In a recent interview, Joanna Newsom ruminated on the diehard fans she calls “the delvers”: those who spend hours scanning her dense lyrics for meaning. “I definitely can’t write an easy song,” she said. “There is a group of people who are showing up with absolute, complete faith that there’s something worth digging for in the lyrics. And if I don’t put it in there, it’s like breaking a contract.”
You can understand why Newsom is impressed by her fans’ dedication: four albums into her career and she already has her own equivalent of Dylanologists, whose tireless efforts to unpick the former Robert Zimmerman’s lyrics have produced shelf after shelf of books, ranging in tone from the insightful to the barmy. Even so, admitting that you’re deliberately encouraging them seems unprecedented. Dylan has usually affected disinterest or even irritation at attempts to atomise his songs. The Beatles spent the late 60s mocking those searching for hidden significance in their lyrics, larding them with deliberately meaningless pointers: “Here’s another clue for you all.” Even Kate Bush – perhaps the most apposite comparison, given Divers’ preponderance of songs on which Newsom twists her voice into an approximation of the shriekier moments on The Kick Inside – gently poked fun at her more indefatigable devotees on How to Be Invisible, mocking up a spell to make herself vanish that included “hem of anorak”. No current artist gets critics wheeling out the highfalutin literary comparisons quite like Newsom – one review of Divers alone variously likened her to William Blake, Angela Carter, Toni Morrison, Emily Dickinson, Jean Rhys and Ralph Waldo Emerson – but the idea that she’s actively stuffing her songs with references for others to unlock leaves her looking a little more like alt-rock’s answer to Kit Williams, the inventor of the armchair treasure hunt, packing his paintings with clues that led to a buried amulet.
She certainly gives them plenty to chew over on Divers. Over on genius.com, every single line in the album’s first single, Sapokanikan, has been painstakingly annotated, digging up references to Shelley and the lesser-known Romantic poet Horace Smith, Van Gogh, Titian, Washington Square Park’s former usage as a 18th-century burial ground, Australian impressionist painter Arthur Streeton, former New York mayor John Purroy Mitchel, the Native American chief Tamanend and the corrupt New York Democratic party machine of Tammany Hall. This is clearly great fun for all concerned, although whether it amounts to brilliantly original illumination or smart-arsey obfuscation of the song’s fairly straightforward central point – that some things are lost to time while others endure – is perhaps a moot point. Still, there’s plenty more where that came from on Divers, from opener Anecdotes’ references to different species of nocturnal birds to the intriguing geographical locations dotted about Waltz of the 101st Lightborne.
The pressing question it raises is whether Newsom’s music holds anything if you don’t view music as something to be delicately unpicked, like a game of Kerplunk with harp accompaniment. On the basis of Divers, the answer is yes. That it’s been heralded as a return to crisp, focused basics perhaps tells you less about the album itself than its predecessor, Have One on Me, which filled three CDs and went on for so long that potential listeners were advised to first draft a will in case they died of old age before it finished. The songs on Divers may be a little shorter than before – only two last longer than six minutes – but they still eschew verses and choruses in favour of fluid, serpentine structures. Her vocals remain the very definition of an acquired taste: the points when she eschews the mannerisms in favour of something more straightforward – a cracked, mournful, rather Neil Youngish voice on The Things I Say – underline just how many mannerisms there are elsewhere. And the arrangements are as rococo as ever – even the relatively pared-down, country-rockish Goose Eggs comes decorated with much baroque trilling on a harpsichord.
But for all that, Divers is a surprisingly easy listen. There are certainly moments where it seems so densely packed with musical and lyrical information that it starts to feel wearying, slipping from something you admire for its ambition rather than actively enjoy. But they’re remarkably few and far between, separated by songs where it’s easy to succumb to Newsom’s idiosyncratic approach: you’re pulled along with her through the melodic twists and turns of the title track or A Pin-Light Bent. For all their opulence, there’s a delicacy and subtlety about the way the arrangements constantly shift. On Leaving the City, a weird blend of distorted guitar, cimbalom and synthesiser drift around Newsom’s harp and voice: it sounds exquisite, as does the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra shimmering and flickering on Time, as a Symptom. Amid the references and the self-consciously kooky stuff about talking to trees – “hey little leaf, lying on the ground” – she has a way with a straightforwardly striking line: “Lists of sins and solemn vows don’t make you any friends”; “Anecdotes cannot say what time may do”.
It’s easy to see why people start making with the purple prose and the lofty literary comparisons about Newsom. She can genuinely claim to have come up with a unique take on something as well-worn as the business of being a singer-songwriter, something that seems harder and harder to do as time passes: you can pinpoint the influence of Kate Bush or Roy Harper, but no one really writes songs like hers. But you don’t have to buy into the idea that she’s in some way possessed of superhuman powers – a “casually insightful mystic”, as film director Paul Thomas Anderson claimed – or believe that her work can only truly be understood with the aid of a lengthy set of footnotes to enjoy Divers. It’s a rather messier album than both the hyperbolic acclaim and the five years that were apparently spent meticulously writing and recording it suggest. It’s at turns maddening, exhausting, enrapturing, insightful and very beautiful. But it always feels like the work of an artist who’s out there on her own, doing something no one else is doing.
