Joanna Newsom - Waltz Of The 101st Lightborne

Music 5 years ago

Joanna Newsom - Waltz Of The 101st Lightborne

scribblers like me have been trying to find useful ways to talk about Joanna Newsom’s wildly idiosyncratic,

anachronistically baroque brand of music-making; fact is, her work is so novel and unprecedented it’s nearly impossible to effectively contextualize.

Divers, her fourth full-length, is a folk record that’s remarkable not for its smallness but its ambition—its vast, unspooling arrangements, its points of unexpected intersection, its newness. Despite all that,

Divers never feels over-thought. Instead, it’s marked by moments of tremendous, startling vulnerability. "Anecdotes", the record’s opener, contains what might be the most heartbreaking coda I’ve ever heard sung:

"Nor is there cause for grieving, nor is there cause for carrying on", Newsom announces, her voice high, calm.