Where is Pulitzer already? Joanna Newsom’s 20 Best Songs – Ranked! | music

20. Divers (2015)

“And in endless regress / Tell me why the pain of birth / is lighter than the pain of death?” sings Joanna Newsom on the elegant, kaleidoscopic title track of 2015’s time-obsessed Divers, its interwoven cascades of strings and piano echoing the album’s premise, which is that life contains death, which contains life, and so on ∞…

19. Sapukanikan (2015)

Sapukanikan’s blissful piano and gentle rambling verses belie the profound depth of hidden history in Divers’ title song, which contemplates the passage of time in blurring landscapes and paintings rich in secrets. The song culminates in a kind of ecstatic existential panic: “Look and despair,” Newsom sings once it settles down.

18. Peaches, Plums, Pears (2004)

Since 2006’s Ys, Newsom’s albums have been so conceptually stunning that even her simplest debut can seem small by proxy. But it’s still clear why anyone who heard The Milk-Eyed Mender in 2004 fell in love. Here, as her crackling harp drives an urgent, anxious narrative of attraction and rejection, the sweetness of her voice and the accompanying bursts of a children’s choir make the pain all the more poignant.

17. You Won’t Take My Heart Alive (2015)

Newsom’s narrator struggles madly with the challenge of mortality: “I cut all the strings / For everyone, and everything, beyond remembrance,” she sings amid fragments of harp and distorted organ. The beauty of this song lies in the devastating way she repeats the title, crushing it as if it were a force protecting her heart.

16. Easy (2010)

From the massive triple album Have One on Me, there’s beguiling the beauty of Easy, which drains color from its blissful scenes of domestic bliss, in bed and fairytale arenas, to reveal the tension and indignity of loving someone who resists it. It shifts from gentle piano and strings to something gentler—a forced love ritual, perhaps—as Newsom gradually makes her painful discontent clear.

15. Skin Only (2006)

The futility of care also drives Only Skin, the gorgeous 17-minute showcase for Ys (the hour of the last letter of Only and the first of Skin), which brims with both hope and despair. Honestly, you could rank the top 20 moments on this song alone: ​​Van Dyke Parks’ epitaph, the original string arrangements as Newsom chants “Being a woman!” At 7:38 points for me.

14. Sawdust and Diamonds (2006)

Ys’ simplest moment (relatively) strips down Parks’ arrangements and puts her other collaborator, engineer Steve Albini, in the spotlight, making a virtue of his ability to capture the performance: just Newsom, her harp and a heart-rendingly choreographed vocal performance that delves into unfathomable loss and pain. Her repeated cries of “Oh Desire!” Tearing apart the fabric of the universe.

13. It’s Not Enough (2010)

At the end of “Easy,” Newsom packs up her silk cashmere belongings “and everything that might remind you / How easy I wasn’t,” and depicts her cold ex enjoying his empty mansion. With Newsom gliding with just her fingers around the piano, the tune is bittersweet yet distraught (and echoes the refrain of “In California”). It seems to end with a farewell “la la la” – until the final moment turns into a stormy cacophony.

12. Goodwill Paving Company (2010)

Parks didn’t return for “Have One on Me,” but the flowing “Good Intentions” evokes the playful, searching Americana of his 1967 debut album Song Cycle. Meanwhile, the beauty of Newsom’s lyrics lies in the contrast between the struggle to make a relationship work and the simplicity of her own desire: “I just want you to stop and hold me/Till I can’t remember my name” is Lasts all the time.

11. In California (2010)

Almost every song on Have One on Me is a mini-kit in itself, moving through clusters of conversation, ridiculously beautiful melodies and baroque arrangements. The best parts are often when Newsom’s composure boils over and the arrangements become frenetic and fraught: the cries of “cuckoo, cuckoo” here are so lonely.

10. Cosmia (2006)

The inability to comprehend loss — the inability to prevent it or survive it — shines through the closing track of Ys, a dedication to a friend who died while Newsom was touring her debut. Her and Parks’ harp arrangements swell and search, culminating in her agonizing attempt to reconcile pain with soul release: “And I miss your precious heart,” she howls over and over again.

9. On a Good Day (2010)

The shortest song in Newsom’s catalog may be her most brutal. Widely interpreted as being about a lost pregnancy, as well as the end of a relationship, it shows only her and her harp shedding sacred light on the most terrible of disappointments.

8. Time as Paradigm (2015)

As much as loss trumps Newsom’s catalog, so does her absolute belief in the beauty, love, and purpose of it all. “Stand brave, you living liver/Bleeding your days/In the river of time,” she says in the exhilarating finale to Divers (although the album’s final word, “trans-,” links to the first, “transmission,” escaping linearity and conclusions in a perfect, never-ending loop).

7. Leaving City (2015)

Newsom may have one of the most detailed catalogs in popular music, though her oeuvre never sounds entirely airless. The incantatory attack of the Leaving Town chorus is perhaps the closest thing to the reckless abandon, freedom from calculated materialism and glory that its lyrics suggest.

6. Tales (2015)

Newsom joins an army of birds (“Hot Crazy!”) in a war against the tyranny of time, longing for “temporal betrayal” and an immortality that does not depend on surrendering our “borrowed bones” at the end of life. She’s a strong, exciting leader in the first half, before the prismatic and sublime veer off, as if high on the possibilities of life beyond earthly constraints.

5. Emily (2006)

One of the most beautiful symphonic songs in Newsom’s catalog is a tribute to her astrophysicist sister and her metaphysical and physical guidance. And in the catalog that should have already won a Pulitzer Prize, the description of the shoal as “a mud cloud shimmering with mica, as if the sky were breathing on a mirror” is particularly wondrous.

4. Jackrabbits (2010)

Newsom sings in a crushing murmur on Jackrabbits, as if she doesn’t want to acknowledge the suggestion that in the wake of a crushing loss, she and her estranged lover might give it another try. Hearing this poetic writer sing something as banal and palpably desperate as “I’m tired of being drunk” hits hard.

3. The Monkey and the Bear (2006)

A tale of exploitation and the impact of performance, it’s the best story in Newsom’s catalogue, with a profound reference to nature, the universe, and the gods unparalleled by anyone. The threat that comes into her voice when the monkey realizes that the bear is ready to escape is startling, disturbed by the jumping woodwinds.

2. Baby Birch (2010)

The simple harp riff at the beginning of “Baby Birch” echoes the childlike beauty of Newsom’s debut single, Sprout and the Bean, which only adds to the agony of another song clearly about pregnancy loss. After six minutes, it darkens and the pace quickens, creating an utterly haunting feeling of futile panic.

1. Go Long (2010)

Touching on the story of Bluebeard and the room of murdered former brides he reveals to his next victim – “dazzled by the teeth of women who loved you with gold” – Go Long’s remarkable novel decries the male pride, violence, and stubbornness that condemns such characters to loneliness at the expense of those who try to love them. It’s one of Newsom’s best performances, her guitar with a syncopated, reverb-tinged tingle, and her gravelly delivery smoldering with contempt and pity. Of all her warnings, about war and royal arrogance, the distress in her voice as she observes “You’re badly hurt, you silly goose” is perhaps the nastiest of all.