As I grow older and more culturally saturated with each passing year, my capacities for surprise and wonder have become nearly non-existent. Nevertheless, 2006’s Ys completely floored me and has been very firmly entrenched as one of my favorite albums ever since. Given the stunning beauty and imagination of that album and the enormous progression that it displayed from The Milk-Eyed Mender, my expectations for its follow-up were impossibly, crazily high. Unsurprisingly, they were not met. Have One On Me is an enjoyable and accessible album, but it is a decidedly anticlimactic one.
I have long maintained that triple albums are never, ever a good idea at all under any circumstances. Nevertheless, I was uncharacteristically optimistic when I heard that Joanna Newsom was planning to release one. Her singular aptitude for epic song-forms and compelling narrative lyrics, coupled with the fact that it has possibly been in the works for four long years, seemed to indicate that the groundwork for a truly staggering and ambitious opus was in place. As it turns out, I was at least half-right, as the sprawling Have One On Me is inarguably ambitious in scope: Newsom wrote a lot of songs (for her, anyway) and has made quite a few significant changes to her sound. There is no overarching concept uniting all of the songs together though, aside from the fact that the lyrics invariably address the very Newsom-esque themes of doomed love, dangerous escapes, horses, spiders, and redemption. Also, whereas Ys was a very focused, coherent, and perfectly sequenced artistic statement, the 18 songs here seem to be the more diffuse, searching sound of Newsom trying to figure out where to go next.
The most immediately striking quality about the album is that Joanna’s vocals are generally much more restrained and conventionally melodic than they have been in the past: there are even some hints of a newfound influence from early gospel/traditional spirituals. This will probably come as a great relief to anyone that has previously found her singing to be annoying, but I find it to be a bit of a mixed blessing. Another notable change is that nearly all overtly autobiographical vestiges have departed from her lyrics. Instead, the songs are all self-contained, mysterious and oft-fanciful vignettes culled from an unpredictable array of times and places. Then again, maybe she has just become better at transforming her life into art. As always, her words remain wonderfully evocative and clever and her colorful vocabulary does not seem to have atrophied at all either (not many people could toss out a phrase like “faultlessly etiolated fishbelly-face”).
I suspect that this is an album that will take a while to make its full impact, due to the sheer volume of material present. Also, the densely narrative lyrics seem pregnant with the promise of secrets and beauty that may take a while to fully flower in my consciousness (that is my hope, anyway). Nevertheless, there are a number of excellent, instantly gratifying songs strewn throughout the three beautifully packaged records. My two favorites (at the moment, anyway) are the sparse, lilting “’81” and the languorously soulful “Baby Birch,” the rousing outro of which notably boasts the album’s most successful incorporation of drums. For the most part, it is the more stripped-down songs that are the most striking (such as the similarly excellent, but impossible sad, one-two punch of “Jackrabbits” and “Go Long”). The pieces that adrenalize Newsom’s sound with brass or a groove (such as “Good Intentions Paving Company” and “You and Me, Bess”) leave me pretty cold though. Thankfully, they are in the minority.
Nevertheless, this album is ultimately a bit of a disappointment. The main reason is that the songs blur together a bit. This is largely due to the 2-hour-plus running time and the fact that almost all of the songs are built around very similar central components, but there are some other key contributing factors as well. For one, Ryan Francesconi’s arrangements are a bit too straightforward and safe for my taste (though the end of “Does Not Suffice” gets a little wild). While there are some occasional unexpected flourishes and unconventional instrumentation (such as Bulgarian tambura, kaval, vielle, and rebec), the arrangements largely serve only to beef up what Newsom is playing. I realize that this is the whole purpose of accompaniment, but it often has the unintended effect of softening Newsom’s edges and making the songs seem less intimate. While Van Dyke Parks’ work on Ys was quite polarizing and viewed by some as too intrusive, I personally loved it and thought it was essential, unpredictable, and an appropriately quirky and elevating foil for Newsom’s odd songs. No one will claim that the accompaniment on Have One On Me is intrusive, but it does not achieve much more than adding density and subtle color.
My other main issue with the album is, quite unexpectedly, Joanna’s singing. From a musicianship and melody-writing standpoint, her vocals have probably never been better. Unfortunately, I do not love Joanna Newsom for her ability to hit, sustain, and flow effortlessly between notes, I love her for her oft-brilliant lyrics and her idiosyncratic passion. The increased emphasis on actual singing comes at the expense of enunciation and greatly downplays the role of her words. Also, her characteristic tendency to yelp and squawk like a feral kitten or precocious child is now largely absent. While it was admittedly an acquired taste, her wild, raw vocals played a crucial role in the blunt emotional power of early classics like “Peach, Plumb, Pear” and “Cosmia.” This new batch of songs sounds very assured, nuanced, and pleasant, but simply does not pack the wallop of Newsom’s alternately fragile and cathartic past work.
That said, Have One On Me is a still very good album. I wanted it to be a brilliant one though. There are some great songs and excellent lyrics, but there is a real and tragic dearth of gut-level emotional power. Fortunately, there is no indication that a creative downslide has begun in any way (though the unfortunate spectre of “maturity” may have crept into the picture a bit). Instead, Newsom is merely experiencing the inevitable growing pains of trying to evolve upon near-perfection without repeating herself.
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