¤ milky moon ¤

So grateful to Joanna for sharing this with us, what an incredible cap-off to Divers. Just thought I'd make a post here to create a space for analysis and discussion if there's any interest- as Adam has noted, posts on the Facebook group tend to get layered over pretty quickly.

I think the line 'it was before our time' really sums up a key component of the Divers era in general- as much as Joanna's music gets labelled as somehow anachronistic, it's pretty clear that her approach to songwriting places her firmly ahead of her time- each album's explorations of narratorship, polysemy and world-building through music simply haven't been done before. In keeping with Divers' questions of what endures, and the legacies that remain, the line might also suggest some bittersweet solace that her work will get the attention and recognition it deserves at some point later in time. It really is the sound of genius; I think 'You Will Not Take My Heart Alive', amongst other things, might refer to this idea of confronting the possibility of erasure, and later resurfacing.

Let's all give the gift of Divers these holidays

Also, 'I was the queen of the rodeo (and everybody'd know)'; the symbolism of horses keeps coming up! Maybe horses are hearts, souls or minds, and hay represents that on which they graze? Do the rhythms in Divers represent canters and trots, or 'en gallops'? Much to discuss!

Firstly, I just thought I'd note that there is a thread for "Make Hay" here, though it should probably be moved to the Divers forum. (Mods??)

In response to your first line of thought, the following response given by Newsom in a HOOM-era interview comes to mind:

RH How much of an escape do you think music should provide from “perceived” reality? And how much would you like to concur that for countless millennia it has provided that necessary escape from, or an alternative to, the naked reality of ourselves?

JN Ha. No matter what the lyrical content of my songs is, it’s a losing battle at this point to try to make albums unanchored by the times in which they’re conceived. My songs might not be littered with references to Twitter and Angry Birds, but they still fix me as irremovably in this decade as Daniel Day-Lewis’s hilarious shirt in Last of the Mohicans fixes him in 1992 and not the 1750s. I don’t aspire to write in a voice that is outside time; I just write about what is interesting and moving to me. That said, we certainly do need as much escape from “perceived” reality as art or science might afford us, and I do think the specific act of playing an instrument can situate one oddly outside of time. The simple act of sitting at the instrument and playing at will has a gooey, disjunctive effect on my own reality that I’ve only ever experienced elsewhere in the act of sprinting as fast as I can at the end of a very long run.

(link)

If there is any song in Newsom's catalogue that fulfills that characteristic of 'anchoring', it is "Sapokanikan". Certainly within the realm of popular music, Divers swims against the tide in a way that hasn't been done before.

I would like to think her music will only grow more popular and respected; it's remarkable that the online community is already avid enough that I see new interpretations and opinions on Divers even now, over a year after it was released. "Make Hay" has made a lot of people consider the creative aspect of Divers, in terms not just of the birth-death duality identified early on, but also, more latterly, the creation of the album itself -- summed up by lines like "(And the rattling nib writes: 'What did I make?')", and, as you say, "It was before our time." Recently, Bob Dylan was awarded a Nobel prize award many, many years after the peak of his fame and career. And we also just had the ten-year anniversary of Ys, which (at least according to the coverage I saw), shows that it has endured very well.

You mentioned "My Heart Alive" and resurfacing -- perhaps you were subconsciously thinking of "Divers" as well: the lines "But how do you choose your form? / How do you choose your name? How do you choose your life? / How do you choose the time you must exhale, / and kick, and rise?" I've read those before as being about marriage, but I suppose they could equally be about career, especially a showbiz career like the one that did Robert Zimmerman so well!

Anyway that's some jumbled thoughts on that. With respect to the "rodeo", I think there is something interesting here regarding dominion over animals -- obviously explained by the Biblical Creation story; also the raison d'être of a circus; and the means of making steak from cattle! I'm not sure about the symbolism of the horses specifically.