death inside of it, and then that death contains love inside of it.”

so you know. i'm doing okay.

[issythediver]

Album Review: Divers (2015) by Joanna Newsom

9.5/10

Joanna Newsom's fourth studio album, Divers, is essentially an album about "the nullifying, defeating, negating, repeating joy of life" but also so much more than that. In an interview with Uncut, Newsom talked about the “fear of loss” that informed this album and how falling in love invites death into your life “because there is someone you can’t bear to lose. when it registers as true, it’s like a little shade of grief that comes in when love is its most real version. Then it contains death inside of it, and then that death contains love inside of it." That is such a beautiful and heartfelt way to put it. In the album, Newsom talks (or rather, sings) about time, war and death.

The first song on the album, titled Anecdotes, relies on war imagery. The second song is called Sapokanikan. Sapokanikan “was the name of one of several Lenape villages that archaeologists have identified as existing on Manhattan Island prior to the coming of Europeans.” In this song, Newsom talks about how so many people who have been a significant part of history are forgotten ("The cause that they died for are lost in the idling bird calls/ And the records they left are cryptic at best, lost in obsolescence/The text will not yield, nor x-ray reveal with any fluorescence/Where the hand of the master begins and ends.") In the third song, called Leaving The City, the music rises and falls in unexpected ways, making it one of my favorite songs on the album. In the fourth song on the album, called Goose Eggs, the narrator sings about how her inability to connect with people on a deeper level drives people away from her ("And I could never find my way to be the kind of friend you seemed to need in me/ Till the needing has ceased") The fifth song on the album is called Waltz Of The 101st Lightborne, which is sung from the perspective of a soldier's lover, wishing for her love's well-being. The sixth song on the album, called The Things I Say, is one of the shortest and the simplest songs on the album.In the title track of the album, the narrator is a woman standing on the pier and waiting for her love (the diver) to return ("The diver is my love/ And I am his (if I am not deceived), who takes one breath above for every hour below the sea") The song also talks about the different roles that society has assigned to women and men ("I know we must abide, each by the rules that bind us here/the divers, and the sailors, and the women on the pier.") This theme continues as the narrator says to her lover "I can't claim that I knew you best, but did you know me at all?" The music intensifies as she sings "A woman is alive! A woman is alive!". Towards the end of the song, she decides to leave the pier and dive into the sea herself ("I'll hunt the pearl of death to the bottom of my life/And ever hold my breath, till I may be the diver's wife"). The eighth song on the album, called Same Old Man, is the only song on the album which was not written by Newsom. The tenth song on the album, called Pin Light Bent, was inspired by the demise of a female flight attendant, after she accidentally fell from an airplane. In the last song on the album, called Time, As A Symptom, the narrator answers some of the questions she asked in the previous songs of the album. In the title track, she asked "Tell me, why is the pain of birth lighter borne than the pain of death?" And in Time, As A Symptom, she sings "When cruel birth debases, we forget/When cruel death debases, we believe it erases all the rest that precedes." After being in an endless war with time for the rest of the album, in the final track, she sings "And it pains me to say, I was wrong/Love is not a symptom of time/Time is just a symptom of love" and we are all just "bleeding out our days in the river of time." The last song of the album flows perfectly into the first song because the album is created to be an endless loop, just like the cycle of time.

[musicollage]

Joanna Newsom. Divers, 2015. Drag City. ( Recorded By – Steve Albini )     ~ [ Album Review | Pitchfork ]

On her fourth album, Divers, Joanna Newsom comes down in size if not scope. A love letter in the form of a reckoning with death, Divers deals with making tangible the huge mass of impending doom about the loss of love. You know, the small stuff. It's a gorgeous record, full of her usual harp wilyness and baroque rhythms.

