Unconventional Formal Structures and Function in the Music of Joanna Newsom

Home , A Broken Wing, Bring Night, Cosmia, Cosmia calami, Deep in the Night, Have One On Me

Rachel Hottle

Department of Music Research, Music Theory Area Schulich School of Music, McGill University, Montreal, QC

A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts, Music Theory, April 2020.

Table of Contents

Abstract ...……………………………………………………………………………………...... ii

Résumé ...……………………………………………………………………………………...… iii

Positionality Statement …………………………………………………………….………...… iv

Acknowledgements ...………………………………………………………………………….... v

Chapter 1. Introduction ...………………………….…..………..……………………………..…. 1

Formal Functions ……………………………………………...………………...…...... …. 3

Methodology…………………………………………………………………..………...... 6

Chapter 2. “Emily” ...……………………………………………………..……………...…….... 11

Chapter 3. “Monkey and Bear” ………………………………………………………………..... 26

Chapter 4. “Sawdust and Diamonds” ………………………………………………………….... 46

Chapter 5. “Only Skin” ………………………………………………………………………… 63

Chapter 6. “Cosmia” ………………………………………………………………………...…. 90

Chapter 7. Conclusion …………………………………………...……………………….…… 103

Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………………….. 109

Appendix A: Complete annotated lyrics ………………………………………………….….… 111

“Emily” ……………………………………………………………………………....… 111

“Monkey and Bear” ………………………………………………………………….… 113

“Sawdust and Diamonds” ……………………………………………………………… 116

“Only Skin” ………………………………………………………………………….… 119

“Cosmia” …………………………………………………………………………….… 123

Abstract

This thesis explores formal function, structure, and narrative in the five songs on American composer, harpist, and singer Joanna Newsom’s 2006 album Ys. Newsom’s music eschews popular song forms that rely on regular patterns of musical and lyrical repetition for their intelligibility, such as the verse-chorus paradigm (Osborn 2010). Studies of formal function in popular music take the verse-chorus paradigm as their point of departure (Temperley 2007, Biamonte 2014, de Clercq 2012, Osborn 2010), which is largely inapplicable to work, such as Newsom’s, which does not employ clear verse-chorus distinctions. For this study, I conceive of formal function in Newsom’s music as the intraopus coupling of narrative and music. As such, my analysis takes a chronological approach to form, rooted in close listenings and readings of the texts. Chapter 1 outlines the methodological context for my work and provides background on Newsom’s previous work. In Chapters 2 through 6, I analyze each of the songs on Ys as they appear on the album: “Emily,” “Monkey and Bear,” “Sawdust and Diamonds,” “Only Skin,” and “Cosmia,” respectively. In Chapter 7, I compare and contrast formal function and structure in each of the songs.

iii

Résumé

Ce mémoire explore les fonctions formelles, la structure et le récit des cinq chansons de l’album Ys (2006) de la compositrice, harpiste et chanteuse Joanna Newsom. La musique de Newsom évite les formes de musique populaire qui dépendent de la répétition des paroles pour leur intelligibilité, à savoir, le paradigme couplet-refrain (Osborn 2010). Les travaux sur les fonctions formelles dans la musique populaire prennent pour point de départ le paradigme couplet-refrain (Temperley 2007, Biamonte 2014, de Clercq 2012, Osborn 2010), qui est largement inapplicable aux chansons qui n’emploient pas de distinctions claires entre les couplets et le refrain, comme c’est le cas dans les chansons de Newsom. Dans ce mémoire, je définis la notion la fonction formelle dans la musique de Newsom comme le couplage du récit et de la musique à l’intérieur d’une chanson. Comme telle, mon analyse adopte une approche chronologique de la forme, enracinée dans une écoute et une lecture rapprochées des textes. Le chapitre 1 décrit le contexte méthodologique de mon travail et donne un aperçu des chansons antérieures de Newsom. Dans les chapitres 2 à 6, j’analyse chacune des chansons de Ys selon l’ordre dans lequel elles apparaissent: « Emily », « Monkey and Bear », « Sawdust and Diamonds », « Only Skin » et « Cosmia », respectivement. Dans le chapitre 7, je compare et contraste les fonctions formelles et la structure formelle de chacune des chansons.

Positionality Statement

McGill University, where I conducted the major of this research, resides on the traditional land of the Kanien’kehá:ka, which has also been a place of gathering for other Indigenous peoples, including other members of the Haudenosaunee confederacy and Anishinaabe communities. I recognize that my presence on this land is but one outcome of an ongoing colonial legacy. I make this statement as a first step in interrogating the diverse effects of these seldom-acknowledged colonial histories. While my thesis seeks to challenge the boundaries of music scholarship by considering both music by a woman composer and unconventional formal structures, this research also upholds music theory’s white racial frame. As a first step towards dismantling this structure, I acknowledge that this research is not race-neutral, but rather is influenced by both my and Joanna Newsom’s whiteness. Moreover, I acknowledge that the majority of the music theorists whose work I employ are white and male, and the majority of their work is built on the music of white male composers. Acknowledgement is hardly a sufficient step towards equity in academia and in society as a whole. But I hope that this statement will serve as consciousness-raising, both for my readers and for myself, enabling us to take more active steps towards dismantling oppression.*

* I am indebted to Philip Ewell for his identification of music theory’s white racial frame: “The Myth of Race and Gender Neutrality in Music Theory,” Music Theory’s White Racial Frame, (blog post, April 3, 2020), https://musictheoryswhiteracialframe.wordpress.com/. v

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my advisors, Professors Nicole Biamonte and Robert Hasegawa, for their support and guidance throughout the process of writing my thesis. Without their advice, feedback, and encouragement, this project would not have been possible.

Thank you to my professors at McGill—Professors Nicole Biamonte, Bill Caplin, Bob Hasegawa, Ed Klorman, Christoph Neidhofer, Peter Schubert, and Jon Wild—who have challenged and inspired me to think differently and more deeply about music in my two years here.

Thank you to my friend and colleague Marie-Ève Piché, for her help with the French translation of my abstract.

Thank you to my family, especially my grandmother, Lois Hottle, for their continued support of my studies.

Finally, thank you to my friends and peers at McGill, especially Bronwyn Kelly, Alex Jonker, Lara Balikci, Marie-Ève Piché, Lindsay Rader, and Tom Ingram, for their love, camaraderie, and commiseration throughout this degree.

Chapter 1 Introduction

This thesis explores form and narrative in the songs of critically acclaimed American composer, harpist, and singer Joanna Newsom’s 2006 album Ys. Newsom’s work blurs the boundaries between popular music and art music. Her songs are built around the interaction between voice and harp, and draw on sound worlds as disparate as Appalachian folk, Renaissance counterpoint, and psychedelic rock. Ys, Newsom’s second studio album, is a dense, sprawling, epic work. At almost an hour in length, the album contains just five songs, ranging from seven to seventeen minutes in length. It is an intensely personal album; as Newsom has stated in interviews,

“Basically I wanted to undertake the task of writing songs about a particular year of my life. Not the task of telling that story in a linear way, or in any way that would make the story explicitly knowable to a listener, but rather, to tell the story to myself.”1

The album is named for the mythic lost city of Ys, sunk into the sea off the coast of

Brittany, in western France. The legend describes the demise of a city built by a king as a present to his daughter. The city lies on an island, surrounded by walls to keep the ocean at bay. As she ages, the daughter descends into licentiousness, and the people of the city follow in her stead. One day, she falls in love with a beautiful, mysterious young man—alternately depicted as the Devil or an avenging angel—who convinces her to open the gate to the city, flooding Ys and drowning everyone in it. In some versions of the story, the daughter becomes a harpy, luring sailors to their death with her song.2 Notably, Newsom only named the album after all the songs were finished. She says, “None of the songs directly allude to that myth. But the main themes that emerge out of that

1 Joanna Newsom, interview by Brian Howe, Pitchfork, November 20, 2006, https://pitchfork.com/features/interview/6488-joanna-newsom/. 2 Joanna Newsom, interview by Rob Young, The Wire, November 2006, https://www.thewire.co.uk/in- writing/interviews/joanna-newsom.1. 2 myth are really close to the themes on the record—mortality, decadence, an excess of water, isolation, rebirth.”3

With her 2004 debut album, The Milk-Eyed Mender, Newsom had established her reputation as a distinctive and somewhat eccentric songwriter and musician. While the twelve tracks on the album are short, ranging from three to six minutes in length, the song forms are unconventional and sometimes non-recapitulatory. All songs contain Newsom singing and playing either the harp, piano, or harpsichord, and are filled with precise imagery and often arcane language, such as “Across the

Great Plains, keening lovely and awful / Ululate the lost Great American novels,”4 but also folksy turns of phrase, like “Lead me to water, Lord, I sure am thirsty.”5 While Newsom maintains her distinctive lyrics and singing and harp playing on Ys, the form of the album is a radical departure from The Milk-Eyed Mender. Four of the album’s five tracks are densely orchestrated by composer and arranger Van Dyke Parks, best known for his 1967 solo album Song Cycle and his work writing lyrics and arranging songs for the Beach Boys. Critics have favorably compared the album to other ambitious long-form records, such as Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Patti Smith’s Horses, and Robert

Wyatt’s Rock Bottom. Newsom herself cites Roy Harper’s 1971 folk-rock album Stormcock as her most direct influence on the record.6 Her following two records are no less ambitious. Have One on Me

(2010) is a devastating triple album of 18 songs, tracing the trajectory of a relationship from its start to its finish. While Divers (2015) features a more traditional album structure—just under 50 minutes in length, with eleven tracks—Newsom refers to it as “the closest thing to a concept album I’ve

3 Ibid. 4 “Inflammatory Writ” [2:21-2:29]. 5 “Sadie” [1:01-1:05]. 6 Joanna Newsom, interview by Mark Guarino, https://www.mark-guarino.com/harp/117-joanna-newsom. 3 made.”7 As the end of the last track leads directly into the beginning of the first, it is, quite literally, a song cycle.

Newsom’s music seems to eschew popular song forms completely; direct lyrical repetition is rare in her music, and some of her songs contain up to ten distinct sections, sounding almost through-composed on a first listening. Closer study reveals that her songs contain a high degree of internal structure that is primarily determined by repeated melodic patterns and harmonic relations, but rarely involves lyrical repetition.

Despite its widespread positive critical reception, little scholarly attention has been paid to

Newsom’s work, including her unique approach to form. In his book Punk Aesthetics and New Folk,

John Encarnacao notes the formal complexity of many of Newsom’s songs, stating that “the lack of repetition of any block of text…means that the repetition of sections is somewhat obscured.”8

Encarnacao further identifies the use of “modified strophic forms”9 in Newsom’s music, but does not relate these formal structures to formal functions, or explore the implications of such complicated structures for listeners. In this thesis, I help to fill this gap in the literature by exploring how Newsom uses features such as repetition, climax, and narrative to create novel formal functions on Ys, and how these functions coalesce into intelligible song forms.

Formal Functions

Two of the two main conceptions of formal functions in music theory are William Caplin’s temporal theory of form in Western Classical music, and the implicit formal functions associated with the verse-chorus paradigm in Western popular music. Both of these models acquire their interpretive

7 Joanna Newsom, interview by Julia Felsenthal, Vogue, October 23, 2015, https://www.vogue.com/article/joanna- newsom-divers-profile. 8 John Encarnacao, “Chapter 9: Freak Folk” in Punk Aesthetics and New Folk: Way Down the Old Plank Road, (Taylor & Francis Group, 2013), 208. 9 Ibid, 211. 4 power from the use of familiar formal schemes—sonata form and verse-chorus structure, respectively—and thus have limited applicability to Newsom’s music, which employs a variety of unconventional formal structures. In this section, I summarize these models and describe which of their features will be applicable to my discussion of Ys. I interrogate the traditional connection between formal functions and familiar structures, proposing that formal functions could also be understood as the coupling of music and narrative within a particular work.

