madpawn wrote:When considering the relationship between "excess" and Joanna Newsom's music, I think it's important to pay special attention to the theme of excess in the albums—in both Ys and Have One On Me, the notion of excess is a major theme/motif, as well as a word that many use to describe them. It's about the medium reflecting the message.
Ys was about one kind of excess, as she's mentioned several times in interviews—overabundance, overripeness to the point of decay. The album is bursting with lyrics about water, flooding, submersion, and also a direct nod to excess itself: "The hills are groaning with excess/Like a table ceaselessly being set." The songs themselves reflect this theme, by their sheer length, by their being full-to-bursting with words and musical ideas, by the near-vanity of a full symphony orchestra swelling behind the stark sound of the harp. The album is excessive, and is also about excess.
Have On On Me is about a different kind of excess—as the title/title track indicates (as well as Newsom in several interviews), it's about the excess of extravagant and decadent living, but also about how this kind of abundance can only come from diminishment of others. The phrase "Have One On Me" reflects this: by giving to someone else, you are reducing yourself. To take an example from each of the three discs, you can see this theme in the relationship between Lola and Ludwig in the title track, in Go Long's "terrible room" gilded with the gold teeth of the man's previous lovers and the palanquin "made of the many bodies of beautiful women," and in Does Not Suffice's list of fabrics and clothes which has made the narrator's lover think that she is less than she really is, which are revealed to be hollow finery and are taken away to leave only "The tap of hangers swinging in the closet." Once again, the theme is reflected in the structure of the album as well; in an act of almost ludicrous generosity, it's a triple album of over two hours in length—mightily appropriate for an album in which Newsom was dealing with the idea of being a woman/female performer and how "giving" also means "giving up" and "taking away from one's self."
My point? Yes, these albums are excessive—but they had to be.
I loved this. It makes me feel better about HOOM.