Good Intentions Paving Company – Joanna Newsom (Buy)
California native, Joanna Newsom, re-emerged this February with her refreshing new album, Have One On Me. Marking her third trip to the studio, Have One On Me explores the art of vocal versatility and the beauty of the harp. Newsom’s vocals are her bread and butter, an instrument she uses to add comprehensive depth to her tracks.
There are perhaps a few reasons this review wasn’t posted sooner. For one, listening to the entirety of the album is an event in and of itself, as it clocks in at over 126 minutes. Newsom’s style of singing, high-pitched notes that strike with an intense sharpness, also makes her music slightly more inaccessible and difficult to interpret quickly. With time, though, I began to uncover the album’s many layers and fully appreciate what an amazing work it is.
Though the opening lines of the first track “Easy” fail to allude to Newsom’s real brilliance, the song quickly builds, just as so many others do, into a complex, momentous arrangement of beauty. Perhaps the most upbeat song on the album, “Good Intentions Paving Company” is Newsom in all her glory (with the pop dial turned slightly up). It’s a highly thorough track, which makes for the most theatrical song on Have One On Me.
The title track, lasting over 11 minutes, is likely one of her best. Newsom’s masterful harp plucking introduces us to a biopic of Lola Montez. “Here’s Lola – ta da! – to do her famous Spider Dance for you, lighten up your pockets,” is a reference to Montez’s wild ways, and one of the many references to arachnids. Considering its tragic subject matter, “Have One On Me” is a song that’s largely playful in its arrangement and vocal style. The track is, overall, incredibly diverse in how it’s composed, a trend found consistently throughout the entire album.
As her song “Autumn” may suggest, this album could easily fall victim to ‘seasonal emotional’ disorder. It’s very much a collection that fits specific moods, which fall more appropriately into the fall or spring. Regardless of this seasonality, it’s hard to beat the creative achievements of Have One On Me, an album that will forever resonate in my memory as one of the year’s best.
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Here’s a clip of Newsom’s appearance on Jimmy Kimmel. If you got the same ad as me, it was for Kimmel’s Fantasy Football. Perfect matching for “You and Me, Bess”. Seriously? Got to love the Bud Light banners in the background too.
