It’s become disturbingly common to read characterizations of Joanna Newsom as mystical or fairylike. This is a lazy generalization, one that minimizes the profound talents of the singer, harpist, pianist, composer, and producer. And the frequent comparing of her voice to that of a child or a woodland nymph is decidedly belittling and gendered—Newsom’s vocals are complex in their masterfully controlled unpredictability. Though unconventional, hers is not unlike the unusual timbres of Kate Bush and Joni Mitchell, and like those artists, Newsom’s entire career has been unfairly labeled inescapably feminine—see Vanity Fair‘s 2010 piece “The Virile Man’s Guide to Liking Joanna Newsom.”
However, it’s admittedly difficult to untangle the artist from this sexist rhetoric, in part because Newsom’s music is pure enchantment. Her harp-driven chamber folk spins cerebral, often referential lyrics into golden storylines, undeniably evoking imagery of medieval days of yore. But perhaps there’s a way to contextualize the magic of Newsom’s music without completely pigeonholing her. She isn’t simply bound to these misty fabled realms—she’s an incredibly powerful, intuitive narrator telling us fairytales about our own reality.
In October, Newsom released Divers, which initially seems like a surrealist diss track to time. Over 11 songs, she narrates a Lord of the Rings-type quest to find a faraway land where life and love are unaffected by time. She grasps desperately for this imagined world that won’t rot, startling at this world’s changing seasons. On “Same Old Man” she sings to a leaf, “Hey little leaf, lying on the ground/now you’re turning slightly brown!/Why don’t you come back on the tree, turn the color green the way you ought to be?”