In his pioneering explorations of Classical form, music theorist William Caplin asserts that

“musical form directly engages our temporal experience of a work.”10 He argues that certain musical features allow musical passages to “express their temporality,” or their formal function, in a way that is intelligible to experienced listeners. At the level of the individual phrase, harmonic progression is the foremost of these features: Caplin writes that “In general, prolongational progressions engender a sense of formal initiation, sequential ones express medial functions, and cadential progressions create formal closure.”11 At a higher level, formal function is imparted mainly by tonality, as confirmed through cadences, as well as what Caplin calls “tight-knit” and “loose” features, following

Schoenberg. A continuum of these features is shown in Figure 1.1, reproduced from Caplin.

Figure 1.1. Caplin’s conception of “tight-knit” and “loose” features in Classical music.12

10 William E. Caplin, “What Are Formal Functions?” in Musical Form, Forms, & Formenlehre: Three Methodological Reflections, Caplin, William E., Hepokoski, James, Webster, James, & Berge, Pieter, (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2010), 23. 11 Ibid., 34. 12 Ibid., 38. 5

In Western popular musics, verse-chorus structure is analogous in ubiquity to Classical-era sonata form. In this structure, verses containing different lyrics over the same music alternate with choruses, which are usually both lyrically and musically the same each time they occur. Much current research on form in popular music centers around categorizing sections in rock music according to this verse-chorus structure.13 Following Caplin’s conception of loose and tight-knit themes, David

Temperley proposed the “loose-verse/tight-chorus” model, in which choruses are normally more lyrically and tonally unified than verses.14 Nicole Biamonte expanded this model to include other musical parameters, such as rhythm, meter, and texture.15 While in Caplin’s theory, “loose” and

“tight-knit” provide clues as to location in time, there is no prototypical temporal progression of sections in verse-chorus structure; songs may begin with a verse and end with a chorus, begin with a chorus and end with a chorus, etc. While musical form in verse-chorus structure is still intimately related to temporality, it seems that formal functions may not be.

In his dissertation on form in experimental rock music, Brad Osborn identifies

“memorability” as the defining feature of formal function in popular music. Osborn departs from the moment-oriented conception of climax in classical music, proposing that rock music more often employs sectional climaxes, which are determined by the “memorability” of the section.16 While

Osborn does not explore what features confer memorability upon a section, he identifies choruses in the popular verse-chorus paradigm as the locus classicus of sectional memorability. Trevor de Clercq provides some clues as to how a section might become memorable in his dissertation, where he develops a prototype-based theory of form in popular music. His work is based on recent studies in cognitive science, which suggest that, in most circumstances, category membership is not an all-or-

13 See Covach 2009, Everett 2009, Stephenson 2002. 14 David Temperley, “The Melodic-Harmonic Divorce in Rock,” Popular Music 26, no. 2 (2007): 323-342. 15 Nicole Biamonte, “Formal Functions of Metric Dissonance in Rock Music,” Music Theory Online 20, no. 2 (2014). 16 Brad Osborn, “Beyond Verse and Chorus: Experimental Formal Structures in Post-Millennial Rock Music,” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2010), 80-87. 6 nothing condition based on strict definitions, but instead is graded based on non-essential characteristics.17 De Clercq posits that “no definition of a chorus section exists. Instead, we ascribe chorus-like quality to a span of music based on a confluence of factors, none of which are in and of themselves necessary to the quality of the section.”18

De Clercq’s “confluence of factors,” like Caplin’s continuum of features (Fig. 1.1), are most usefully analyzed post hoc, after top-down labels such as “verse” and “chorus” (or “primary theme” and “secondary theme”) have already been applied. Given the non-essential nature of these features, they cannot solely form the basis of a bottom-up analysis of formal functions and structures, which is my goal with Newsom’s music. The question remains: how do formal functions operate within

Newsom’s music? Do they provide clues as to the temporal position of a given section, as in

Classical form? Do they contribute to the memorability or climactic nature of a section, as in verse- chorus structure? It is some combination of the two? Something else entirely? Does it vary from song to song?

Methodology

I consider musical formal functions, in the present study, as intraopus phenomena arising from the interaction between bottom-up musical features and top-down formal schemes. My classification of formal functions relies on a union of Caplin’s temporal approach and Osborn’s, de

Clercq’s, and Temperley’s approaches, applied with a consideration of local formal contexts. In parallel with my musical analysis, I will consider how the songs’ narrative trajectories act in concert with, or in opposition to, formal function as articulated through musical features. As such, my analysis begins and ends with close listening to the music and close reading of the texts.

17 Trevor de Clercq, “Sections and Successions in Successful Songs: A Prototype Approach to Form in Rock Music,” PhD diss., Eastman School of Music, 2012, 4. 18 Ibid. 7

To facilitate this close listening, I have transcribed the melody and chords for each of the five songs on Ys. I realize that transcription can be a fraught and problematic practice for a number of reasons. Our current system of notation privileges the pitch and rhythmic domains, while neglecting musical parameters such as texture, timbre, and dynamics.19 Transcriptions usually iron out microtonal and microrhythmic variations that are not easily represented in standard staff notation. Moreover, the practice of notating music for closer observation is somewhat at odds with the phenomenological approach that I am proposing; as Judy Lochhead notes, notation “pins down” the music, and “allows the future and the past to exist in the same way the present exists. In musical listening, however, the future and past are temporally distinct from the present; they exist in anticipation and memory.”20 While reading my analysis, I encourage the reader to listen along to the sections I am discussing—all of my analytical figures include track timings for this reason.21 My transcriptions are at best an approximation of the music, visual aids to draw the listener’s attention to musical features that stand out to me.

Since lyrical content rarely repeats in Newsom’s music, I use repeating melodic patterns and chord progressions to delineate formal sections (as A, B, C, etc.). My analysis of temporal function is based on the larger formal schemata that emerge from these formal sections. My analysis of a section’s memorability or climactic-ness is based on a selection of musical features, shown in Figure

1.2. I have aggregated these features from de Clercq’s, Temperley’s, and Biamonte’s works, as well as my own experience and intuition. This figure is modeled on Caplin’s discussion of loose and tight- knit characteristics in Classical music (Fig. 1.1).

19 Trevor de Clercq, “Sections and Successions,” 7. 20 Judith Lochhead, “The Temporal Structure of Recent Music,” 13-14. 21 Newsom’s music is available on Youtube and Apple Music. 8

Figure 1.2. Questions that could be used to evaluate whether a section is tight-knit or loose, memorable or not, climactic or not. Partially derived from Temperley 2007, de Clercq 2012, Biamonte 2014.

Finally, any approach to form in Newsom’s music must necessarily consider narrative, which is a key part of her work. Indeed, in songs with lyrics, form is unique as a musical parameter in that it directly influences and is influenced by narrative structure.22 Jocelyn Neal discusses this coupling of form and narrative in light of what she refers to as the “Time-Shift paradigm” in country music.23

The Time-Shift paradigm occurs in verse-chorus country songs that “center on the multigenerational life-cycle and attention to family in chronologically distinct episodes.”24 In this narrative format, each verse presents an episode that follows the previous one chronologically; the chorus repeats, but its meaning is “enhanced, inflected, or even dramatically changed by the context that the preceding

22 Jocelyn Neal, “Narrative Paradigms, Musical Signifiers, and Form as Function in Country Music,” Music Theory Spectrum 29: 2007, 41-77. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 46. 9 verse creates.”25 While Neal’s study considers a specific variant of the familiar formal verse-chorus formal scheme, it stands to reason that this coupling between narrative and form would perhaps be even closer in songs that use unconventional structures.

My analysis of narrative takes as its starting point Lloyd Whitesell’s 2008 characterization of voices and personae within the music of Joni Mitchell.26 Mitchell is considered one of the first singer-songwriters in the modern folk tradition, and Newsom’s music is often compared to hers. I will consider Whitesell’s categories of mode, “the general manner in which a poem addresses its audience,” and speaker, which considers the main persona or voice that drives the narrative.27 In parallel with my formal analysis, I will consider how the songs’ narrative trajectories act in concert with, or in opposition to, formal function as articulated through musical features.

Each of the subsequent five chapters is devoted to one of the five songs on Ys: “Emily,”

“Monkey and Bear,” “Sawdust and Diamonds,” “Only Skin,” and “Cosmia,” respectively. As I present my analysis of the album chronologically, patterns begin to emerge at larger formal and narrative scales. I address some of these patterns briefly in later chapters, and Chapter 7 is devoted entirely to comparing and contrasting the formal functions and larger formal types Newsom uses in each of the five songs.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge that my analysis results from my personal experience of the music. I do not wish to make any claims towards determining the “true” formal function of a musical span, but rather hope to situate my research within a feminist epistemology. In her seminal essay “The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Donna Haraway seeks to reconcile “radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims” with “faithful accounts of

25 Ibid. 26 Lloyd Whitesell, The Music of Joni Mitchell, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 46. 27 Ibid., 44. 10 a ‘real’ world,”28 a central question for feminist scientists, which should also be a central question for feminist music theorists. Haraway argues that objectivity is about “particular and specific embodiment”; that “only partial perspective promises objective vision.”29 In other words, we cannot make rational knowledge claims on experiences other than our own; we must situate our knowledge within our own experience. Any analytical decisions that I make are necessarily shaped by my prior knowledge, sociocultural moment, and chosen analytical tools, as well as by the musical context of the event I am describing, and my prior predictions about that event. Feminist scholars would refer to these factors as the analyst’s “positionality.”30 Marion Guck echoes this sentiment when she argues that “any analysis of music derives necessarily from personal experience of music and… analyses benefit from the overt representation of the analyst in the text.”31 This thesis is based on my own experience of Ys; I do not seek to make universal claims about “the formal function” of any particular section. Rather, I hope to present my hearing to you—maybe you will find my hearing worthwhile, and maybe it will help you hear the album in a new way.

28 Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” (Feminist Studies, 14, no. 3, Autumn 1988), 579. 29 Ibid., 582-583. 30 Ibid., 587. 31 Marion Guck, “A Woman’s (Theoretical) Work,” (Perspectives of New Music, 32, no. 1, Winter 1994), 29. 11

Chapter 2 “Emily”

“Emily,” the first track on Ys, is a personal, poetic ode to Newsom’s sister. The lyrics of

“Emily” are presented in Lloyd Whitesell’s “lyric” communication mode, which serves primarily to convey the state of mind of an “expressive subject,” spoken in a voice that “approximates the voice of the poet.”32 In lyric poetry, the audience is granted access to the emotional state of the speaker through “an imaginary monologue or one-sided dialogue.”33 This type of poetry is characterized by reflection, rather than by dramatic action. The narrator, who can be heard as a fictionalized version of Newsom herself, recalls childhood memories in a one-sided dialogue with Emily. Newsom’s sister is an astrophysicist, and thus the lyrics of the song often turn to images of astronomy and the cosmos; Newsom has described this as “a symbolic bow towards what she studies and the way her brain works.”34 While the lyrics are intensely personal and nostalgic in a way that only reveries of childhood can be, the cosmic imagery lends the song an expansively mythic quality, which is not uncommon in Newsom’s music.

“Emily” can be parsed into three large strophes, which contain repeating successions of four basic sections, A, B, C, and D, shown chronologically in Figure 2.1. The column “Internal structure” denotes the repetition of melodic and harmonic material within each section. For example, the first A section consists of the same four-measure figure repeated eight times, denoted by “4 mm. 8x” in the table.

32 Ibid., 41. 33 Ibid. 34 Joanna Newsom, interview by Rob Young, The Wire. 12

Figure 2.1. Form chart of “Emily.” Brackets indicate larger strophes.

