In a pure songwriting sense, if you factor out her objectively kind of bizarre voice, the general style, and other objections that have nothing to do with composition and lyricism, this is the most mindfuckingly great album the world has known.
Yeah, that includes her other albums.
Yeah, that includes your favorite album, which is probably not this.
Prove me wrong, /mu/.
>>60291128
Newsom is fucking garbage.
>>60291128
>>60291140
you're both retards
>>60291142
ur a retard
>>60291144
nice one
>>60291128
What, specifically, about her songwriting do you find mindfuckingly great? Name one specific thing. What about her compositions is so mindfuckingly different from every other popular music writer?
>>60291156
don't reply to threads like this, then it becomes your fault that /mu/ is so shit
I think her songwriting is fantastic; her voice is just so bad that it ruins the album.
/r/equesting that article where a feminist complains about two straight white men laughing after watching a music video from Joanna Newsom.
>>60291156
compositionally, to be honest there isn't really anything that departs from what you could consider fairly standard.
her lyrics are more poetically appealing to me than anybody else's i think. she objectively has more skill with, or at least devotes more effort to, her poetry than almost anybody else, if that "almost" is necessary. on this album she did, anyway.
and my impressions of the composition are, to be fair, very influenced by how well i feel like the arrangements and vocal melodies complement those lyrics....my impressions of the merit of each aspect are highly codependent.
>>60291163
i know, i should probably hit you guys up for any reason besides quasi-trolling threads. but i'm drunk, so i figured i'd rile you. so far, it's working better than i expected. if it makes you feel any better at all, i legitimately hold the opinion that this is the best album i've ever heard. it's not trolling in the sense that i'm being facetious, but it is in the sense that i'm looking to draw flames.
FLAME ON, FUCKERS
>>60291128
The instrumentals are incredible, but the voice is incredible hard to swallow. I tried to hard to like her voice, but I just couldn't.
"Awful atoll, oh incalculable indiscreetness and sorrow; bawl, bellow, Sybil sea-cow all done up in a bow.
Toddle and roll, teethe an impalpable bit of leather while yarrow, heather and hollyhock awkwardly molt along the shore."
Like, are you getting this you guys? She just smoked most professional poets, and I'm an English major who has read a good deal of poetry both classic and modern.
Bob Dylan used to shit out albums full of intentionally vague faux-thought provoking lyrics like this, the impressive part was that he did it every year and actually made good music in the process.
Joanna talks too much about how much "work" she puts into her songwriting
>>60291242
>>60291174
it honestly took a lot for me to fully deal with her voice, to where it sounded legit pretty neutral to me. it's a lot like learning to tolerate Bob Dylan in that way. once you have forced your way through it enough that you just hear the melodies and not the tonal quality of the voice, it's great.
>>60291279
Bob Dylan is nothing at all like Joanna Newsom. He's 100x more tolerable than her imo.
>>60291270
i'm with you on the latter part. "oh, i spent 2 months researching the historical occupation of the plot of land Manhattan is on to write the lyrics for this song!" no, you didn't. it takes 2 DAYS tops to know basically everything on the topic.
however, Dylan was a notoriously lazy songwriter, who generally had half of every album being clearly not up to his level of ability. title track to John Wesley Harding he just never even bothered to finish, for christ's fucking sake. is that for real the ideal as far as intellectual songwriting goes, a guy who fucking phones it in for half of every classic, iconic album, and then just utterly phones it in after a certain point for a majority of his career?
like, Times A-Changing is masterful start to finish. Desire is fucking sick minus the awful Mozambique and Romance in Durango, and the lackluster Joey. any other album of his i can think of is half-trash at best, by the standards of what you absolutely fucking know the man was capable of.
>>60291333
I don't understand what you're getting at.
>>60291349
i guess what i'm getting at ultimately, is that i disagree that Bob Dylan just shat out vague albums with cool words to make them seem deep. they actually were deep when he was actually trying. but he wasn't fucking trying most of the time, and therefore how prolific he was isn't a grounds for preferring him over Newsom in the realm of artists with weird, erudite lyrics.
but, to mitigate that opinion, i concede that Newsom probably takes her shit too seriously and makes too much of the effort she puts forth, as the guy i responded to said.
>>60291370
I think it becomes cringe worthy when you're "trying" hard to be deep. If it rolls naturally then it's cool.
>her voice getting this much hate
Holy shit it's not that hard to get into it. Have you guys ever heard Cranes? Now THAT is a fucking impossible voice to get into, it's like Newson on helium.
