In 2006, YS tipped the balance from a 'cool to like' fringe artist to what for the January 2007 edition of Wire magazine called "wilfully contrived oddness". Glasgow based record distributors Volcanic Tongue joined the backlash by branding Joanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart in an online review of a Nick Castro album as "cute pop".
Elitist circles like to be seen to be above the smart press and immune to popular trends; the misguided perception being that what the masses understand can never be truly alternative.
The soft targets of Freak Folk are Newsom and Banhart and this is a classic case of the media foisting a label on artists then using the selfsame term as a baton to beat them back down with.
Newsom's YS was guilty of achieving critical and public acclaim, listeners drawn into her strange realm who didn't necessarily buy into to the other extremes of free folk. To date she's the closest the New Weird America has to a mainstream female artist by sheer dint of the astonishing impact of YS .
Yet for all this record's success, this EP is further proof, if any was needed, that her songs fly and soar so far free from the standard concept of a pop song that any notion of selling out says more about a critic's blinkered vision than it does about the music.
There are so many colours on her palette , blending to evoke vivid individual images but leaving the final picture magically enigmatic. Anyone coming for the first time to her album The Milk Eyed Mender would be well advised to reserve judgement until at least 12 concentrated hearings. Less dedicated listeners may persist in complaining that Newsom's whelps and chirrups sound like the ravings of a petulant child and never get beyond this - this is their loss. After all, she's part of a line of natural, unschooled female voices - Vashti Bunyan, Karen Dalton, Anne Briggs - dammed by indifference but rightly now being re-evaluated.
The three songs on this ep are:
1. Colleen (6.41)
2. Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie (4.02)
3. Cosmia (13.23)
Only one of these (Colleen) is a new song (i.e. previously unreleased) : The other two are new versions of the closing tracks of her two full length albums.
The banjo that leads us into 'Colleen' suggests an Appalachian ballad but while it has the atmosphere of Harry Smith's 'Old Weird America', this is just one point of reference as Newsom's ornate harp playing also hints at baroque chamber music while her band's instrumental contribution resembles the current fashion for Eastern European folk ( vis-à-vis Beirut & A Hawk And Hacksaw) . The song is very playful and direct, qualities that set it apart from the intensity of YS.
'Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie' first appeared on her self-released 2002 Walnut Whale ep. On this she conceded - in the November 2006 feature in Arthur magazine - that her voice sounded "fucking crazy" and she has since officially blacklisted it. The song however subsequently resurfaced on her debut album 2004 The Milk Eyed Mender where 'that voice' still divided listeners but for poetry and strangeness it is hard to beat, exemplified in offbeat lines like "Your skin is something that I stir into my tea".
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The second revised version in this EP shows how much her voice has matured. By no means has it become in any sense 'ordinary' but there is, shall we say, a subtlety of phrasing previously absent. It is as if she is growing into the songs so that the more she sings them the more she understands. Here there are discrete male backing vocals from drummer Neal Morgan. Kevin Barker (aka Currituck Co) plays guitar and banjo. The other musicians from her touring band are Ryan Francesconi (guitar, tambora)and Dan Cantrell (accordion, musical saw).
The third and final track here is 'Cosmia', a joyful rather than plaintive elegy to her best friend which draws upon a torrent of curious remembered details (shaking eyebrows, stained knuckles), painful memories of first hearing the tragic news and the impossibility of forgetting her presence. Above all there is the ache and longing that culminates in climactic cries of loss "And I miss your precious heart" followed by the words "and miss" repeated eight times. The new version has quite a different feel through not being dogged by Van Dyke Parks over fussy orchestral arrangement. Here the song has chance to breathe and flow. At a little over 7 minutes this was the shortest track on YS but here it's almost twice as long mainly because of a wonderfully evocative 6 minute acoustic coda that gently spirals and drifts to take us beyond words towards a reflective and ultimately calming closure.
Joanna Newsom's music continues to remind us that melancholy does not have to lead to despair and wisdom does not have to equate with pessimism. Her luminous qualities shine brightly and evoke the joyful spirit expressed by William Blake's anecdote that "exhuberance is beauty".
(Grateful thanks to Alissa Anderson (http://www.alissaanderson.com/) for kindly granting permission to use her photo of Joanna Newsom.
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