Joanna Newsom: "Leaving the City"

Last year, the singer and harpist Joanna Newsom appeared in Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice as Sortilège, a maybe-clairvoyant beachdweller who in Pynchon’s description “liked finding new uses for the term ‘beyond’” and once taught the novel’s protagonist how to tell time from a broken clock. Her beliefs are ethereal but her presence is grounding: In one scene, her and Joaquin Phoenix share some pizza; in another she strokes his hair, not like a lover but like a mom. In the context of a story about the corruption of ’60s ideals, Sortilège becomes a monument to everything lost, her innocence not naïve but defiant.

The casting was canny. Newsom herself has always seemed like a refugee from the present, an artist whose elaborate song-suites and Spenserian diction stuck an oar into continuously moving waters. One early highlight argues that ideas are interesting to kick around but don’t hold a candle to birds; another uses a wardrobe of elaborate dresses as a metaphor for romantic armor. But despite the nature and antiquity, Newsom’s message never seemed nostalgic so much as perpetually modern: The same things that supposedly make our lives better make them more complicated, too.

You can hear the friction play out in “Leaving the City”, a song from the forthcoming Divers. Musically, the song is surprisingly bitter, a little metal, maybe, or a little battlefield march—the Anglo Saxon roots are the same anyway. “The harder the hit, the deeper the dent/ We seek our name, we seek out fame in our credentials, paved in glass, trying to master incidentals,” she sings, maneuvering a tricky hemiola against the drums and playing the word “incidentals” not just as the chance result of another action but the expenses of doing a job. As for the move suggested by the song’s title, the sense is that something powerful is lost either way.

Comments are closed.