Note: You'll probably be able to figure this out, but I wrote this earlier (much earlier) and am just publishing it now.
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It’s late, I’m tired, and I should have gone to bed two hours ago because that’s when my eyes began to hurt and now it actually feels as though they’re falling out of my head. But no matter. All this is small stuff in the grander scheme of things and besides, there is music to download, and then you can’t very well just go and leave it sitting on your hard drive. Stated otherwise: it is quarter past two in the morning and out of the murky depths of lo-fi bullcrap (ahem, Arcade Fire and Of Montreal: get a real piano) emerges Joanna Newsom like an indie Loch Ness Monster. With a friendly disposition, and a harp.
The great thing about Joanna Newsom – besides her dead impressive vocal range; she jumps octaves like they’re bloody speedbumps – is her complete disregard for the conventions of synth-heavy neopop that currently dominates college radio airwaves. When are these pretentious hipsters going to figure out that it all sounds exactly the same? Furthermore, when are they going to stop lying to themselves (and the rest of humanity) and just admit that they only like one type of music? I’m sorry (a lie, actually; I’m not sorry at all), but you cannot carry on claiming you like “a little bit of everything” and then show me your iTunes library (likely veritable tens of gigabytes barely contained in the flimsy hard drive of your sleek, black MacBook), which will inevitably be full of bands and avant-garde virtuosos (classically trained on the hurdy-gurdy) from whom no-one else will ever have heard so much as an opening chord (God forbid), and the most mainstream of which will be the earliest Yeah Yeah Yeahs EP or, worse still, Karen O.’s latest side project.
But I digress. This is a review of Joanna Newsom. Recently I saw her in concert and although I had an exceptionally poor view, her presence and talent is more than sufficient that I can safely say she deserves those damn pitchforks. Although continually prodded in various inappropriate places by 80s-era hipster cameras (we get it, you’re indie, you’re artsy, you’re a non-conformist; now, would you like me to tell you what a megapixel is?), I could hardly contain myself when I heard the opening measures of “Colleen”, from her latest EP Joanna Newsom and The Ys Street Band (Drag City, 2007). The entire concert was just Joanna and her harp, and on this song she manages to incorporate an infectious bass line, machine-gun finger-picking, and a controlled yelp at measured intervals. (I may have jumped up and down when I heard the first five or six low notes as I shouted, to both everyone and no-one in particular, “Holy mother of God, she’s playing a freaking bass line on a freaking harp!”) “Colleen” is a work of genius, from the conception to the arrangement to the execution: at once vaguely medieval, with inflections of Appalachian and traditional Celtic influences and archaic lyrics (I came away from the deep blue sea / It picked me up and tossed me ’round / I lost my shoes and tore my gown / Forgot my name and drowned / Then woke up with the surf a-pounding); but also undeniably modern (Down where our bodies start to seem / Like artifacts of some strange dream / Which afterwards you can’t decipher).
But unfortunately I prefer the live version I heard first, which is obviously harder to find on this newfangled thing they’re calling the internet, and so I have had to settle (a harsh word, I know) for the studio version. Which is undeniably good (can’t knock a lack of tracking in light of today’s overproduced-is-better recording strategy), don’t get me wrong, but also adorned with a squeezebox and percussion section and banjo (albeit with Sufjan Stevens-esque mastery of arrangement). If I could choose, I would take the girl and the harp, unembellished, because that way it’s easier to appreciate how she plays melody, bass, rhythm and solo all at once, like she’s the freaking Lightnin’ Hopkins of baroque pop (which she very well may be). So to condense this hallucinatory tirade, kiddies, I’m making it a two-parter (oh, mixing it up!): 1. go and see Joanna live and immerse yourself in the solitary magic of “Colleen” sans instrumental padding; and 2. download “Colleen” from the EP, turn on the “Repeat All” function on your iPod, make a new On-the-Go playlist and go bananas.
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Below you can watch what I believe is the best live version of "Colleen" currently on YouTube. It is the adulterated version, but it's also a lot of fun.
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