Joanna Newsom's Divers is an album about a profound love, but it hardly features any love songs. The singer/songwriter recently explained to Uncut that her marriage in 2013 had invited death into her life, "because there is someone you can't bear to lose," she said. "When it registers as true, it's like a little shade of grief comes in when love is its most real version. Then it contains death inside of it, and then that death contains love inside of it." There is only one domestic vignette on the record, towards the end of "Leaving the City", where Newsom and her love go running on a beautiful day. Immediately, though, her high dims: "The spirit bends beneath knowing it must end." 2010's Have One on Me traced the death of a relationship as Newsom tried and failed to defeat a proud man's human nature. On Divers, she attempts to defeat time to stave off death.

To bear the weight of its subject, Divers fits to scale, ornate and roaming after the intimacies of Have One on Me. The arrangements—tackled by Newsom along with eight different musicians, including Nico Muhly, Ryan Francesconi, Dirty Projectors' David Longstreth, and her brother Pete—cover the ground of all her past work in a fraction of the time, making this her most dynamic and exhilarating album. The first half in particular veers between baroque poise, jaunty blues, and rococo beauty, as if searching for answers in disparate places. Landlocked between the dry, acoustic arrangements of "The Things I Say" and "Same Old Man", the lilting harp and piano of the title track casts her lover as a deep sea diver and measures the distance between them, "how the infinite divides." The meticulous internal rhymes in the chorus of "Leaving the City" contract against the tug of her harp, a cascade of tiny parts that form a huge, billowing whole, like tiny bones in a vast wingspan. "The longer you live, the higher the rent," she sings inside the frenzy.

Divers makes a landscape out of this abstract fear of loss. On the courtly "Anecdotes" and "Waltz of the 101st Lightborne", she is part of a battle fought by birds to try and wrest control of time. "You Will Not Take My Heart Alive" is the most Ren Fair piece here, on which Newsom contemplates ascension to some transcendent plane, "[severing] all strings to everyone and everything." Its sister song "A Pin-Light Bent" descends sadly back towards reason and reconciliation of her unsuccessful quest to outrun time. "In our lives is a common sense/ That relies on the common fence/ That divides and attends," she sings with palpable mourning, accepting that her life, "until the time is spent, is a pin-light, bent." Where this kind of cosmic existentialism could come off like a stoner marveling at the moon, Newsom pulls it off with balance of poetry and reason. Her fantastical world is sometimes hard to get your head around, but it brings surreal, sometimes sci-fi delight to a record that's otherwise often lyrically despairing.

Where Newsom's second and third records each overhauled what came before, Divers is a refinement that draws on elements of each of its predecessors. The shapes of her records often get misinterpreted as concepts themselves, rather than the sign of a writer attuned to her work's needs. Ys from 2006 was the five-song suite; Have One on Me from 2010, the three-disc opus. On its surface Divers is more conventional, a single disc where nine of its 11 songs are under six minutes long, but it also happens to be a wild, genuine concept album. The final song, "Time, As a Symptom", ends with Newsom in raptures, commanding white stars, birds, and ships to "transcend!" On the very last burst, she clips the word to "trans—". The first word on opener "Anecdotes" is "sending." It is a perfect loop.

Most artists on their fourth album settle into atrophy, or at least comfort, Newsom delivers such complex, nuanced music, filled with arcane constructions, that she is only her own yardstick. (In a recent interview about Divers, David Longstreth cited The Milk-Eyed Mender as one of the reasons he quit college: "[What] am I doing here if someone is already out there making music like this, on this level?") Her consummate craft is a given; what surprises every time is her ceaselessly renewing sensitivity for life's vicissitudes and the fantastic ways she finds to express them. D**ivers is not a puzzle to crack, but a dialog that generously articulates the intimate chasm of loss, the way it's both irrational and very real. Nothing will stem the fear of a loved one's death, which western culture does little to prepare us for until the very end, but by pulling at the prospect of mortality from every angle, Newsom emerges straighter-spined, and invites you to stand alongside her.