The song opens with Newsom’s voice, slowly and solemnly listing birds over stark block chords in the harp (Figure 2.2). She paints a peculiar, quasi-Biblical picture that includes the Pharaoh watching birds for sport, and Pharisees searching a meadow, as her harp playing is occasionally punctuated by pizzicato strings. The fourth line of the section reveals crucial information about the speaker and mode of narration: “Do you remember what they called up to you and me, in our window?” We learn that the narrator is addressing her speech to someone, “you,” and that the narrator is also an active participant in the story she is telling. The lyrics establish that the speaker and the addressee were close enough to share a window, and that, notably, the scene of birds flying and Pharisees searching happened at some time in the past. The last four lines of the section shift the focus to the present-day—“tonight”—and in the evening: the light is described as “rusty,” the sunset red (wine) and yellow (marrow), the trees and church steeples emerge from the shadows as everything seems to slope slowly downwards. As the lyrics describe the growing eventide, the orchestration becomes metaphorically “darker” as arco low strings are added to the texture.

Figure 2.2 Lyrics of A1 section[0:00-0:48]. Bold type indicates rhymes, red arrows indicate phrase- level enjambment.

The A section in the first strophe has a mainly expository function: a lot of information is able to be conveyed in a short span of time, setting the scene for the rest of the song. This is facilitated by the straightforward delivery of the lines: there is only one end-rhyme for the entirety of this section; the last four lines of each section follow a regular internal rhyme scheme; and there is only one enjambment to disrupt the grammatical syntax.35 These factors, combined with the slow vocal rhythm of the melody and pauses at the end of each phrase, allow these lyrics to be clear and intelligible, as one would expect of an introductory section.

The declarative, expository nature of the A section’s lyrics is mirrored by its musical simplicity: it is composed entirely of repetitions of a basic four-bar phrase loosely centered around G minor, shown in Figure 2.3. This structure can be related to what John Encarnacao calls a “single-

35 In my analysis, I distinguish between sentence-level enjambments and phrase-level enjambments. In the fifth and sixth lines of the first B section, one sentence is spread over two lines of music (see Figure 5), resulting in one sentence-level enjambment (“Helps me find my way back in / from the place where I have been”). Since the second of these lines marks the beginning of a new syntactic unit, a prepositional phrase, this enjambment weakly respects syntax. However, the meaning of the phrase spills across this line into the next: “helps me find my way back in” is not a complete semantic unit without the qualification “from the place where I have been.” While this type of line break is not considered to be enjambment by many poets and scholars of poetry, I contend that the transmission of meaning is sufficiently different between the aural and visual realms as to cause these types of line breaks to be more disruptive when heard, as in a song, than when read, as in a poem. The second type of enjambment I consider is the more traditional enjambment, in which a phrase or clause is split between two poetic lines, as in the first A section between lines 1 and 2: “The meadowlark and the chimchooree and the sparrow / set to the sky in a flying spree for the sport of the Pharaoh.” The first line presents the subject of the sentence, while the second line begins with the verb, splitting the main clause between two lines and resulting in a phrase-level enjambment, which is maximally disruptive to both syntax and meaning. For more on maximally and minimally disruptive effects of enjambment, see Mary Kinzie, A Poet’s Guide to Poetry, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 75-7. 14 cell form,” one of his defining aesthetic features of “new folk” music.36 In Encarnacao’s conception, single-cell forms describe songs that contain just one musical idea. He relates these forms to “a minimalism and austerity often indicative of punk aesthetics,” and notes that songs that use this type of form lack “the contrast essential to verse/chorus/bridge formulations.”37 Newsom frequently uses such single-cell forms, but they are most often confined to a single section within a song; I will refer to these as “single-cell sections” for the remainder of this paper. These sections tend to be simple and stable, but due to their paucity of musical material and extremely repetitive nature, rarely attain the focal quality that defines a chorus section.

Figure 2.3. First phrase of first A section [0:00-0:12].38

The beginning of the B section is marked by a striking harmonic progression. It begins with an Ab major chord, which is closely related (by L transformation) to the C minor chord at the end of the preceding A section. But after this chord, the phrase abruptly pivots to a C major tonal space, a compound LP transformation away from the Ab major harmony (Figure 2.4). This harmonic change underscores a shift in lyrical focus; while the A section mostly sets the scene in a declarative way, the lyrics of this B section serve to highlight the narrator’s shared memories with Emily:

“We’ve seen those mountains kneeling, felten and gray / We thought our very hearts would up and melt away” (Figure 2.5). These two lines of text are set with motive m, shown below in Fig. 4. An

36 John Encarnacao, Punk Aesthetics and New Folk: Way Down the Old Plank Road, (Taylor & Francis Group, 2013), 21. 37 Ibid. 38 Unless otherwise indicated, all transcriptions are my own. 15 extra poignancy is afforded to the line “We thought our very hearts would up and melt away,” as the

A minor chord at the end of the previous lines leads directly back into the Ab major chord at the beginning, in a striking SLIDE transformation (Fig. 2.4). This line emphasizes not just the narrator’s literal shared history with her addressee, but also their shared emotional history—while it is unclear if their hearts would “melt away” from joy or from sorrow, this shared intense emotional experience links the narrator to Emily in a powerful way.

Motive m Motive n

Motive o

Figure 2.4. Three basic motives of B section.

Figure 2.5. Lyrics of first B section [1:34-2:40]. Bold type indicates rhymes, red arrows indicate phrase-level enjambment, blue arrows indicate sentence-level enjambment, brackets indicate melodic and harmonic motive patterning.

The lyrics of the B section are presented rather simply, with short lines, owing to the slow vocal rhythm of motives n and o (Fig. 2.4), regular end rhymes, and few enjambments (Fig. 2.5). The musical material of the section is somewhat at odds with this lyrical simplicity: it contains three 16 separate motives in just six lines of text, as well as jarring, distant harmonic relations (the SLIDE and

LP operations just mentioned). Additionally, there is no tonal closure within the B section—its third phrase ends in a half cadence in the local key of C Major, but no authentic cadences occur. Perhaps this musical complexity is afforded by the emotional nature of the lyrics; unlike the A-section text, which was mainly expository in function, the text of the B section is more lyrical, less information- dense, and thus more amenable to musical expressivity.

The beginning of the C section is dramatic and attention grabbing, following the relative repose of motive o, which spans just a perfect fourth in Newsom’s low vocal range (Fig. 2.4).

Motive p launches the section into a higher register, as it begins an octave above the conclusion of motive o (Fig. 2.4, Fig. 2.6). The syncopated vocal rhythm of motive p, moving every quarter note, is much more active than the vocal rhythm of motive o, which moves roughly every half note (Fig. 2.4,

Fig. 2.6). The first time motive p occurs, in strophe 1, Newsom sings the words, “And Emily, I saw you last night, by the river”—the first time thus far that we hear Emily’s name spoken (Figure 2.7).

This direct address contextualizes the repeated first-person plural invocations in the A and B sections (“our window,” “we’ve seen,” “we thought”); we learn for the first time who the narrator is speaking to. She is telling Emily of a dream she had, for which the descriptions of the A and B sections possibly set the scene.

Motive p

Motive q

Figure 2.6. Two melodic and harmonic motives of the C section.

Figure 2.7. Lyrics of first C section [2:40-3:45]. Bold type indicates rhymes, brackets indicate melodic and harmonic motive patterning.

Motive q contains a similarly active vocal line and faster harmonic rhythm, with chords changing every measure. It is less focal than motive p, due to its lower register and less dramatic melodic contour. Additionally, while the lines containing motive p are densely orchestrated with an active, legato countermelody in the strings, the orchestration is reduced to a more ornamental role for the lines containing motive q, with only pizzicato strings and bass.

The rhetorical function of this C section is mainly expository, setting the scene for the presentation of the poem in the subsequent D section. We learn in the second half of the section that in the narrator’s dream, Emily is not skipping rocks alone; the narrator sits with her by the river, listening as Emily tells her about the stars. Based on the emotional relationship between the two established in the B section and the fact that the narrator is dreaming of this scene, we can infer that this memory is of great importance to her. She took notes as Emily talked; she wrote a poem to remember Emily’s words.

The D section presents this poem in the form of two pithy couplets, shown in Figure 2.8.

The frequent but regular internal rhymes give these lines a childlike quality; in comparison to the text of the A, B, and C sections, clearly spoken by an adult narrator, this poem sounds more like a nursery rhyme, or a bedtime prayer. The texture is drastically reduced for these lines; Newsom’s 18 voice is accompanied only by harp and string bass. In the third line, some sparse pizzicato strings are added. The focus is squarely on the text, and on Newsom’s voice.

Figure 2.8. Lyrics of D sections [3:45-4:22]. Bold type indicates rhymes.39

The musical material of the D section is recycled from the C section; the harmonic progression remains the same, and the melody retains the same essential contour, but is slightly retooled to fit the next lyrics (Figure 2.9). This motivic similarity marks a dependency between the two sections. They are inextricably linked; the C section sets the scene for the presentation of the poem in the D section.

Figure 2.9. Comparison of motives of C and D sections. Dotted orange lines show melodic correspondences between motives in the two sections.

39 Interestingly, Newsom appears to mix up the definitions of meteorite and meteoroid in her rhyme: in actuality, the meteoroid is the original celestial object which combusts and becomes a flaming meteor when it reaches Earth’s atmosphere. The meteorite is the no-longer-flaming rock that reaches Earth’s surface (NASA, “Asteroid or Meteor: What’s the Difference?” NASA Space Place, September 4, 2019, https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/asteroid-or-meteor/en/). It’s possible that this error was unintentional—after all, Newsom is not an astronomer. Perhaps this was a bit of poetic license on Newsom’s part—since “meteorite” rhymes with “light,” it would be tempting to juxtapose the two. As a commenter on Genius.com suggests, perhaps this slippage is meant to highlight the differences between the sisters (https://genius.com/1933909). Or perhaps the narrator’s failed recollection illustrates the unreliable nature of childhood memories—while the exactitude of the facts may decay over time, the emotions associated with those memories remain. 19

The transition between the first and second strophes is harmonically and instrumentally distinctive in an especially stark way. Following the conclusion of the D section’s motive s, the orchestral strings rest, unmoving, on a held E minor chord for four beats. On the fourth beat,

Newsom sings a pickup, the word “you” at the start of the next A section, and on the following downbeat, the strings SLIDE from their E minor chord to an E-flat major chord. This highly chromatic movement makes this transition between sections especially marked—D has a clear concluding function, and the start of A marks the beginning of a new strophe.

The beginning of this A section further develops the personal relationship between the narrator and the addressee that was established in the first A section. The narrator describes that, while in a state of personal crisis, Emily comforted her (Figure 2.10). The first four lines of this section depict a state of relative repose as the narrator lays, exhausted; the section begins in a slightly slower tempo than the preceding strophe ended in, and the only orchestration is long, sustained notes in the strings. But the energy suddenly increases in line 5—the tempo picks up and the orchestra becomes more rhythmically active as the narrator compares the downward spiral of her life to the ruin of a great kingdom (Fig. 2.10). The tension continues to build as the section is extended for an extra two lines: “And the mail is late and the great estates are not lit from within /

The talk in town’s becoming downright sickening.”

Figure 2.10. Lyrics of second A section [4:22-5:58]. Bold type indicates rhymes, red arrows indicate phrase-level enjambment. 20

The tension of this A section breaks at the start of the B section: the orchestra becomes suddenly much quieter and less active, pushing Newsom’s voice and harp to the foreground. The harmonic shift in the first phrase of the B section (Fig. 2.4), coupled with the addition of multi- tracked backing vocals, further underscores this shift in tone. While in the immediately prior A section, the narrator described the misfortunes befalling her life, in this B section she becomes more optimistic that Emily will be able to save her: the “far butte lit by a flare” indicates that they are not alone in the dark, she is inspired to emulate Emily’s bravery. The search for the midwife indicates that perhaps the narrator is undergoing some birth-like transformation. The last two lines of the section echo the previous B section: before, the “stirring of wind chimes in the morning” provides guidance through the dark: “helps me find my way back in / from the place where I have been”

(Fig. 2.5). This B section ends with the same optimistic tone, the same hope to make it through the dark: “Help me find my way back in / There are worries where I’ve been.”

