Symbol 00: "Emily" by Joanna Newsom

    This past summer, some good friends of mine introduced me to the music of Joanna Newsom. Her style is difficult to pin down - baroque 'n' roll, psy folk¹. Her voice is something else altogether, sometimes sweet and melodious, often warbly and shrill, and in my opinion, always absolutely beautiful.² I could tell on my first listen that I loved her music.

    Unfortunately, for whatever reason it takes quite a long time for me to actually sit down and listen to something once I already know about it. Because of this, even though I knew about her for the entire summer, I did not get around to listening to "Ys" until nearly midway through October. You may recall that this is about the same time my grandmother died. Naturally, for this reason this album has taken on a completely different dimension of emotional significance to me.

    I am not fond of going to "song meaning" websites because I dislike reading entries which are based entirely on the person's projection of personal significance onto a work, with little or no justification or even logical connection. There are some passages in "Emily" that move me deeply entirely for the external meanings I associate with them, but elaborating them contributes nothing to someone else's understanding of the song. Therefore, I will concentrate only on themes I think Joanna develops within the work. It would be too ambitious for me to say I know what "Emily" means. But I will say this: throughout the song, Joanna seems suggest that language is inadequate for dealing with certain experiences.³

    To lay the groundwork, we might first notice the image-rich language of the song. Descriptions are in some sense clear, told in the language of physical objects and sensory impressions.

There is a rusty light on the pines tonight
Sun pouring wine, lord, or marrow
Down into the bones of the birches
And the spires of the churches
Jutting out from the shadows

    While the objects themselves are described directly, what they mean and how things relate to each other, is much less clear. What, for example, were the Pharisees doing when they "dragged a comb through the meadow?" How would your heart "up and melt away"(warmth) from "that snow in the nightime"(chill)? Joanna has stated that everything, every bit of imagery, has some personal symbolic meaning,¹ and I take that statement in good faith. However, she also seems to admit that it's not necessarily the case listeners will understand what she means from the words alone. This is much softer than the claim I've made - let's turn from the general to some specific instances.

    In the song, Joanna dreams that Emily, her sister who is an astrophysicist, is "skipping little stones across the surface of the water." What's of interest to me is this next bit: "Frowning at the angles where they were lost and slipped under forever." Though talking about insignificant stones, the image suggests a troubling sense of loss. In the second stanza, Emily tries to teach Joanna "the names of the stars overhead." Joanna, for her part, seems conscious of her own limited understanding of the subject, and eager to hold onto the pieces of knowledge her sister is sharing with her. ("Though all I knew of the rote universe were those Pleiades loosed in December / I promised you I'd set them to verse so I'd always remember.") Another way of saying this: she turns what her sister says into a song so that she won't forget or lose it. It's seems to me that whether or not she retains everything her sister said is in question; though Emily is an expert in the subject, Joanna's versification is rather simplistic (as far as astronomical facts go, anyway.)

That the meteorite is a source of the light
And the meteor's just what we see
And the meteoroid is a stone that's devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee

And the meteorite's just what causes the light
And the meteor's how it's perceived
And the meteoroid's a bone thrown from the void that lies quiet in offering to thee

    In the next stanza, we seem to break from the dream (we return to the window from the beginning of the poem). After giving Joanna some comfort, Emily, whether intentionally or not I do not know, address the whole world with the cry "amen, amen, amen," and the world "stopped to hear you [Emily] hollering." It seems that her words have some effect on the world, and yet at the same time, it's not clear she was really aware of it until she "looked down and saw now what was happening." Are they just observing some spectacle? Later lines seem to suggest otherwise ("Emily they'll follow your lead by the letter.") I can't comprehend how what she said has significance to such a wide audience; even more so when she doesn't know what's happening until after she cries at the window. We'll come back to this when the song returns to the subject of Emily and other people.

    The stanza that follows Emily's announcement is chaotic, not only thematically but musically. Meaningful distinctions are disappearing, which in hindsight may not have been enforceable. "The lines are fading in my kingdom / (Though I have never known the way to border them in.)" Are these the effects of Emily's words? Is it because of her that "the talk in town's becoming downright sickening[?]" Far from creating order or sense, Emily seems to have disrupted fragile distinctions and introduced chaos.

    Let's compare how Joanna views Emily, and how others view her. Joanna claims: "I've seen your [Emily's] bravery, and I will follow you there," possibly likening this to "a far butte lit by a flare." In contrast, other people are described this way: "Emily, they'll follow your lead by the letter / And I make this claim that I'm not ashamed to say I knew you better / What they've seen is just a beam of your sun that banishes winter." Joanna is saying that she knows Emily more truly than the letters of what she's said or done; she seems to say she knows that flare that is her, is her bravery. Joanna isn't saying the others are wrong, or that what they understand is bad, but that it's incomplete.

    These two lines really hit home how words are not enough. In place of others failing to understand Emily, Joanna is now admitting she herself doesn't understand something Emily is intimately bound up with - the Universe. "Though there is nothing to help me come to grips with a sky that is gaping and yawning / There is a song I woke with on my lips as you sailed your great ship towards the morning." This is critical; her song, her words, are not enough to deal with the cosmos. This should immediately make the listener remember the last verse mentioned - the refrains about meteorites, meteors, and meteoroids - and think that this, too, is simply inadequate.

    Joanna's song leads to a fantasy of home, where her father will "point it out to me for the hundredth time time tonight / The way the ladle leads to a dirt red bullet of light." This is reminiscent of the dream Joanna had about Emily, and here we see Joanna failing utterly to remember astronomical facts - her father has to point it out a hundred times (OK, she's exaggerating) in a single night.

    She reflects that she could "stand for a century / Staring" filled with "Joy" as she contemplates the cosmos. The reference to time (another 100, by the way) seems itself another exaggeration - until the prospect of death appears.

Landlocked
In bodies that don't keep
Dumbstruck with the sweetness of being
Until we don't be

     This casts the reference to a century in a much darker light - this is of course the approximate amount of time we humans are expected to live. It's not "could" in the sense of a hypothetical; it's also "could" in the sense of this is what is physically possible, and not longer.

    Faced with the contemplation of the Universe and the prospect of our eventual death, we again seem to have words: "Told take this / And eat this." The words of someone concerned with our health, who loves us, maybe, but not words which help us "come to grips with a sky that is gaping and yawning." Even more poignant, Joanna leaves us with the simplistic words of someone who struggled to remember the basic facts of astronomy, and this verse, this effort, doesn't even begin to address the issues she's just brought up, sounding childishly simple.

Told
The meteorite is the source of the light
And the meteor's just what we see
And the meteoroid is a stone that's devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee

And the meteorite's just what causes the light
And the meteor's how it's perceived
And the meteoroid's a bone thrown from the void that lies quiet in offering to thee

    I can't help when listening to this but to think of how my own words fall helpless and empty when when it comes to the hole the death of my grandmother has left in my family.


1: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2006/oct/15/folk
2:  To be fair, I have a real soft spot for unusual female vocals.
3: An ironic, though not uncommon, claim for a writer to make, given the medium.