>>60291554
Nigga what. I've tried listening to her on about five separate occasions now and it's still such a struggle.
>>60291575
It's not that weird of a voice. Hell, I find opera singers more hard to get into.
>>60291128
>most mindfuckingly great
what is so most mindfuckingly great about a folk album that sounds like 14th century?
>>60291128
>If you factor out the entire album it is the greatest album in the world
>>60292425
gb2 nxt lvl deaf grips senpai
>>60292480
i don't even like death grips
>>60291370
I dunno man, I think Divers specifically has a novellistic, belaboured high-concept feel to it that demands this approach.
Songs from the Milk-Eyed Mender are have a free or even spontaneous feel to their lyric-writing. She speaks in interviews of how her early songs were made just to please herself and she never meant to release them into the wider world at first, and she also speaks of how as a child her dad would engage her and her siblings to have "poem races" where he would stick words on trees and they would have to come up with poems for each word on the spot. So I use this as evidence, that while songs like Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie, This Side of the Blue, or Inflammatory Writ might seem overwrought taken from the point of any other songwriter, in Joanna's world they can still stand as rather raw and un-hewn pieces of self-expression.
Basically I think she's cultivated a natural and spontaneous talent for songwriting that is intrinsically motivated more than it is overreaching and pretentious.
>>60292552
My next project is to start a series of threads where we collect songs that are similar to Newsom's in the poetic aspirations and verbosity.
A thorough study of similar efforts (from disparate genres) will help us achieve a level-headed assessment of where Newsom stands on the ladder of songwriting greatness.
One difficulty with this is that looking to languages other than English is one of the best ways to find truly great lyric-writing, as the poetic tradition is stronger in many other cultures. But for each such work, only a fraction of us will be able to appreciate its brilliance.
>>60291267
Sounds like she's just ripping off Joyce's Finnegans Wake and passing it off as profound and abstract, it's fucking garbage.
>>60292580
This
>>60292573
Oh, you're just a pretentious jackass. Kill yourself
>>60291128
This is why it's such a shame I can't get past her voice. The songwriting is absolutely incredible, but her singing is 3weird7me
Dylan's lyrics blow Newsom's overwrought stuff out of the water honestly. And this argument about quality is invalid because Dylan has 36 albums to Newsom's 4, and at least 10 of those are better than anything she's ever done.
>>60291128
>Ys is lyrically and compositionally superior to HOoM
>>60291140
this tb h
>>60292706
Shh don't say it too loud. They will call you a misogynist for not liking le epic harp girl.
>people who think Newsom's vocal delivery is bizarre/unconventional
It's like these people have never listened to a freak folk album in their life
The vocal style she uses is pretty standard fare among women in the genre
![1c2bb3eb[2].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/WAAhKeS.jpg "1c2bb3eb[2].jpg")
Okay so I've seen this album posted a few times already and I've never listened to it.
Just put on the full album on youtube, and closed the tab after 10 seconds.
This is shit music people, praise Tim Hecker, Wu-Tang, Liturgy, Prurient, Burial, but not this holy shit who likes this?
>>60293282
Doesn't make it any more bearable though.
>>60291128
>Prove me wrong, /mu/.
Art music exists
>>60293282
They usually won't even try listen to free folk, if they have their waifu, here and now
>>60293329
>Believing in that rigid pop/art music dichotomy that /mu/ newbies always spout.
>>60291128
>if you factor out 90% of this album, the other 10% is the best thing ever made
>>60292610
B-but they could turn out to be such nice threads.
ALSO! Help me with this Captcha, /mu/.
>>60293888
Fucking patio, man
>>60293888
fuck that patio shit
I listened to this for the first time recently and then again. I don't get the voice meme. It's different but I really like it.
>>60291128
Song Cycle was better
>>60293284
It's called having a different opinion. Not everyone here even likes it, either. Also
>praise Burial
>praise Wu-tang
>>60291370
>>60291502
Wordy albums filled with pretty, or obscure words are no substitute for the symbols which the words are meant to represent.
If you're a songwriter and you fill your album with vague and pretentious words instead of focusing on the layers of meanings behind the words, and the emotions they are presented with, then you are a bad songwriter.
>>60291128
>proving wrong an opinion, the epitome of subjectivity.
If you want to talk about this album just say it, no need for half assed baits.
>>60291128
It's just baroque folk w. Kate Bush influenced vocals.
>>60291128
plebs impressed by fancy lyrics
what a surprise
>>60293329
>album
>>60291140
well argued anon