Figure 2.11. Lyrics of second B section [5:58-6:55]. Bold type indicates rhymes, red arrows indicate phrase-level enjambment, brackets indicate melodic and harmonic motive patterning.

As in the first strophe, the beginning of the C section is marked by a higher vocal range and more active melody, but here is also emphasized by a more active and present orchestra, as

Newsom’s harp playing recedes into the background. The structure of the section is altered to give it more of a sense of forward motion. Whereas in the first strophe, two lines of text were set to motive p, followed by two lines set to motive q, here in the second strophe, only one line is set to motive q 21 before motive p returns (Figure 2.12). We are denied the second line of the motive q couplet until the very end of the section: the lines “Though there is nothing that would 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,” finally fulfill our expectation from the previous C section, and also strongly indicate that the poetic couplet of the D section will follow. In the previous C section the narrator describes her dream of the poem that she wrote for Emily; what else could be the “song” she “woke with on (her) lips”? But, like a dream that disappears from one’s memory upon waking, the arrival of the chorus is thwarted and the climax we are hoping for is not reached. The music deceptively SLIDEs from E minor to the E-flat major chord at the start of the A section to begin the third strophe (see Fig. 2.1).

Figure 2.12. Lyrics of second C section [6:55-8:15]. Bold type indicates rhymes, brackets indicate melodic and harmonic motive patterning.

In the third and final A section, the narrator paints a picture of decadence and decay (Figure

2.13). Like the narrator’s decaying kingdom in the previous A section (Fig. 2.10), their childhood home is ruined by the overgrowth of summertime, and the narrator herself is struggling. The first four lines are slower and more sparsely orchestrated than the rest of the section; here, the slow 22 tempo and solo harp accompaniment provide a languorous backdrop for the lyrics. The decaying fecundity of the countryside is mirrored in the rich, excessive internal rhymes and alliterations in the text. As in previous A sections, the tempo increases and the orchestra becomes more active at the beginning of line 5, giving the last four lines a sense of urgency as the narrator again implores Emily to return to her.

Figure 2.13. Lyrics of final A section [8:15-9:39]. Bold type indicates rhymes.

Directly on the heels of the narrator’s “clay-colored motherlessness,” the B section opens with a description of the narrator stargazing with her father (Figure 2.14). Notably, she does not say

“My Pa pointed out…,” but rather, “Pa pointed out,” implying that Emily would also perhaps refer to him as “Pa” and explicitly hinting for the first time that Emily may be her sister. She refers to their family as an “asterism,” a pattern of stars visible in the night sky. Though the orientation of the sky might change, their little constellation remains constant, visible even in “broad daylight.” The last few lines of the section hint at a kind of transcendence: though they are transfixed by their familial love now, the narrator recognizes that there will come a time, after their bodies are no more, when they will become one with the stars.

Figure 2.14. Lyrics of B section in third strophe [9:39-10:44]. Bold type indicates rhymes, red arrows indicate phrase-level enjambment, blue arrows indicate sentence-level enjambment, brackets indicate melodic and harmonic motive patterning.

The structure of this B section differs from those that have come before it. While it is marked by the same decrease in texture as the previous B sections, the addition of the banjo on the first phrase lends the music a folksy flavor, appropriate to the childhood-home context of the third strophe. Whereas the first two B sections consist of three distinct motives, each repeated twice, this

B section lacks the third motive, motive o (Figure 2.15). Instead, motive n repeats an extra four times, becoming more and more texturally dense and loud as the section drives toward the climax of the song. The harmonic progression of motive o concludes with a definitive half cadence, serving both to reinforce the local tonic of C Major and to provide a smooth transition, via an R- transformation, to the E minor chord that begins the D section. By contrast, motive n de- emphasizes G Major, and ends instead on an A minor chord. The change in structure allows this B section to flow more seamlessly into the reprise of the D section, presented not in E minor, as before, but in the higher key of G minor.

Motive m Motive n

Motive o

Figure 2.15. Reproduction of Fig. 2.4, three melodic motives of B section.

The final D section is richly orchestrated, as befits its climactic nature. The chorus we expected to occur in the second strophe has finally arrived, but in an altered presentation. The D section now falls in a higher vocal register for Newsom, as it is presented in G minor, rather than the E minor we would expect from strophe 1. This change has two functions within the greater narrative trajectory of the song: firstly, the song begins in G minor, and each A section is in G minor. Transposing the final D section so the song ends in G minor is consistent with the Western classical formal practice of beginning and ending musical works in the same key, which was thought to lend the work coherence. Additionally, the melody is altered from its initial presentation in the first D section. Whereas previously, each line of the couplet is set with a different melodic motive

(see Fig. 2.9), in this D section, every line is set with motive r, which essentially just outlines the tonic triad (Figure 2.16).

Figure 2.16. D section, motive r. 25

As established in the first strophe, the C section functions primarily to lead to the D section.

This function is denied in the second strophe, as the C section deceptively leads directly into the start of the third strophe. This denial builds tension, making the final appearance of the D section in the third strophe all the more powerful and climactic—especially given that the C section is omitted completely in this strophe, making the D section’s arrival unexpected. The climactic nature of this final D section is underscored by changes to the musical material. The music is transposed from E minor to G minor, placing Newsom’s voice in a higher and more powerful register. The second melodic motive (s) of the D section is omitted in the third strophe in favor of repetition of motive r

(Fig. 2.16) which, in addition to being in a higher vocal register than motive s, mostly outlines the tonic triad, adding to the section’s climactic nature.

This final D section also serves as the song’s narrative climax. In the first C section, in a moment of sibling closeness, Emily taught our narrator facts about the cosmos. As a sign of her devotion, the narrator vowed to Emily that she would remember these facts, setting them to verse in a poem to help her memorize them. In repeating the lyrics in the second iteration of the D section, the narrator is literally enacting the process of rote memorization, as she promised Emily she would do. Thus, the second D sections function to fulfill the promise the narrator made to her sister, rounding off the end of the song both narratively and tonally.

Chapter 3 “Monkey and Bear”

“Monkey and Bear” is the second track on Ys. The song is 9:29 long, making it the second- shortest song on the album. The song tells the story of an organ-grinding monkey and a dancing bear who are in love and are enslaved by a farmer. They escape their captivity only for Monkey to enslave Bear, forcing her to dance for profit. At the end of the story, Bear transcends her corporeal form in an ambiguous transformation which can be read to symbolize either death or rebirth. In an interview with The Wire, Newsom described the song as “basically a fucked-up love story,” a meditation on “conditional love.”40

While “Emily” was presented in the lyrical mode, conveying information about the narrator’s emotional state, “Monkey and Bear” is an example of the communication mode that Lloyd Whitesell identifies as “narrative”: In this mode, the singer takes the role of storyteller while the listener is positioned as the recipient of the story (sometimes called the “narratee”). Thus a narrative song implies a direct communicative role between listeners and singer, who is understood as telling the story to them.”41 Whitesell cites this communication scheme as a common trope in the folk revival scene, and very common in Joni Mitchell’s music.42 The story in “Monkey and Bear” is told from the point of view of an omniscient narrator, voiced by Newsom.

The story occurs in a vague historical setting, implied by the circus that enslaves Monkey and

Bear, the use of anachronistic phrases such as “They’ll founder, fain, they’ll die” (Figure 3.2), and the modally mixed harmonic palette, which implies changes from melodic to harmonic minor in quick succession. This unspecified setting, coupled with the omniscient narrator, lends a fairy-tale-esque atmosphere to the story—which is further emphasized by the anthropomorphic animal characters.

40 Joanna Newsom, Interview with Rob Young, The Wire, 273, November 2006. 41 Lloyd Whitesell, The Music of Joni Mitchell, 45. 42 Examples include “Conversation,” “Cherokee Louise,” “Dry Cleaner from Des Moines,” and “Woodstock.” 27

“Monkey and Bear” can be parsed into three main parts, shown in Figure 3.1. Strophes 1a and 1b contain the same basic succession of sections, ABACD. Strophe 2, which also repeats, is contrasting, with a basic form of EFEF. The coda consists of material from the A and C sections.

The column “Internal structure” denotes the repetition of melodic and harmonic material in each section. For example, the first A section consists of the same six measure figure repeated twice, denoted by “6 mm. 2x” in the table.

Figure 3.1. Form chart of “Monkey and Bear.” Brackets indicate larger section groups.

While “Emily” featured a single multi-part strophe that repeated over the course of the song,

“Monkey and Bear” adheres to a different formal blueprint. The first two strophes contain the same succession of sections (with the exception of C’ in Strophe 1b), seemingly setting the song up for a multi-part strophic form (Fig. 3.1). But the beginning of Strophe 2 signals a departure from this blueprint, as it is made up of completely new musical material. In “Emily,” the song’s climax was achieved through the repetition of a musically and narratively focal section; in “Monkey and Bear,”

Strophe 2 serves as the narrative and musical climax of the song, despite its departure from the song’s earlier thematic material. 28

The first three lines of the song open with a chorus of unaccompanied multi-tracked vocals.

The lyrics serve to set the scene for the song, functioning somewhat like a chorus at the beginning of a Greek play (Figure 3.2). At line four, as the stable-boy begins to speak, the multi-tracked vocals end, and Newsom’s voice is accompanied by harp and orchestra. This section serves an expository function, setting the scene before the focal interpersonal interactions take place. Owing to the expository function of the section, the lyrical content is relatively simple. The lyrical lines are short, follow a regular end-rhyme scheme, and lack internal rhymes. While there are a few sentence-level enjambments, there are no phrase-level enjambments, meaning that most lines are at least weakly semantically closed (Fig. 3.2).

Figure 3.2. Lyrics of A1 section [0:00-0:27]. Bold type indicate rhymes; blue arrows show sentence- level enjambments.

While the vocal rhythm is slow and the melody is almost entirely consonant with the underlying harmony, the modally mixed harmonies and metric ambiguity lend the A section an unstable quality (Figure 3.3). The first line of the section is clearly in a triple meter, while the third line of the section is clearly in a quadruple meter (Figure 3.2). The intervening line contains eight downbeats, and while it is possible to parse this line as being in a quadruple meter as well, as I show in Figure 3.3a, this hearing is unlikely, due to the violation of several of Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s metric preference rules (MPR).43 Figure 3.3b shows a preferable metric parsing of this section. The continuation of 3/4 meter in m. 3 respects MPR 1: “when two or more groups or parts of groups

43 Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1983), 74. 29 can be construed as parallel, they preferably receive parallel metrical structure.”44 The occurrence of the first syllable of the word “usually” on a strong beat respects MPR 4: “prefer a metrical structure in which beats of level Li that are stressed are strong beats of Li,”45 since this hearing locates both the prosodic stress and the change in harmony on a strong beat. The occurrence of the word “lay” on a strong beat respects MPR 5: “prefer a metrical structure in which relatively strong beats occur at the inception of notes of relatively long duration.”46 These shifting meters give the A section a sense of instability that continues in each of its iterations.

Figure 3.3a. One possible metric parsing of first A section [0:00-0:13].

Figure 3.3b. A preferable metric parsing of first A section [0:00-0:13]. The continuation of 3/4 meter in m. 3 respects MPR 1: parallelism; the occurrence of the first syllable of “usually” and its concomitant change in harmony on a strong beat respects MPR 4: stress; the occurrence of “lay” on a strong beat respects MPR 5: length.

44 Ibid., 75. 45 Ibid., 79. 46 Ibid., 80. 30

The melody of the first measure of the subsequent B section is derived from the last measure of the A section (see Figure 3.4). The change in melodic contour and increase in rhythmic activity in the first measure of the B section transform this motive from a cadential melodic gesture pushing towards closure to an initiating gesture, and mirrors the shift in narration that occurs here.

The first A section ends with the stable boy’s fatalistic cry, “They’ll founder! Fain, they’ll die,” but when the B section begins the stable boy is no longer speaking. Rather, the seemingly omniscient narrator addresses an aside to the audience, foreshadowing the tragic events that are to follow

(Figure 3.5).

