Have One On MeJoanna Newsom

I don’t know why I bother, enough words have been written about this album already. There are already silos full of surplus Joanna Newsom reviews all over Europe. The EU are starting to subsidise bloggers to stop writing about Have One On Me, and to switch their attentions to Finnish folk music instead. But – sigh – I do love this record. I mean records. The new Joanna Newsom album is a triple oh you know all this already, lets dispense with these formalities and just get it over and done with, eh?

First, the length. The length seems like an essential part of this package. It couldn’t have been a short record. Have One On Me, perhaps out of an obsessive love, seems to needishly seek to draw attention to itself. It is almost as if Newsom is saying “look at all this I have done for you, you MUST love me now”. It demands that you prove your love by sitting through it all in a single sitting. Even the stunning monochrome photography in the box feels like a plea for attention, Newsom alone in a hotel room, being composed of about 90% bare leg, and I swear I didn’t buy this on LP just for the bigger photos, oh no. It could comfortably have fitted on a double album, although there is a sense of a three act narrative, if you can pick it out of a tangle of fable and fantastic imagery. It begins full of gushing adoration – “I was born to love you”, “I will love you”, “You can feel my love for you”, “I am so in love with you”, “I really do fucking love you, you lovely fucker”, actually I may have made the last one up. But there is a gradual sense that the love may not be entirely requited (why is she sitting in that hotel room on her own?), and by the third record there seems to be a parting of ways; the album ends with “the tap of hangers, swaying in the closet, unburdened hooks and empty drawers” . A relationship-based song cycle like Joni Mitchell’s Blue perhaps; and “Ribbon Bows” and “In California” really do sound similar to pieces from that album, although try as I might I can’t quite imagine Mitchell writing the lyric “advance the tallow-coloured wall-eyed deer, quiet as gondoliers”.

Such comparisons fit for, the occasional lyrical idiosyncrasy aside, Have One On Me is shorn of much of the quirkiness which many may have found off-putting previously. Gone are most of the vocal squeaks and yelps, out go the elaborate Van Dyke Parks arrangements. Despite its youthful demands and ability to go on all blooming night, Have One On Me is a classic-sounding record, full of songs that flower from spare beginnings, sensitively supported by subtle instrumentation and orchestration. It soars to surprising climaxes,  Newsom’s emotional delivery leaping up to sink hooks in the heart in masterpieces such a “Have One On Me”, “81″, “Baby Birch”, “Go Long”, “Kingfisher”, oh pretty much all of it to be honest – much like one of Joanna’s legs it may be pretty long, but there isn’t an ounce of flab on it.

Hell, you probably know all this already. You’ve probably got this record. You’re probably listening to it right now as you read this, singing tunelessly as you do so about daddy-longlegs and cuckoos. I certainly am, and you certainly don’t need me, of all people, to tell you how good Have One On Me is.