Joanna Newsom: Master of Assonance

2006 brought us Ys, Joanna Newsom's second full-length album and a welcome evolution from her debut in The Milk-Eyed Mender. Van Dyke Parks contributes full orchestral arrangements to the five lengthy songs in Ys, rounding out Newsom's departure from Mender's folksy minimalism. Luckily, lyrical prowess accompanies her instrumental maturation, delivering an unprecedented blend of lush soundscapes and inspiring poetry.

Newsom is undoubtedly a master of assonance. Her lines flux and weave with a phonic waggishness that makes them at once memorable and moving. They're sometimes reminiscent of hip-hop, relying on a bouncing slant-rhyme scheme that renders more congruous lines than you would expect:

It was a dark dream, darlin', it's over
The firebreather is beneath the clover
Beneath his breathing there is cold clay, forever
A toothless hound-dog choking on a feather
...
Awful atoll
O, incalculable indiscreetness and sorrow!
Bawl, bellow:
Sibyl sea-cow, all done up in a bow

Toddle and roll;
Teeth an impalpable bit of leather
While yarrow, heather and hollyhock
Awkwardly molt along the shore

Despite her structural playfulness, Newsom conjures a somber ambiance, expressing frustrations with the dualities of body and spirit, desire and fulfillment, pragmatism and idealism. She yearns for past idylls, pastures, kith and kin, while metropolitan modernity drifts in the distance as a "flickering wasteland." Yet she acknowledges our confinement within cosmic and individual schemes, and abandons the plaintive mode for a se la vie mentality:

Stay by the gate you are given, and
Remain in your place for your season...
Loving Him, we move within His borders,
Just asterisms in the stars set order
We could stand for a century
Starin' with our heads cocked
In the broad daylight at this thing -
Joy
Landlocked
In bodies that don't keep
Dumbstruck with the sweetness of being
Till we don't be
Told; take this,
Eat this

Newsom champions those who make the most of their earthly provisions in spite of inherent limitations. Like her lovers in "Only Skin" that "shuck and jive" in a doorway, we too are expected to find joy within solid perimeters; our bodies, our lives and capacities must be reflexively contented. If ingenuousness can help in this endeavor, it's found in Joanna's skipping stones and treehouses. But, as she shows us in "Cosmia," voluntary innocence is only a half-truth, and spiritual freedom is still thwarted by a very prominent corporality:

Water were your limbs, and the fire was your hair
And then the moonlight caught your eye
And you rose through the air
Well, if you've seen true light, then this is my prayer:
Will you call me when you get there?

It's this kind of "left behind" sentiment that puts Newsom out of joint with her desired existence and at odds with mainstream fare. Her music, depicted as a "white dove made with love," suffers at the hands of the profiteering industry - an avaricious conquistador that leaves the once pure bird "stuffed now with sawdust and diamonds."

But Newsom's birds can always fly, as long as they remain in their own kingdom, away from the world that "moves often according to the hoarding of these clues":

And though you die, bird, you shall have a fine view...

Cause she'd lain, as still as a stone, in my palm, for a lifetime or two
Then, saw the treetops, cocked her head and up and flew