Figure 3.4. Last two measures of A section, followed by first measure of B section, showing melodic similarity [0:23-0:31].

Figure 3.5. Lyrics of first B section [0:27-0:53]. Bold type indicate rhymes. Blue arrows show sentence-level enjambments.

While the B section is more metrically regular than the A section—it has a regular phrase rhythm and a consistent 4/4 meter throughout—the harmonic instability and profusion of melodic motives present in this section undermine its sense of stability (Figure 3.6). The section is harmonically closed, beginning on D minor and ending on D Major, but moves from D minor in the first phrase to F Major in the second and third phrases, before modulating back to D minor and ending with a Picardy third. 31

Figure 3.6. Melody and harmony of first B section [0:27-0:53].

This B section is followed by another iteration of the A section, just three lines long this time, which introduces the major characters of the song, Monkey and Bear. Like the A section that came before, this section contains important expository information: Monkey and Bear are going to try to escape their prison.

Figure 3.7. Lyrics of second A section [0:53-1:03]. Bold type indicate rhymes. Blue arrows show sentence-level enjambments.

What follows in the C section is a long, winding address from Monkey to Bear, in which he attempts to convince her to leave the farm with him. The first line of the section is linked to the immediately preceding A section by end rhyme: the last line of the A section is “They’ve left the gate open wide,” and the first line of C is “So, my bride.” Monkey assures her of his unfailing love, and promises her that they can have a better life if they escape their servitude and head for the hills. But, 32 there’s a catch: in order for them to support themselves financially on their quest for freedom,

Monkey wants Bear to continue dancing for profit, with the promise that “sooner or later you’ll bare your teeth.”

C is made up of five different two-measure melodic motives (Figure 3.8). The five motives differ in contour and level of rhythmic activity, but all begin on either D or A, and all but motive s end on D. The five motives are presented chronologically in the music, then the melody alternates between motive r and motive s for several lines (Figure 3.9). The entire section is underlaid by a two-chord harmonic ostinato, oscillating between D minor and G Major chords.

Figure 3.8a. Melodic motive p of C [1:08-1:12].

Figure 3.8b. Melodic motive q of C [1:20-1:24].

Figure 3.8c. Melodic motive r of C [1:40-1:43].

Figure 3.8d. Melodic motive s of C [1:48-1:51].

Figure 3.8e. Melodic motive t of C [1:56-2:00].

Track 1:08- 1:20- 1:40- 1:48- 1:56- 2:00- 2:08- 2:16- 2:20-2:25 timing 1:20 1:40 1:48 1:56 2:00 2:08 2:15 2:20 Motive p q r s t s r s r Figure 3.9. Progression of motives in the C section.

The lyrics in this section are syntactically complex, containing many enjambments, end rhymes, and internal rhymes. The rhyme partitioning and motivic partitioning often do not line up, causing this section to feel quite breathless and chaotic (Figure 3.10). Sometimes lines containing different melodic motives are linked by similar end rhymes, as between the lines “But Ursula, we’ve got to eat something,” which is sung on motive r, and the line “and earn our keep while still within,” which is sung on motive s. In other instances, lines containing different melodic motives are linked by internal rhymes, as when the end rhyme of the line “And no longer answer to that heartless,” which is sung on motive q, and is repurposed as an internal rhyme two lines away, “That charlatan with artless hustling!” which is sung on motive r. Other times, similar internal and end rhymes between lines suggest larger groupings of lines with differing melodic motives, as in the last three lines of the section: “Can you bear a little longer to wear that leash? My love, I swear by the air I breathe: Sooner or later you’ll bare your teeth.” These meticulously crafted disjunctions between motivic patterning and rhyme scheme create a breathless, unstable atmosphere in the C section.

Figure 3.10. C-section lyrics. Partitioning on the left is according to end-rhyme scheme. Partitioning on the right is according to melodic motives. Bold type indicates rhymes, red arrows indicate phrase- level enjambment, blue arrows indicate sentence-level enjambment.

It is clear to the audience that Monkey does not have Bear’s best interests at heart. He is trying to convince Bear to remain in servitude to financially support him. While he paints the farmer as a cruel taskmaster—“that heartless hay-monger,” “that charlatan with artless hustling,” whose grip on his land is “tightfisted”—he himself wants Bear to remain enslaved. This is underscored by the breathless, chaotic nature of the section: he is a conman, trying to overwhelm Bear with information so that she will provide for him.

The D section that follows is the most chorus-like of all the sections in the song. In it,

Monkey implores Bear to dance for him. The lyrics are simple and repetitive; there are no enjambments or internal rhymes; the lines follow a regular end rhyme scheme; the harmonic rhythm 35 is regular and slow: the harmony changes once a bar (Figure 3.11). The D section is harmonically active compared to the ostinato-based C and C’ sections. It is also somewhat tonally ambiguous: the first and third phrases are in D minor with a Dorian inflection, but melodic emphasis on F major in the second phrase allows us to hear it briefly as a tonal center (Figure 3.11). Some of the melodic material repeats within the section: the melody is the same on both iterations of “darling, there’s a place for us,” although it is offset by one beat with respect to the text. This melodic material is derived from motive iv from the C section, but is simplified and slowed down in the D section (see

Fig. 3.12).

Figure 3.11. Transcription of first D section [2:25-3:21].

Figure 3.12a. Motive iv from C section [1:40-1:48].

Figure 3.12b. Motive iv, simplified and slowed down in D section [2:34-2:38].

The beginning of the D section corresponds with a decrease in texture as the dense orchestration of the C section gives way to a sparse harp accompaniment. This sparseness is at odds with the other features of this section, which seem to point towards a chorus-like function.

Throughout the D section, the orchestration grows steadily more complex: first a far-off French horn figure is added, then active ornamentation in the woodwinds, and finally the dense string accompaniment returns.

After the conclusion of the D section, the following A section signals the start of a new strophe. After Monkey implores Bear to run away with him and keep dancing, the A section describes their journey through the countryside (Figure 3.13). In the second B section, Monkey urges Bear to keep walking even though Bear wants to stop for tea.

Figure 3.13. Lyrics of ABA sections of second strophe [3:21-4:20]. Bold type indicates rhymes, red arrows indicate phrase-level enjambment, blue arrows indicate sentence-level enjambment.

While both the first A and B sections of the second strophe serve to move the plot forward, the following A section serves a crucial but somewhat different function: “Though cast in plaster /

Our Ursula’s heart beat faster / Than Monkey’s ever will.” The narrator provides an aside to the audience that lends insight into both Bear’s and Monkey’s emotional states. While many of the sections in the song are composed entirely of speech by Monkey, Bear never speaks; she is only spoken for. This is the first time in the song that we are given any insight into Bear’s mind, and thus it marks a critical turning point in our understanding of the characters. It is also the first time in the song that the narrator addresses the audience directly, through “Our Ursula.” Previously, the narrator had maintained some degree of distance from the audience; indeed, they seemed very much like a third-person omniscient narrator. But this aside lets us know that the narrator is not a disinterested third party; they have a stake in the story, and are inviting us to identify with them through “Our Ursula.” 38

Following this A section should be another C section, but the musical materials in what follows are sufficiently different that I designate this section C’. It features the same two-measure D minor to G major harmonic vamp as the C section, and is likewise linked to the preceding A section by end rhyme. But while C contained five distinct melodic motives, C’ consists of just one melodic motive, four measures long, that repeats six times (Figure 3.14), making C’ an instance of a single- cell section, like the A section of “Emily.” This single melodic motive features a descent from A to the non-harmonic tone E, which is emphasized first through syncopation, as a kind of suspension or appoggiatura for almost three measures, and then through repetition. This melodic motive appears to derive from motive q of C, which follows the same basic contour of a descent from A to an emphasized non-harmonic E (Figure 3.15). While the melodies of the two motives are similar, their harmonic contexts are not: in C, the figure descends over the D minor portion of the vamp, then lands on E as a 6-5 suspension over the G major harmony, while in C’, the descent takes place over

G major, and the E functions as a 2-1 suspension over D.

Figure 3.14. Melodic motive of C’ [4:36-4:44].

Figure 3.15. Melodic motive q of C, and melodic motive of C’. Both feature a descent from A to a non-harmonic E.

Section C contains six enjambments, three of which disrupt the phrase-level syntax, which adds to the feeling of unrest (marked in red and blue arrows in Figure 3.10). By contrast, C’ contains just three enjambments, which all occur at the sentence level (Figure 3.16). Additionally, the C’ section has a much more regular rhyme scheme than C. While it features a profusion of internal rhymes, the internal rhymes and end rhymes segment into four neat couplets (Fig. 3.16). For example, lines 5 and 6 contain four different sets of internal rhymes: “courage,” “cur,” jerk,” “fur,” and “jerkin”; “clown,” “brown,” “gown,” and “down”; “kite” and “tight”; and “tether” and

“leather.” But no other rhymes with these words appear in the C’ section. Thus these internal rhymes serve to strengthen the bonds between lines in each couplet, making C’ feel much more stable than C.

Figure 3.16. C’-section lyrics [4:20-5:08]. Bold type indicates rhymes, blue arrows indicate sentence- level enjambment, brackets indicate rhyme patterning.

These differences between the C and C’ sections parallel the different narrative functions that these sections serve within the larger story. The C section is breathless and incoherent. The lyrics in this section are spoken by Monkey to Bear: he tells her that he loves her, and that this is their one chance for freedom from the farm. He tells her that someday they will reach the land of

“milk and honey,” but for now they have to support themselves somehow. Perhaps the profusion of melodic motives, enjambments, and conflicting rhyme schemes in this section represent Monkey’s 40 high energy, but duplicitous nature. By contrast, the C’ section seems to depict Ursula’s inner thoughts. She remembers Monkey’s entreaty that “they have got to pay the bills,” and so she decides to dance. This section is more measured, containing just one melodic motive, a regular, coherent rhyme scheme, and longer, four-bar phrases. Just as in A4, the narrator entreats us to identify with

Ursula, so perhaps the enhanced memorability of the C’ section renders her melody more salient for listeners.

Following C’, the D section returns, as expected. For the first five lines, the lyrics are the same as in the prior iteration of the section (Fig. 3.11). But since Bear has already begun to dance, these lyrics take a different tone—rather than pleading with her, Monkey is accompanying her dance with his song, literally forcing her to keep dancing as he provides the music (Figure 3.17). In the next five lines, Monkey explicitly states for the first time that his love for Bear is conditional, providing an impetus for the musical change and narrative transformation that follows.

Figure 3.17. Lyrics of second D section [5:08-6:06]. Bold type indicates rhymes.

After the conclusion of this D section, the music departs from the ABACD strophe and presents the E section, hitherto unheard. E is a single-cell section, as C’ was—its purpose is to present a lot of information in a short span of time. The harmony is static, holding a Dm/A vamp for the entire section; the melody consists of just four measures (Figure 3.18). The speaker switches 41 from Monkey back to the narrator, who tells of Monkey hearing a rumor about Bear bathing by the sea (Figure 3.19). He gleefully plans how he will humiliate her with this news when she returns to camp. Monkey is mean and “miserly,” he laughs and mutters to himself at the thought of Bear washing herself—he describes her face as “that matted and flea-bit pelt” and plots to humiliate her by telling her she smells.

The metric positioning of the melody mirrors the instability of Monkey’s C section and belies Monkey’s manic, scheming nature. The melody can be divided into three-beat units based on the repeating rhythmic value of eighth–eighth–quarter–quarter. This three-beat unit is repeated and overlaid on the four-beat metric fabric, creating a kind of hemiolic feel (Fig. 3.18). But the agogic accents on the quarter notes in this figure make the eighth notes seem somewhat anacrustic in nature. However, the eighth notes only fall in a metrically anacrustic position at the end of measure

1. This rhythmic dissonance causes the entire melody to careen forward towards the half-note A at the end of the phrase.

Figure 3.18. Melody of E section [6:06-6:13]. Red brackets show rhythmic groupings.

