It’s been eight years since Joanna Newsom released an album. It’s long enough to change entirely—to become one or two or three different people. It’s long enough to see people in your life die and see new life born, which is familiar conceptual territory for Joanna Newsom. Her songs are like koans, full of fables and parables without conclusions. They’re lines of rich, blank time in which life and death cancel one another out. “Nor is there cause for grieving, nor is there cause for carrying on,” she sang on “Anecdotes,” the opener of 2015’s Divers. We have lived multiple lifetimes and died multiple deaths in the eight years since.
As a fan, eight years is long enough to surrender hope and come to terms with the idea of a musician’s retirement. It’s also long enough to go kind of batshit. During the drought, we assembled on the private Facebook page “Joanna Newsom Shitposting.” The community has moved through several meme cycles since Divers. In the Minions era, fans would photoshop the yellow creatures onto photos of Joanna. The Lana Del Rey phase kicked off when my friend Bret posted the Lust For Life art with the caption “sounds like Ys.” The page has most recently been in its trolling moon. Members of the group have concocted fake press releases, promising hyperpop albums that don’t exist. So last week, when rumor spread that Joanna Newsom would play a secret show in Los Angeles, I took it for horseplay.
In January, Pecknold’s band Fleet Foxes announced that they would play a “spring recital” with an unnamed special guest on March 22. I thought nothing of it. Then, the flowers. During the afternoon of March 22, I repeatedly refreshed Pecknold’s Instagram page as he posted more and more photos of band rehearsals with flowers decorating the stage; flowers that were spiked with violet light, that twisted around the stage like curlicues, that were identifiably Joanna’s aesthetic. My girlfriend and I hastily tried to get tickets. We got scammed, lost a bunch of money, and then, we bought tickets for double the original face value.
When we arrived at the venue that night, the merch was folded in half, partially obscuring a not-Fleet Foxes name. “Shirts go on sale at 9 p.m.,” read a sign. I asked the vendor why. “That’s when the special guest’s set will end,” they said. “Who do you want it to be?” Joanna Newsom, I said. They made a sort of grimace.
At 8 p.m., the venue lights dimmed. Without warning, a stage curtain, lit up with a light blue wash, quickly fell to the floor, and revealed a large harp and piano. The crowd gasped, and a few of us screamed like we were John Purroy Mitchel falling from an airplane. Pecknold came to the stage. “Without further ado, I present the high priestess of acoustic music, Joanna Newsom,” he said.
Describing what happened next feels a little like trying to describe a coma or a trip to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. A grave and awed intensity muted the crowd. Stood there amongst it, I felt myself a node in a network of raw feeling, a little brainless plant simply reacting to the strange whirl of light and sound. As she began to play an unfamiliar melody, we came to what felt like a ground-shaking realization: Newsom was not only there to perform but to perform new material for the first time in eight years.
The five new songs were largely piano-based. Primarily known as a harpist, Newsom’s piano playing bordered on virtuosic. She moved about the instrument like it was made of train carriages, with each section representing a different voice and character. I thought of Randy Newman, Joni Mitchell, and other great American storytellers. She played a 15-minute song about a canary trapped in a coal mine. It was amazing.
In the past eight years, Newsom became a mother. Perhaps that’s why the songs she debuted felt as though they were spread on a bed of new life. A fear of death had once made Newsom choose her words carefully, preciously, fearfully. She attempted to capture huge concepts—life, death, gender, nature—in mathematically precise rhymes. It was a desperate, hubristic and beautifully futile attempt to ward away the inevitable.
Divers was placed on the brink of new life, which meant the death of a life turned old. The album functioned like a kind of death doula, offering up a peaceful resignation with the terror of death. These new songs, on the other hand, had all the safety of a mother comforting a child. In them, she pulled from a vast collection of personal experiences, details and moments, returning with a little girl to take care of. “I’m not alone, I have a daughter,” she sang.
