ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 2010 No. 4 – JOANNA NEWSOM – Have One On Me

Here we go again; it’s a triple album epic, a narrative driven opus and a work of such colossal depth that it simply cannot be dipped into casually. Our Top 20 of the year is not purely judged on albums having great length, an overall concept, a degree of difficulty or some effort required of the listener to enjoy (our Top 2 albums will prove as much) but ‘Have One On Me’ is musically and lyrically a work of impossible ambition and Joanna Newsom had the wherewithal to pull it off. So many have written about the supposed quirky nature of Joanna’s voice, how hard it makes her music to enjoy and how it almost puts up a brick wall when approaching her work. I heard all those points and it made me a touch reticent in those unenlightened days when she was unknown to me. It’s such a lot of rubbish though really, hard to fathom how we could find her style so unusual after vocally similar artists like Joni Mitchell and Kate Bush have seen major success. The consensus seemed to be that with someone as out-of-the-ordinary as Joanna, a whole triple albums worth of material would be hard to stomach; she needs sampling in small doses. Well I’ll dispel that myth as my media player has easily clocked up plays well into double figures and I’ll happily confirm that every time I easily digested the whole album from start to finish. There’s a progression in the text after all, an angular poetic relationship study that is never going to reveal its depth that quickly and even less so if the pieces are heard out sequence. Serious drama abounds in the music too; take our example below ‘Soft As Chalk’. It would appear that there’s a pivotal moment of separation being illustrated here and the way the piano moves from warm chords to graceful then adrenalized tempo and pent-up Ragtime style is totally sumptuous. All over the music is a constantly evolving delight; Newsoms Harp playing a unique trademark element combined with strings, trumpet and other light touches of incredible all round accompaniment. This is a major piece of work, a classic.