Figure 3.19. Lyrics of first E section [6:06-7:12]. Bold type indicates rhymes.

After Monkey finishes describing his plan to humiliate Bear, the music turns to the F section, which is also underlaid by a Dm/A ostinato. I was initially unsure whether to analyze F as its own section, or to consider it as a part of a larger E section, but due to its climactic nature and how it differs so strongly from the rest of the E section, I decided to designate it F. It is extremely short, only eight measures in length. Its melody is unlike anything we have heard so far in the song. It consists of a short quarter-note motive from upbeat to downbeat, descending a minor third, repeated and separated by rests. At the end of the phrase, the rests between iterations of this figure become compressed, causing it to be rhythmically displaced (Figure 3.20). This descending minor third from C to A mimics the melodic motive at the beginning of the E section, which also descends from C to A (Fig. 3.18).

Figure 3.20. Transcription of first F section [7:12-7:26].

The speaker switches back to the first-person narrator at the start of the F section. She reveals to us that Monkey’s plan will not come to fruition, for Bear is swimming far out into the sea, an image that recalls Kate Chopin’s early feminist novel The Awakening. The protagonist, Edna

Pontellier, struggles to reconcile her inner desires with the social expectations of being a woman.

Ultimately unable to balance the two, at the end of the novel she walks into the ocean—only in death can she be freed of the shackles of being a Victorian woman. Similarly, Bear swims out into the ocean to escape the literal shackles of her servitude to Monkey. 43

In the E section that follows, the narrator describes Bear’s transformation as she abandons her corporeal form to the sea (Figure 3.21). We learn that she was not, as Monkey imagined, “lolling and splashing obscenely” or “rolling in muck;” rather, she “shed her mantle” and “allowed her burden of belly to drop.” Bear is described as graceful and long-suffering: “lowered in a genteel curtsy,” she “sighs.” She spent “almost every night of the year…mending, suspending that baseness” of her coat. The narrator describes the “life’s worth of hunger” that Bear endured, and finishes the verse by describing the “magnetic embrace, balletic and glacial, of Bear’s insatiable shadow.” The juxtaposition of these two perspectives in the two E sections underscores for us the difference between Monkey and Bear, at least in the narrator’s eyes. Like the narrator, we detest Monkey and sympathize with Bear.

Figure 3.21. Lyrics of second E section [7:26-8:23]. Bold type indicates rhymes.

Throughout the second E section, the orchestration grows louder and more intense, leading to the climax of the song in the F section that follows. The drama is heightened at the start of this F section by the addition of suspended cymbal—the only percussion instrument used in this song—as the lyrics describe Bear’s final transformation (Figure 3.22).

Figure 3.22. Lyrics of second F section [8:23-8:39].

The song concludes with an instrumental rendition of the A section, followed by a single line from Monkey’s C section: “Sooner or later you’ll bare your teeth.” Monkey said this to Bear while he implored her to dance to earn money for him; he promised her that, even though she was currently still enslaved, she would someday experience freedom. We know now, upon hearing this line for the second time, that Bear did eventually attain freedom, but not through the land of milk and honey that Monkey promised her. Rather, she freed herself by wading into the ocean and transcending her bodily existence.

Despite the tragic freedom that Bear attains at the end of the song, she still serves a somewhat subordinate role in the narrative. While Monkey speaks directly many times, Bear never speaks; she is only spoken for by the narrator. It is not difficult to read into this a critique of the gender roles that Monkey and Bear inhabit. Monkey, as the male partner in this heterosexual coupling, speaks for himself; he is the mastermind of their plans. Bear, as the female partner, is only spoken for. She is reduced to just a body through her exploitation by Monkey, but also through the narrator’s detailed descriptions of her physical form.

But is Bear truly dead? While a reading of the allusions to The Awakening seem to suggest this, the ending of the song also seems to recall Newsom’s interpretation of the Ys myth. In that story, another young woman—the king’s daughter—struggles against societal expectations of the 45 role of womanhood, leading to her eventual death by water. But while Edna Pontellier’s descent to the sea ends in death, the Breton princess is transfigured into a harpy. She lives freely in the ocean forevermore, luring sailors to their death. This reading suggests a more triumphant fate for our ursine heroine. Only through death is she truly free; free of the abusive relationship that robbed her of so much, free of the female body that only seemed to weigh her down.

As in “Emily,” the narrative climax of “Monkey and Bear”—Bear’s bodily transcendence— coincides with the song’s musical climax. But while in “Emily,” this musical climax was achieved through the transformation of a section that appears earlier in the song, here, the climactic section is non-recapitulatory, with increased energy built into the very nature of the section. The E sections, which form the bulk of the musical climax, are single-celled, consisting of just four measures of melodic material over an unstable harmonic vamp of Dm/A. The melodic motive’s metric dissonance causes each line to careen towards the downbeat of every fourth measure, leading to a sense of forward motion that helps the climax to build. In the final E section, as the narrator recounts Bear’s transformation, the orchestration grows increasingly louder and thicker, adding to the section’s intensity.

Chapter 4 “Sawdust and Diamonds”

“Sawdust and Diamonds,” the third track on Ys, seems to depict a fraught romantic relationship. As in “Emily,” the narrator in “Sawdust and Diamonds” can be heard as a fictionalized version of Newsom herself, speaking in a one-sided dialogue to her partner, addressed as “you” throughout the song. Newsom draws on a number of rich images to describe the turmoil in her relationship. A ship, symbolizing the relationship, is caught in an storm, at the mercy of the sea

(“drowning mute as a rock and sounding mutiny,” “in the trough of the waves…pitch we, pale-faced and grave, as I write in my log,” “then I hear a noise from the hull, seven days out to sea,” “what was yours and mine appears to me a sandcastle that the gibbering wave takes”). A bell tolls, seemingly that time is up (“there’s a bell in my ears,” “drop a bell down the stairs,” “drop a bell off the dock,” “and it is that damnable bell, and I believe that it tolls for me”). The title, “Sawdust and

Diamonds,” seems to reference Joan Baez’s 1975 ballad reminiscing on a lost relationship,

“Diamonds and Rust.”47 But perhaps the most piquant metaphor is that referenced in the title:

Newsom describes herself as a dove, “stuffed now with sawdust and diamonds,” seemingly taxidermied by her lover (“with your pliers and glue you make your first incision”) and compelled to act in a puppet show (“There's a light in the wings, hits the system of strings from the side, where they swing, see the wires, the wires, the wires. And the articulation in our elbows and knees makes us buckle, and we couple in endless increase as the audience admires,” “the system of strings tugs on the tip of my wings”). In this song, as in “Monkey and Bear,” Newsom uses anthropomorphized animals for expressive effect. But whereas in “Monkey and Bear,” the continuous animal narrative served to distance Newsom from the story, in “Sawdust and Diamonds,” anthropomorphic

47 Just like Newsom and her partner, Baez’s ex-lover Bob Dylan was “temporarily lost at sea”; perhaps the tolling bell that Newsom describes is the ringing telephone that frames Baez’s story? Could the dove reference Baez’s 1967 anti-war protest ballad “La Colombe (The Dove)”? 47 descriptions are mixed with more human sentiments, allowing listeners to identify with Newsom as protagonist of the story.

“Sawdust and Diamonds” can be parsed into three basic sections, A, B, and C. Figure 4.1 shows the repetition of these sections and their patterning within the song. The A section serves as a frame for the song; it appears first and last but is never directly recapitulated elsewhere in the song.

The song can further be parsed into three strophes, 1a, 1b, and 1c, based on repeating successions of A’, A”, and B sections, shown with brackets to the left of the figure. The C section is a contrasting middle section, distinct from the strophes. The B+ section is a quasi-improvisatory climactic section, derived from the text of the B section (hence its designation as B+).

Figure 4.1. Form chart of “Sawdust and Diamonds.” Brackets indicate larger strophes.

The song’s larger form seems to adhere to the compound AABA structure that John Covach identifies as one of the more complicated formal plans common in rock music.48 In Covach’s model, each A section consists of a verse-chorus pair, while the B section is a contrasting bridge. Thus, under Covach’s framework, each of the larger parts in “Sawdust and Diamonds” would be an “A,”

48 John Covach, “Form in Rock: A Primer” in Engaging Music: Essays in Music Analysis, ed. Deborah Stein, (Oxford University Press, 2005), 74. 48 while the middle section (C in Fig. 4.1) would be designated “B.” However, in a compound AABA form, each chorus within each A section would serve as a point of arrival, while in “Sawdust and

Diamonds,” the climax is not reached until the penultimate section, designed “B+” in Figure 4.1.

And while both “Emily” and “Monkey and Bear” are terminally-climactic forms, Newsom employs different strategies to delay the climax in “Sawdust and Diamonds.”

The A section, like the A section in “Emily” and the C’ and E sections in “Monkey and

Bear,” is a single-cell section that is made up of a single melodic motive over a two-chord harmonic vamp (Figure 4.2). The A section in this form acts as a frame for the rest of the song, appearing at the very beginning and very end. The accompaniment is sparse, as befits an introductory section, consisting only of block chords played once per measure by Newsom on the harp. The harmonic ostinato alternates between G minor 7th and E-flat major chords (Fig. 4.2). These chords can be loosely interpreted as iii7 and I in the key of E-flat major, but this harmonic interpretation is undermined by the melody, which traces a path from 2^ to 6^, coming to rest on 5^ at the end of the phrase (Fig. 4.2). Regardless of the harmonic interpretation, this movement by thirds is not a strongly functional progression in any key, given the common tones shared between the chords.

Figure 4.2. Melodic and harmonic motive of A section [0:00-0:06] with possible harmonic interpretation in Eb Major.

The harmonic and accompanimental indeterminacy of the A section are mirrored by the lyrics. These lyrics are uncharacteristically simple for Newsom; as we’ve seen, her lyrics frequently include rich descriptions and complex internal rhymes. These lines, by contrast, contain few syllables, simple rhyme schemes, and somewhat underdetermined images (Figure 4.3). While they serve to set the scene for the rest of the song, these lyrics provide so little information as to raise a number of questions (Figure 4.3). The “wide, white stairs” and a bell “forevermore” falling seem to evoke an image of an afterlife, while the audible tolling of a bell suggests that the narrator is still living.

Figure 4.3. Lyrics of first A section [0:00-0:47]. Bold type indicates rhymes, blue arrow indicates sentence-level enjambment.

After these lyrics, the tempo drops from about quarter note = 100 to quarter note = 85 at the start of the first A’ section. The harp accompaniment becomes suddenly more active, as now every sixteenth note in the measure is articulated. The addition of frequent non-harmonic tones to the active harp accompaniment makes this section sound much more restless than the block-chord- based A section. While the basic melodic contour of the A motive is preserved in A’,49 it is augmented to span four measures, rather than the two measures that it spans in A (Figure 4.4). This change, coupled with the decrease in tempo between A and A’, is perhaps to make room for the

49 Hence my designation of this section as “A’,” rather than an autonomous section, such as “B.” 50 more active, tension-building harp accompaniment. A’ no longer serves the introductory function of

A; the increased movement in the sixteenth notes literally propels the song forward.

Figure 4.4. The melodic motive of the A section (shown in its first presentation, 0:00-0:06) is rhythmically augmented to become a four-measure unit in the A’ section (shown in its first presentation, 0:58-1:08).

While the A section’s textural sparseness is matched by harmonic indeterminacy, the chords in the A’ section paint a clearer harmonic picture. At the start of the A’ section, the chords change slightly—largely through parsimonious voice leading—to accommodate a more stable harmonic interpretation. The G in the G minor7 chord is dropped, yielding a B-flat major sonority, and the root of the E-flat major chord drops a semitone, yielding a G-minor chord through an L transformation (Figure 4.5a). These new chords can be loosely interpreted as inverted I and vi harmonies in the key of B-flat major, allowing us to retrospectively hear the A section as vi7 and IV of B-flat major. In this tonal context, the melody traces a more conventionally stable path from 5^ through 2^, coming to rest on 1^ at the end of the phrase (Figure 4.5b).

