Joanna Newsom – Have One on Me
Drag City
Words: Bryant Kitching
After downloading all 206 MB (three discs) of Joanna Newsom’s latest album Have One on Me the most difficult problem I faced was how exactly to listen to the damn thing. You don’t have to be an expert to be able to tell that Newsom’s follow-up to 2006’s ambitious Ys is epic in every sense of the word. I chose to focus on one disc at a time. Even taking the album in chunks, I was overwhelmed by the intricacies and instrumentation often surpassing eight minutes in length. After a week or so of solid listening, I’m still not sure if this is a testament to Newsom’s grandiose artistic vision realized or simple overkill. Everything about the album is grand in scale, even down to the cover, which shows Newsom seductively lying on a couch surrounded by various and innumerable trinkets and artifacts. On the surface one could paint Have One On Me as an overly ambitious, even pretentious attempt to create a classic folk record, but I don’t think this is the case. Newsom just sounds like a woman with a lot of ideas.
Have One On Me is the musical equivalent of being lost in a vast forest; it’s beautiful, overwhelming, seemingly never-ending, and there are lots
of animals. Newsom’s approach to song crafting here is not all that stylistically different from Ys, but instead it’s the scale of her vision that has grown. Newsom spins yarns about horses, spiders and gardens, all with an unmistakably nurturing vibe. Her unique voice still sounds as if it belonged to Mother Nature herself, but there is a distinctive impression of maturity and confidence on tracks like “Good Intentions Paving Company.” “Good Intentions” bounces and weaves like a Regina Spektor song on steroids, and is arguably the album’s best track, and one of the few that immediately grabbed me. Other songs like the 11-minute title track are not as openly accessible, but ultimately more rewarding. “Have One On Me” tells the story of Lola Montez, the 19th Century Irish mistress of King Ludwig I of Bavaria. Ludwig was most famous for saying “Whatever Lola wants, Lola Gets,” making it all the more satisfying, even comical, when you hear Newsom sing the album/song title in the context of the track itself.
“Baby Birch” drifts along like a sweet lullaby until it builds up into a beautiful cacophony complete with an irregular drum pattern that threatens to unravel at any moment until the very end when the soft lullaby returns. This superb standout drips with themes of motherhood and fertility, as does “’81,” which, at 4 minutes, clocks in among the album’s shortest tracks. It is likely that “’81”, with its references to the Garden of Eden, refer to Newsom’s own conception (born in January of 1982). The track is another bright spot on the accessible, and strongest first disc. On Have One On Me, Newsom has perfected the art of the build up, and it is often the second half of tracks like “Go Long” and “Kingfisher” that don’t necessarily make up for, but put into different contex and complement, their vastly different first halves. The album is a true roller coaster ride, as unpredictable as it is beautiful.
The tracks that I found most enjoyable fall into two different categories at both ends of the spectrum: tracks that followed more traditional song structures and lengths (“’81,” “On a Good Day,” “Soft as Chalk”) and tracks where the epics of the album itself are most apparent and extravagant (“Have One On Me,” “Baby Birch,” “Esme”). The middle ground into which songs like “You and Me, Bess” and “In California” fall is where Have One On Me becomes difficult to listen to. I felt as though I was trudging through the songs rather than enjoying them. As would be expected in an album of this length, there is a fair share of dull spots. For every “Good Intentions Paving Company” and “Baby Birch” there are tracks like “No Provenance” or “Ribbon Bows,” which struggle to hold the listeners attention. When Have One On Me fails, it’s because it gets lost in it’s own maze. To fully appreciate just how intricate some of these songs are I would need a full year to digest them. Nonetheless in the short time I’ve been acquainted with the album, I couldn’t help feeling that it might be simply too big for it’s own good. Newsom hasn’t created an album as much as she’s opened a window into literally every nook and cranny of her musical psyche.
Would Have One On Me been better as a single, or even a double album? Probably. But even with it’s fair share of blemishes there is much to love. One cannot deny the beauty and impressiveness of what Newsom has created, but the pleasure of the album as a whole remains to be seen. I predict that Have One On Me will change faces several times as future months and years go by. An album of this magnitude couldn’t possibly maintain the same identity even on a day-to-day basis. In the end, Have One On Me is easy to appreciate but hard to understand. It’s magical once you finally get over the album’s sheer size and get to know the songs themselves.
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