[wynsalls]

Everyone’s getting older. When I crossed that line in my mind where I knew I was with the person that I wanted to marry, it was a very heavy thing, because you’re inviting death into your life. You know that that’s hopefully after many, many, many, many years, but the idea of death stops being abstract, because there is someone you can’t bear to lose. when it registers as true, it’s like a little shade of grief that comes in when love is its most real version. Then it contains death inside of it, and then that death contains love inside of it.

Joanna Newsom, 2015 interview on her album, Divers.

[whiteshipnightjar]

it is so unbearably hard to write or talk about love when that love is so knotted, interlaced and entangled with grief. when it feels like all that’s left is all-consuming grief. when it seems that love becomes grief. idk how joanna newsom does it. bc it just hurts too much. idk how she does it.

“Everyone’s getting older. When I crossed that line in my mind where I knew I was with the person that I wanted to marry, it was a very heavy thing, because you’re inviting death into your life. You know that that’s hopefully after many, many, many, many years, but the idea of death stops being abstract, because there is someone you can’t bear to lose. When it registers as true, it’s like a little shade of grief that comes in when love is its most real version. Then it contains death inside of it, and then that death contains love inside of it.”

idk how she does it. idk how to do it. idk how to see through it.

[whiteshipnightjar]

[whiteshipnightjar]

hello,how would you deal with lost ? I think i just cant make peace with it

hi :) that's a big question. Loss is such a hard thing to comprehend sometimes because whatever it is, it changes you and your life. It's always been a difficult thing for me to accept (and still is tbh) but I think the loss of a person means you're losing a part of yourself too. So, you have to learn to live with and accept the new you too. And that's really hard when all you can feel is immense pain. Grief and loss, at least at the beginning, does not give much space for reason.

I'll use a Joanna Newsom quote here to help me cuz she's better at putting it into words than me: "Everyone’s getting older. When I crossed that line in my mind where I knew I was with the person that I wanted to marry, it was a very heavy thing, because you’re inviting death into your life. You know that that’s hopefully after many, many, many, many years, but the idea of death stops being abstract, because there is someone you can’t bear to lose. when it registers as true, it’s like a little shade of grief that comes in when love is its most real version. Then it contains death inside of it, and then that death contains love inside of it." Isn't that so true? Loss and grief is inseparable from love. But it also means, your loved one, whoever or whatever it is, lives on in your love and in your memory. It's hard for us as humans, brought up in a physical world, surrounded by things, to maybe see the loss of someone as just a physical loss, a loss of a body, touch, but not soul, their memory, how they made you feel because we tend to first equate the human with the body. But they're still there in those past experiences, and those memories and feelings are yours forever. No one can take them away.

There's a really beautiful story about Kafka encountering a little girl who had lost her doll told by May Benatar:

"Franz Kafka, the story goes, encountered a little girl in the park where he went walking daily. She was crying. She had lost her doll and was desolate.

Kafka offered to help her look for the doll and arranged to meet her the next day at the same spot. Unable to find the doll he composed a letter from the doll and read it to her when they met.

"Please do not mourn me, I have gone on a trip to see the world. I will write you of my adventures." This was the beginning of many letters. When he and the little girl met he read her from these carefully composed letters the imagined adventures of the beloved doll. The little girl was comforted.

When the meetings came to an end Kafka presented her with a doll. She obviously looked different from the original doll. An attached letter explained: "my travels have changed me... "

Many years later, the now grown girl found a letter stuffed into an unnoticed crevice in the cherished replacement doll. In summary it said: "every thing that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.""

Time. I think it a big part of it comes down to time. It doesn't mean that time necessarily heals all wounds but I think it can help soothe them. It can help you accept the loss or teach you how to live with it.

Someone once asked me how I interpret the line "Love is not a symptom of time. Time is just a symptom of love" and I think I'd say it all rings true to me here too. Loss is part of love. I'll add it here, maybe you'll find something in that response that might soothe you <3