Figure 4.5a. Melodic motive of A’ section [0:58-1:08] Figure 4.5b. Melodic motive of A section [0:00- with possible harmonic interpretation in Bb Major. 0:06] with possible harmonic interpretation in Bb

Major.

While the lyrics of the A section primarily serve to set the scene, the lyrics of A’ describe

sounds and actions, moving the plot forward and providing context for the images described in A

(Figure 4.6). The “wide, white roar” likely referred to the waves of the sea, and the descent “from

the top of the flight of the wide, white stairs” seems to hint at a similar descent into the ocean, here

described as “drowning mute as a rock,” hinting at the Breton myth that provides the name for the

album (Fig. 4.6). Crucially, A’ also provides an emotional tone that was missing from the A-section

lyrics. The imagery of “wide, white stairs” and a falling bell in the opening A section could evoke a

sort of fairy-tale-esque wedding or a peaceful heavenly scene; the song’s tragic undertones only

become clear in A’1, with negative images evoked by “blot it out,” “drowning mute,” and “sounding

mutiny.”

Figure 4.6. Lyrics of first A’ section [0:47-1:42]. Bold type indicates rhymes.

The A” section that follows features the same phrase rhythm and harmonic ostinato as the

A’ section, but the melody is altered and the vocal rhythm is drastically increased, resulting in a much higher density of text (Figure 4.7a). The same basic melodic contour from A’ is retained, as 5^,

2^, and 1^ remain focal pitches. However, the vocal range of the motive is expanded, with the line now beginning on the upper tonic, higher in Newsom’s register (4.7b). Additionally, the melody rests on

2^ for much longer than in the A’ section, well into the harmony’s resolution to the tonic, giving this section a much more unresting, forward-moving feel.

Figure 4.7a. Melodic motive of A” section, shown in its first presentation [1:43-1:53].

Figure 4.7b. Melodic reduction of A’ motive compared with melodic reduction of A” motive. In A”, the motive is registrally expanded to the upper tonic, and temporally expanded to fill the four- measure phrase, and the melody is given more time to rest on scale degree 2^. 53

In “Emily,” the other lyric-mode song that I’ve discussed thus far, the central images of childhood memories, nighttime, and starlight pervade all sections of the song. But in “Sawdust and

Diamonds,” metaphors are largely confined to the section in which they first appear, preventing the song from expressing a coherent through-narrative. This fragmentary nature of the lyrics is somewhat offset by the melodic and harmonic similarity among the A, A’, and A” sections, which lend the song a musical, if not narrative, coherence. In the first A” section, the oceanic imagery of A and A’ is largely abandoned, as the lyrics present the image of a puppet show (Figure 4.8). The narrator speaks directly to the song’s addressee for the first time since A: it seems that together, they are the stars of this show, controlled by some unseen puppet-master, while a “little white dove” represents some sort of outward manifestation of their relationship, perhaps a child, or, as implied by the last line of the section, the speaker’s desire (Fig. 4.8).

Figure 4.8. Lyrics of first A” section [1:42-2:27]. Bold type indicates rhymes, red arrows indicate phrase-level enjambment, blue arrows indicate sentence-level enjambment.

The B section differs from the A sections in musical content and lyrical focus. It consists of a single melodic motive, shown in Figure 4.9a, which repeats four times over a similar chord progression (Figure 4.9b). While the melodic motives in the A sections descend, the B motive is arch-shaped, rising to a peak in tension in each phrase and then descending again. The local apogee of the B section occurs in the third phrase, beginning “and then the furthermost shake” in Fig. 4.9b.

This phrase follows the same pattern of rising and falling as the previous phrases, but after 54 descending to G on the word “stake,” the melody leaps back up to C, finally descending the whole way to D at the end of the phrase. This deceptive descent gives special emphasis to the line uttered in this phrase: in B1, the narrator is “cleft…right down to (her) center.”

Figure 4.9a. Reduction of melodic motive of B section.

Figure 4.9b. First presentation of B section [2:27-2:50].

The new melodic shape presented in B is coupled with greater harmonic momentum and faster harmonic rhythm to give this section a greater sense of urgency. The chord progressions in the B section alternately seem to cadence on G minor and B-flat major, playing on the oscillation between these two chords that underlies A’ and A”, but providing F major as a kind of dominant that these other sections lack. Additionally, the harmonic rhythm speeds up drastically; in A”, the 55 chords change every two bars, while here, they frequently change every half note, and sometimes as often as every quarter note (Fig. 4.9b).

The B section has considerably more forward momentum than the A sections, even than A”, but to what end? Where does this energy lead? In this first B section, this energy seemingly leads nowhere; the lyrics describes the paralyzing and unspeakable terror of a nightmare. Just as the action seemingly reaches a peak when the narrator is “cleft…right down to (her) center,” the music winds back down to the slow harmonic and vocal rhythm of A’ at the beginning of the second strophe

(Figure 4.10). It is as if the climax cannot be reached because the protagonist suddenly wakes from her dream.50

While the first part of the song sees the narrator powerless to act on her own, a puppet in a puppet show, she claims her agency in the second part, first by gently protesting the actions of the addressee (“oh you ought not,” A’, Fig. 4.10) and later by acting out violently in an attempt to secure her freedom (“as I crash through the rafters, and the ropes and the pulleys trail after, and the holiest belfry burns sky-high,” A”, Fig. 4.10). The more active imagery in the second B section pushes the story forward: the fire spreads, the speaker’s partner cuts, the dove speaks. And so the music is spurred on, not to a climax, but rather to the contrasting C section.

50 This move is reminiscent of the dream described in section C2 of “Emily.” The narrator wakes and climax (arrival of the expected D section) is denied; instead, the music moves back to the A section at the start of the next strophe. 56

Figure 4.10. Lyrics of second A’, A”, and B sections [2:54-4:48]. Bold type indicates rhymes, red arrows indicate phrase-level enjambment, blue arrows indicate sentence-level enjambment.

The C section is marked as different from its beginning. After the conclusion of the last phrase of the B section, the harp accompaniment continues, but the sense of meter is drastically destabilized for around seven seconds (4:49-4:56). The harp accompaniment eventually settles into a compound meter, seemingly divided into a moderate 6/8 by a high, oscillating minor-third ostinato

(Figure 4.11). The vocal line is extremely free and sounds independent of the meter, but its contour traces the familiar path of the melody from the A, A’, and A” sections—from 5^ through 3^ and 2^, coming to rest on 1^ at the end of the phrase (Figure 4.12). This melodic contour is varied over the course of the section. As the lyrics grow in emotional intensity, the vocal register increases from a peak on G4 in the first line to a peak on D5 in the last two lines.

Figure 4.11. Harp ostinato in C section [4:57-6:10].

Figure 4.12. Melodic reductions of A/A’, A”, and C motives.

In the C section, the narrator describes what she wants to tell the addressee, but for some reason, has not. The question posed at the end of the first line, “Why the long face?”, becomes a refrain, repeated at the end of each line in this section. The words the speaker wants to tell her addressee are full of care, promising love until death and to do anything “just to lift your long face”

(Figure 4.13). These tender promises are somewhat at odds with the tenor of the interactions between the narrator and addressee in the second strophe: the addressee acts violently against the narrator, she begs them to stop, they taxidermy the “little white dove.” 58

The slow, metrically unstable, reverie-like music marks this section as an interlude or an aside, perhaps existing outside the broader narrative trajectory of the song. If this is the case, this shift in tone could be explained by the introduction of a different speaker, or a different addressee.

Perhaps the narrator is speaking to the little white dove, stuffed with sawdust and diamonds in the last line of the preceding B section. Her references to death—“cold clay,” “our bones they may break and our souls separate,” “the grip of the soil”—could allude to the dove’s fate. If the little dove, “made with love,” symbolizes the narrator’s dying relationship, it makes sense that the speaker would “swallow your sadness, and eat your cold clay just to lift your long face” (Fig. 4.13).

Another possible interpretation is that the dove—who spoke for the first time in the preceding B section, pleading, “hold me close,”—is the speaker in the C section, and is addressing the narrator. This is perhaps a more likely scenario, as the dramatically altered musical content and lyrical tone in the C section suggests a shift in narration. Indeed, the refrain-like repetition of the words “long face,” the descending vocal contour on these words, and the oscillating minor-third harp ostinato (Fig. 4.11) seem to evoke the repetitive, lilting call of a mourning dove. In this reading, the dove’s avowal to “take to the grave your precious long face” assumes an extra poignance, as we, the audience, know that the dove is already dead.

This invocation of bodily transcendence echoes the similarly metaphysical moments in

“Emily” and “Monkey and Bear,” in which the narrator believes that some sort of consciousness can exist outside of the bodily form. In “Emily,” these spiritual musings form the build-up to the song’s final climax, while in “Monkey and Bear,” the moment of transcendence embodies the song’s climax. This section functions quite differently here, as this transcendence is neither climactic nor certain: presented in the conditional tense, the narrator invokes death as a rhetorical move to demonstrate her love and steadfastness.

Figure 4.13. Lyrics of C section [4:48-6:12]. Bold type indicates rhymes, blue arrows indicate sentence-level enjambment.

The C section reverie is abruptly cut short by the return of the rolling harp accompaniment at the start of the third strophe. In this A’ section, the ship is caught in a terrible storm; the speaker and her partner pitch “pale-faced and grave,” and the speaker hears again the bell, which she believes tolls for her (Figure 4.14). This is the most explicit of several references throughout the song to metaphysical poet John Donne’s famous Meditation XVII:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.51

Just because the narrator believes the bell tolls for her does not mean she believes it foretells her impending death. Rather, the narrator acknowledges the interconnectedness of all life described in

Donne’s meditation—whether the bell warns of the death of her lover or a stranger or the little white dove, it diminishes her, because she is “involved in mankind.”

It is unclear what direction the story will take: will the boat crash? Will the relationship end?

The following A” abandons the puppet-show metaphor explored in the previous A” sections; our

51 John Donne, “Meditation XVII,” from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, http://isu.indstate.edu/ilnprof/ENG451/ISLAND/text.html

60 protagonist is a puppet no longer. The two iterations of A” in this third strophe present conflicting information about the fate of the speaker’s relationship: the use of the conditional tense in “I’d have walked you to the edge of the water” suggests a break-up, as does her vision that “what was yours and mine appears to me a sandcastle that the gibbering wave takes” and the image of a wave breaking in the last line (Fig. 4.14). But this conclusion is somewhat complicated by her assertion that “they will recognize all the lines of your face in the face of the daughter of the daughter of my daughter,” as well as her entreaty that her lover says her name “in the morning,” seemingly after the storm is over.

Figure 4.14. Lyrics of third A’, A”, and B sections [6:12-8:42]. Bold type indicates rhymes, red arrows indicate phrase-level enjambment, blue arrows indicate sentence-level enjambment.

The third B section continues to ramp up the energy, but still to an uncertain end. In the first two lines, the narrator repudiates a delicate origin story for herself, instead claiming a sort of 61 monstrosity; she is “all horns and thorns, sprung out fully formed, knock-kneed and upright.” The apogee of the B section accompanies the urgent entreaty, “So, enough of this terror, we deserve to know light and grow ever more lighter and lighter.” But it is still not clear to what the speaker is entreating her partner. She begs them to cast out the fear of the nightmares and the ocean voyage and the puppet show, but to what end? Separation? A new chapter of their relationship?

The last line of the B section, “You would have seen me through, but I could not undo that desire” spins out into the melismatic, rhythmically free B+ section, in which the only text is the word “desire” (Figure 4.15). The free flight of Newsom’s vocal melismas here recalls the first appearance of the dove in section A”1—“The little white dove, made with love, made with love, made with glue and a glove and some pliers swings a low sickle arc from its perch in the dark, settle down, settle down, my desire” (Fig. 4.8)—while the descending minor thirds in the melody echo the harp ostinato from the C section (Fig. 4.11, Fig. 4.15).

