Have One On Me Meets Expectations and More: Joanna Newsom

As the needle rises, the speakers come alive with white-noise anticipation, and then that fateful click. Someone said once that the greatest sound in the world—the one with the most suspense, the most potential—is the sound of the needle as it hits that first groove in the record, a click that opens the door for that art which is so human, so evocative.

It’s only appropriate that the first sound to emit after that anxious build-up is Joanna Newsom, in her crystal-clear voice, gliding, guiding you, “Easy, easy…” Fooling you, possibly, with a soft vocal introduction to her first track on her much-anticipated, adventurous new album, “Have One On Me.” The song takes off after its initial soothing tone, hinting at the range of possibilities still to come.

Folk. In one word, music wraps up ethnic histories, traditions, styles, and identities into one neat, nice, not-so-little category. This human quality of so variant an art stands proudly on display in Newsom’s newest project. Perhaps it is too obvious, too folk-for-folk’s sake, but what’s the harm? That she’s co-opting a movement, perhaps, even co-opting a look—but the quandary arises when all is admitted: she’s not just good at folk, or great at it for that matter, she’s also made it her own.

Just when you start to wonder about her dutiful sidekick, the harp that completes the ethereal image Newsom inspires, she begins her title track with a delicate melody of strings. With this, the longest song on the album, Newsom assures fans that she has not lost her technical prowess, her lyrical inspiration, and least of all her beguiling charm.

It’s a shame, a mistake of the industry and its critics, that whenever an innovative artist matures in their style and execution, they’re labeled “over-produced.” Newsom’s new album, released on Thursday, is orchestrated and intentional. She incorporates an array of instruments, allowing the listener to relax and contextualize the vocals and lyrics—a move that departs from the jarring ingenuity of her first album, Milk-eyed Mender. Though the ability to waver between passive and active listening on this collection might not be Newsom’s typical choice, it shows a more holistic approach to her music, intimating a growing appreciation for the folk tradition and its inspiration on her work’s musicality.

In addition to its titular reference to the old adage, Newsom’s third track, “Good Intentions Paving Co.,” is full of nods to a world shared mutually with the listener (as a opposed to one of fairytale figures inhabited only by Newsom in her last album). With an upbeat tune, instruments like the banjo and mandolin, and phrases like “Hello my old country. Hello” and “but I fell for you, honey,” there’s no mistaking the song’s country and bluegrass roots.

The lyrical enterprise of Have One On Me is a brave departure for Newsom, daring to let her listeners have more insight into the intense emotions that underlie the songs she writes. Though in past work Newsom deftly disguised her experiences in abstracted narratives, she now refers to them explicitly yet without losing an ounce of her poetic grace, “I was tired of being drunk. My face cracked like a joke…I shaped up overnight, you know, the day after she died, when I saw my heart—and I’ll tell you darlin, it was open wide…I can love you again.” Though at times her not-so-covert yet vague allusions to an Eastern orientation can seem kitschy (or at least predictable), Newsom for the most part makes use of her pension for metaphors and striking imagery to reach the listener on a new level of intimacy.

Shining moments throughout the second disc in a three-part record set include the deceptively sweet “Baby Birch” and the heart-wrenching “Jackrabbits,” containing the extraordinary line, “There’s a flame that moves like a low-down pest and says, You will be free.” The hits slow down after the second disc, with only “Esme,” on the third, refusing disregard for its lucid imagery.

Have One On Me is a far cry from the polarizing Ys, Newsom’s last album in 2006. People will like it. In fact, most people will like it—opening it up to it’s worst criticisms. It’s a price she’ll pay for accessibility, the loss of a certain group of fans, the loyalists to abstraction. The rest of us, however, have been gifted yet another lovely foray into the Joanna Newsom show-and-tell—a world full of expectations eagerly met.

By contributing writer, Bonnie Kate Walker