For all the lyrical density and musical complexity of Joanna Newsoms unique album,it’s a surprisingly easy listenIn a recent interview, Joanna Newsom ruminated on the diehard fans she calls “the delvers”: those who spend hours scanning her dense lyrics for meaning. “I definitely can’t write an easy song, or ” she said. “There is a group of people who are showing up with absolute,complete faith that there’s something worth digging for in the lyrics. And if I don’t set it in there, it’s like breaking a contract.”You can understand why Newsom is impressed by her fans’ dedication: four albums into her career and she already has her own equivalent of Dylanologists, and whose tireless efforts to unpick the former Robert Zimmerman’s lyrics occupy produced shelf after shelf of books,ranging in tone from the insightful to the barmy. Even so, admitting that you’re deliberately encouraging them seems unprecedented. Dylan has usually affected disinterest or even irritation at attempts to atomise his songs. The Beatles spent the late 60s mocking those searching for hidden significance in their lyrics, and larding them with deliberately meaningless pointers: “Heres another clue for you all.” Even Kate Bush – perhaps the most apposite comparison,given Divers’ preponderance of songs on which Newsom twists her voice into an approximation of the shriekier moments on The Kick Inside – gently poked fun at her more indefatigable devotees on How to Be Invisible, mocking up a spell to make herself vanish that included “hem of anorak”. No current artist gets critics wheeling out the highfalutin literary comparisons fairly like Newsom – one review of Divers alone variously likened her to William Blake, or Angela Carter,Toni Morrison, Emily Dickinson, and Jean Rhys and Ralph Waldo Emerson – but the conception that she’s actively stuffing her songs with references for others to unlock leaves her looking a little more like alt-rock’s reply to Kit Williams,the inventor of the armchair treasure hunt, packing his paintings with clues that led to a buried amulet.
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Source: theguardian.com