Conjuring Love

Have One on Me
Joanna Newsom
Drag City, 2010

Near the end of the film Closer, Clive Owen’s character describes the human heart as looking like “a fist, wrapped in blood.” As viewers of films, readers of novels and poetry, and listeners of music chock full of canned explorations of the heart, we know one thing: we are tired of triteness. That the curtness and clarity of Owen’s line breaks through and refreshes comes as a shock. Something strange happens: Owen’s line liberates our interpretative apparatus and we actually hear.

The Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky called this ostranenie—roughly, the process of making the familiar strange. Because the concept of the heart has been scooped empty of any real substance by an inundation of bad metaphors and similes, a space is open for its liberation. The necessity of this liberation is mandated by the heart’s symbolic ties to love; love, as a fundamental of human experience, demands expression, and yet a banal familiarity with its symbols prevents us from perceiving its depth and beauty. Its highest symbol becomes a three-line greeting card, quickly forgotten. But then, as in Closer, the unexpected happens, ostranenie. Now, enter Joanna Newsom, a woman whose harp playing and unique voice demand descriptions involving fairytale creatures. With her new triple LP album Have One on Me, Newsom does the work of ostranenie and liberates the love song.

As with the line from Closer, this renewal occurs at the level of language. No doubt, her idiosyncratic voice and lovely harp playing are important, providing a complex and memorable soundtrack, but Newsom’s lyrics do the real work. Whether describing the love between a horse thief and a horse on “You and Me, Bess,” or communicating a parent’s grief for a dead child on the stunning “Baby Birch,” Newsom lets no variety of love go neglected; her poet’s eye transfigures each. But, as one might expect, the album rests most heavily upon the well-worn shoulder of romantic love and finds its best moments there.

Jauntily kicking off the second side of the first record, “Good Intentions Paving Company” is one such example. With this remarkable song, Newsom cleverly expands the familiar proverb “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” into a meditation on the paradoxical joy and fright that accompanies a new romance. In seven minutes, Newsom’s careful wordplay uses driving imagery to subtly create a web of strong emotive cues. As the song progresses, it sheds its cuteness until it arrives at its unabashedly gorgeous and naked destination:

And there is hesitation,
and it always remains
(concerning you, me, and the rest of the gang),
but, in our quiet hour,
I feel I see everything,
and am in love
with the hook upon which everyone hangs.

It is clear that Newsom has absolute command over her art, even as she bares herself to the listener.

Given its primary themes, it is no surprise that Have One on Me’s songs are deeply personal. Songs like “Go Long,” a particularly gut-wrenching number about Will Oldham (an old flame of Newsom’s) leave no doubt: “With the loneliness of you mighty men/with your jaws, and fists, and guitars/and pens, and your sugarlip.” That she can unpack her emotional baggage without lapsing into solipsism is a noteworthy accomplishment. But more remarkable than this balancing act is the penetrating insight her songs offer about universal human experiences.

Because of this, Have One on Me becomes the rare album that sounds familiar after the first listen; it seems inconceivable that these songs have not always existed because their unveiling power opens the listener to him or herself; they become a psychological mirror blurring the line between object and subject. “Honey, you please me/even in your sleep,” she sings on the album’s opener, “Easy.” Instantly, the listener identifies with the sentiment and can tearfully recall the time when the thought existed shapelessly inside them, and here a singing woman plucking a harp has ensnared the feeling in two lines, eight words, ten syllables. She has set the feeling to music and made it indelible. Love is transfigured by ostranenie and the listener experiences the joy of revelation and recognition.

Ross Scarano lives and writes in Austin, Texas.