| Joanna Newsom – Emily Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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This is one of the most perfect songs I've ever heard about what it's like to have a sister. The ties that bind sure as hell are barbed and spined - my sister is still mad at me for things that happened when I was *eight*. My partner is an only child and he's commented before on how every single interaction between me and my sister has so much subtext - twenty years of shared memory and experience. I have love for a lot of people, but the love I have for my sister is the most complicated. I think Emily Newsom is in Joanna Newsom's real life - not her dreamworld, not her world as a celebrity, but the actual lived world, and she's the one who can throw the windows wide open and let the sun in. That's what it's like to have a sister too. |
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| Joanna Newsom – Sprout and the Bean Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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God, I love this song. It sounds like taking a nap by an open window in summer. It sounds like things growing up under the soil. It's rich with the author's obsession with fecundity and fertility, and the questions raised by fecundity and fertility, but I'm not sure it's all about the single example of fecundity everyone always leaps to! I like how it's also got such a rich element of childishness. Here is what I think of when I hear this song: I think of the kind of days where you're just done with other people and you stay inside by your window feeling grumpy and unwilling to leave the house and also peaceful and alone and happy to be alone. |
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| Joanna Newsom – Baby Birch Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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I am honestly only here for fact-checking. I find this song to be heartbreaking and hard, and beautiful, like many of Joanna Newsom's songs, but I don't want to presume on her experience, only on the interpretations I'm seeing in the thread. (And I'm enough of a postmodernist to believe that if we hear these interpretations, they are reasonable, regardless of her intent! Her lyrics are complex enough to count as literature and I think they should be treated as such and I'm not sure fretting on about authorial intent is the be-all and end-all of interpreting them!) That said, an additional fact: it is not unusual for doctors to get involved in miscarriages, especially late or incomplete miscarriages, because they can be dangerous, and miscarriages are very common, especially in young women who have never been pregnant before. The imagery at the end could mean any of a thousand things, but if we want to talk about it involving the end of a pregnancy, it could mean that. Now my two cents: I personally - in my own personal politics and beliefs - certainly do think of abortions more as roads not taken, so to me that interpretation would ring true. But there are so many babies that people could have had if things had been a little different! There are the babies that could have been born if you'd been a little drunker or less shy or more forgetful or better or worse at math! There are the babies that could have been born if you just hadn't started an argument over whose turn it was to do the dishes, and the babies that could have been born if you'd skipped class that morning, and the babies that could have been born if the pregnancy hadn't miscarried, and the babies that could have been born if you hadn't broken up, and the babies that could have been born if you hadn't gotten an abortion. Every time we make a choice we shut out a whole bunch of other choices, all the time. How many missed chances are we supposed to live our lives for, anyway? But I think there are certain choices that come to represent how we expected our lives to turn out one way, and they didn't, and there's a whole lot of Joanna Newsom songs that seem to be about that kind of choice. She is a brilliant and articulate woman, and I wish her every luck. |
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