Joanna Newsom — Ys

By Jordan Sargent

Published Feb. 20, 2007

If you've never heard of Jonna Newsom, allow me to introduce you to the Internet. The California-based harpist, who weaves nap-long tales about animals falling in love and more normal things such as happiness, loneliness and human romance, made a Sasquatch-sized footprint on the indie world about four months ago with the release of Ys, her undoubted magnum opus.

She's also a divisive figure of the highest order.

Her voice sounds completely inhuman (on first listen it will sound something like a pocketknife slicing the inside of your eardrum), the shortest of Ys' five songs clocks in at 7:17, and those songs consist of much ballyhooed short stories containing vocabulary that would have Webster himself flipping his dictionary ragged — "spelunking," anyone?

So to say the least, Ys requires your time, devotion, patience, sanity and ability to keep a straight face.

But once it receives all that and more, it reveals itself not as an alternative album but an alternate world.

Newsom's ability to transplant the listener directly into her story should've been bought for a Powerball jackpot by the makers of failed films such as "Eragon."

And in all honesty, if Newsom is anything customary, she most resembles the country's best rappers.

The only dude fucking with her storytelling is Ghostface Killah, whose crack-rap tales are nearly as cinematic as Newsom's ones about the stars. More importantly, though, she rhymes in couplets.

Her prose is nowhere near syllabic, her lines fall off ledges and crash into each other, five-syllable lines blossom into 17-syllable lines and by the end of one stanza, you're wrapped around her finger like you were just yarn all along.

No one is manipulating words and sentences in contemporary music like Newsom — except for Lil' Wayne.

So yes, I'm gushing over Ys like nearly anyone who's both heard this album and touched a keyboard, but it's impossible not to.

Plain admiration of Newsom's sheer talent and ambition will eventually evolve into gripping dissections of Ys' fables, and if all things fall into place, that will eventually become love.

And though Newsom plays her harp like she invented it, the rub here is in the string compositions of producer Van Dyke Parks.

Parks, most famous for his work on Brian Wilson's Smile, rightfully scores Ys like a movie.

His strings swell at times of suspense and deflate when necessary. They also appear at precisely the right moments (after "I am the happiest woman" on "Only Skin") to peak interest when it needs to be peaked.

The strings here, though decried by some, are the aural exclamation points, question marks, ellipses and interrobangs that Ys, in retrospect, couldn't live without.

Ys' only fault lies in the fact that its true enjoyment requires that at least until you grasp what each song is about, you do nothing else but live Ys.

That means astutely reading lyrics, pausing and rereading lyrics, looking up words, etc.

Is it music, or the best ever book on tape? I'll leave that up to you.

I'll make no qualms that Ys might require more time than you, as a studious college student, probably have.

But in order to write this, I forced myself into Newsom's world, and I'm just now starting to escape.