Events

[FOLK] If singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Joanna Newsom’s career in music were to end now, she’d still have made her mark. Others have done it with much less. With Divers, out in October on Drag City, she’s managed to rein in her peculiarities just enough to make something that resembles pop music without sacrificing anything essential from her beguiling trove of quirks. It’s a collection of chamber-folk tunes with vaguely pop structures that, “…looks at love from both sides now”—more specifically, before and after marriage (in this case, to actor Andy Samberg). Not nearly as sprawling as 2010’s triple-disc, Have One on Me, and with shorter vignettes than 2006’s Y’s, which featured string arrangements ala Van Dyke Parks, Divers is a work of intense focus that examines the way time and nature conspire to regulate our lives and loves. From the interplay of swooping birds in the opener, “Anecdotes” (“…Anecdotes cannot say what Time may do,” she posits, setting a tone of wary uncertainty that permeates the set) to the title track, which looks at life’s outcomes through metaphors about the fate of divers under the water and the impacted sailors and women above, Newsom seems to be calculating the risk of loving deeply in a world where she’s not running the show. The closing song, “Time As a Symptom” behaves like performance art: the lyric projects a sense of resolution about the time/nature/love conundrum, but our protagonist sounds like she’s still racing to beat the clock, leaving the impression that she’s not entirely convinced her love is safe from the ravages of the natural world. Curiously, the album ends on a fragmented lyric that leads right back into the opener, creating a loophole in time that’s a subtle act of genius.

With assistance from Nico Muhly, Noah Georgeson, Steve Albini, and Dirty Projectors’ Dave Longstreth, Divers is awash with the sort of instrumentation that makes you wonder if it was recorded live-to-tape decades ago (clarinet, English horn, bouzouki, recorder, celesta, mellotron, saw), but the truth is that it’s a largely digital construction, five years in the making. Newsom moves between her signature harp and keyboards, vocalizing like a wise-but-loony relative that tucks you in with a good story and a bit of booze on her breath.  

She’ll perform many of her new songs and a few of her older ones in an able quartet at Babeville’s Ashbury Hall on Sunday, December 13 with Alela Diane & Ryan Francesconi opening.