Figure 4.15. Melody, chords, and lyrics of B+ section [8:42-9:15]. Red annotations show falling minor-third motive from C section.

This B+ serves as the song’s musical apex, but is only lightly climactic. The music is barely texted, set only with the words “oh, desire.” The only real climactic feature of this section is

Newsom’s dramatically higher vocal register, which soars above the harp accompaniment. In parallel 62 to this ambiguous climax, the narrative of the song does not reach climax or resolution. The conclusion of the story only becomes clear to us upon the reiteration of the first A section. Our speaker repeats, over sparse block chords, the words of the opening: “From the top of the flight / of the wide, white stair, / through the rest of my life / do you wait for me there?” The fate of the relationship is unclear to the audience because it is also unclear to the speaker; the song ends, on an uncertain subdominant harmony, with a question.

Chapter 5 “Only Skin”

“Only Skin” is the longest and most labyrinthine song on Ys, at almost seventeen minutes.

In an interview with Pitchfork upon the release of Ys, Newsom said, “There were four very big things that happened in my life in this particular year, and so four of the songs are about these things. The fifth song, “Only Skin,” was an effort to talk about the connections between the events.”52 Appropriately, “Only Skin” features a dense network of interrelated images and themes: principal ones include the ocean, dreams, idyllic natural scenes, home, nighttime journeys, and death.

These images traverse the complicated form of the song, which is delineated by a variety of melodic motives, tonal areas, and meters (Figure 5.1).

“Only Skin” can be parsed into two basic parts. As shown in Fig. 5.1, Part 1 recurs after Part

2, giving the piece an overall ternary form, similar to “Sawdust and Diamonds.” Part 1 contains six basic sections, labeled A-F in Fig. 5.1, and following the basic form of ABCA-DEFD. Part 2 is made up of five distinct sections (labeled G-K in Fig. 5.1) which appear nowhere else in the song. The music transitions back into Part 1 with a reprise of the A section. In typical Newsomian fashion, the form is rounded, concluding with the same material it began with—after an instrumental interlude, a reprise of the F section precedes a new A section (Fig. 5.1). Newsom embeds changes of perspective and shifts in narrative setting within the formal grid of this song, obscuring what is real and what is a dream. This mirrors the psychological state of one of the characters, providing emotional potency to the song.

52 Brian Howe, “Joanna Newsom,” Pitchfork, November 20, 2006. https://pitchfork.com/features/interview/6488- joanna-newsom/. 64

Figure 5.1. Form chart of “Only Skin.” Brackets indicate larger parts.

The narrative of the song opens in medias res, or “in the middle of things:” “And there was a booming above you that night / black airplanes flew over the sea” (Figure 5.2). Beginning a work in medias res is a stylistic convention of epic poetry, signposting both the length of the work and the probable nonlinear narrative style that will follow.53 It is not immediately clear from this first A section who “you” refers to. Whitesell notes that second-person address can occur in three different speaking situations: a first-person subject can address another person (as Newsom does in “Emily” and “Sawdust and Diamonds”); the speaker can speak to themself in the second person; or the song

53 Claire McLeish discusses the opening in medias res in “According to the Hoarding of These Clues’: The Form- Functional Problem of Joanna Newsom’s ‘Only Skin,’” unpublished paper, McGill University, MUTH 541, 2014. 65 can describe the actions of a second-person focal character.54 It is not clear yet who the speaker is, what their relationship is to the second-person “you,” or where they stand in relation to the war-like scene that is unfolding before us.

Figure 5.2. Melody, chords, and lyrics of first A section [0:00-0:37]. Red annotations show phrase structure.

The swift downward contour of the melody in the A section seems to mirror the “retreat of the hairless and blind cavalry,” watched by the indeterminate “you.” In a similarly indeterminate way, the harmonic content of this section provides us with not quite enough information to ascertain the tonal center, as the chords oscillate between A minor and F major, often passing through G major along the way. Additionally, the section does not end where the listener might expect. A normative phrase structure would comprise two parallel 4-bar phrases ending at measure

8, on the words “squinted to see.” But the second phrase is extended for an extra two bars to clarify

54 Whitesell, The Music of Joni Mitchell, 54-5. 66 what it is that “you” sees: we learn that the airplanes are receding into the distance, and are provided with the monstrous, ominous war-like imagery of “hairless and blind cavalry” (Fig. 5.2).

The B section that follows is much more harmonically active and less stable than the A section, with chord changes roughly twice as often, nondiatonic harmonies, a wider vocabulary of chords, and a modally mixed tonal center of D minor, while the meter abruptly switches from a triple division of the beat to a duple division (Figure 5.3). This is a characteristic Newsomian trope: in all the songs we have seen thus far on Ys, the B section has contrasted with the A section through increased harmonic activity. In some cases, this has involved chromatic movement (“Emily”) or modally mixed chords (“Monkey and Bear”). The functions of the A and B sections here are especially closely parallel to those in “Emily,” the first track on the album (Chapter 2): while the A section serves a mainly expository function, the B section provides crucial information about the emotional states and relationships of the characters that will inform the rest of the song. In the first line of the B section, the narrator confirms what we already suspected from the A section: “you” is afraid; they freeze and pray on the beach as they watch the planes overhead (Fig. 5.3). The narrator also reveals herself in the line “my sleeping heart woke, and my waking heart spoke.” We learn that

“you” is neither the narrator herself nor a removed second-person focal character; rather, the song projects a dialogue between the speaker and another person.55

55 This is typical of Newsom’s second-person lyrics—we have seen this type of dialogue in “Emily” and “Sawdust and Diamonds” thus far. 67

Figure 5.3. Melody, chords, and lyrics of first B section [0:37-1:04].

What follows is a reiteration of the A and B sections with different lyrics and a more hopeful turn. The addressee can “run” and “sing,” for the airplanes are gone; they are “released from their hairless and blind cavalry” (Figure 5.4). The narrator is waking from slumber as you “runs” to her; she reveals that the ominous airplanes were a nightmare, a “small death.”56 After this line, we expect a return to another A section, since this is what happened earlier in the song. Instead, the B section is iterated again for another four lines, as the narrator assures the addressee that the beast of their dreams is dead and never coming back (Fig. 5.4).

56 Recall the similar instances of sections that are only later revealed to be dreams in “Emily” and “Sawdust and Diamonds.” 68

Figure 5.4. Lyrics of next A and B sections [1:04-2:16]. Bold type indicates rhymes, red arrows indicate phrase-level enjambment, blue arrows indicate sentence-level enjambment.

The C section that follows abruptly pivots from a modally mixed D minor tonal center to a much brighter harmonic area that suggests A major, D major, of F# minor.57 This bright harmonic change is met with an increase in energy: rhythmic density in the harp changes from eighth and sixteenth notes to constant sixteenth notes, the vocal register is suddenly higher, and the melodic contour changes to a dramatic downward gesture (Figure 5.5). Despite her assurances, our narrator still worries about her companion, so she goes in search of an herb to cure their fear. The homey images of the “swimming hole” and the riverside echo the narrator’s dream from the B section of

“Emily,” suggesting a close, caring, perhaps childhood relationship between the narrator and the addressee here.

57 While a mode shift from D minor to D major between sections would make sense, the chord progression and melody in the C section seems to suggest A major as a tonal center: in A, the chords would be vi—I—ii—IV, and the melody ^ ^ would descend from 3 to 5. It is difficult to hear the D major chord in m. 2 of this section as the tonal center, since it clashes with the prominent E in the melody. An F# minor hearing takes into account the metric placements of the harmonies—the chords on the downbeats are F# minor and B minor, i and iv in F# minor. 69

Figure 5.5. Melody, chords, and lyrics of first C section [2:16-2:41].

A strikingly chromatic chord on the word “here” in the antepenultimate measure pivots the music back to D minor, and the last two measures of the C section echo the melody and harmony of the end of the B section (Fig. 5.3, Fig. 5.5), providing a smooth and familiar transition into the next

A section that follows, back in the home tonic of A minor. As if to illustrate the “treacly” languorousness of summer, the tempo slows and the orchestra drops out, leaving just the harp to accompany the first two lines of this section.58 The narrator seems to grow distracted, her task of searching for the special flower seemingly abandoned as she is transfixed by the river.

Figure 5.6. Lyrics of third A section [2:41-3:14]. Bold type indicates rhymes, blue arrows indicate sentence-level enjambment.

58 This depiction of summertime slowness echoes the A3 section of “Emily,” the “hot, ungodly hours” that cause “ants” to “mop up their brows.” 70

After this A section, the meter shifts from a quadruple grouping to a triple grouping to mark the start of the D section (Figure 5.7). The D section is strikingly focal in its simplicity: the accompaniment thins to just a single harp chord plucked at the start of each measure, which serves to foreground Newsom’s voice. The rhythm of the vocal melody, which was frequently in eighth notes in the A section, slows to dotted quarters, quarters, and occasional eighth notes, with frequent rests between phrases. The melody is simple; each phrase is a variation of the same basic contour.

Each phrase features only diatonic harmonic movement by thirds. While this kind of progression also undergirded the C section in its movement from F#m to A and Bm to D (Fig. 5.5), here the parsimony extends through the entire phrase: A minor and C major, C major and E minor, and E minor and G major all share two common tones (Fig. 5.7). The imagery shifts from the river to the open sea, echoed by the expansion and stillness of the music. The language here seems to evoke a twisted sort of nursery rhyme in its simplicity; swaddled in seaweed, the addressee falls into a crib

(Fig. 5.7).

Figure 5.7. Melody, chords, and lyrics of first D section [3:14-3:54].

The tempo increases and the orchestra re-enters as the lyrics of the E section present the more active image of “rowing along, among the reeds, among the rushes” (Figure 5.8). The wide contour of the melody gives the section a sense of rocking, like a boat; our narrator has seemingly resumed her search.59 The chord progression in the first and third phrases establishes continuity with the previous section, as it traces the same parsimonious voice leading, but now beginning on D minor instead of A minor (Fig. 5.7, 5.8). The octave leap in the melody at “I heard your song before my heart had time to hush it” emphasizes the poignancy of this line, drawing us back into the intimate relationship between the narrator and her companion. The song the speaker describes is inescapable; like the smell of a ripe peach or a glowing ember, she is powerless to avoid the feelings that it evokes.

Figure 5.8. Melody, chords, and lyrics of first E section [3:54-4:25].

59 The journey through water to find a cure seems to recall the narrator’s journey in the second B section of “Emily:” “And row through the nighttime, so healthy, gone healthy all of a sudden, in search of a midwife who could help me, who could help me.” 72

The imagery of the fire is continued into the next F section, although the nature of the fire remains unclear: A cleansing fire? An internal fire of passion? A destructive but freeing fire, as in

“Sawdust and Diamonds?” Little is revealed in this section, which seems to function as an interlude.

This unresting, unfocused feeling is compounded by the very slow vocal rhythm, few and repetitive lyrics, metric instability, irregular phrase structure, textural reduction to just harp and voice, and simple C major harmonies (Figure 5.9).

Figure 5.9. Melody, chords, and lyrics of first F section [4:25-5:00].

Four measures of harp figuration at the end of the F section lead into another iteration of the D section. The first line of this section contains the only statement of the title in the song:

“Scrape your knee, it is only skin,” (Figure 5.10). This statement seems to be a non sequitur in relation to the section that came before it, especially considering that the narrative seemed to flow relatively cohesively through the sections up until this point. Given the in medias res opening of the song and the narrative implications following that, we could interpret this D section as existing outside the linear narrative of the song, perhaps as a flashback. The description of scraping one’s knee evokes 73 images of childhood, when outside play would lead to such small injuries—“it is only skin” could be a statement of comfort from an adult to a wounded child, emphasizing that the damage is only on the surface. This reading is further supported by the use of the word “son” as a form of direct address in the preceding F section (Fig. 5.9). While it seemed that the F section continued the fire imagery from the end of the E section, upon closer inspection it appears that “and when the fire moves away” is also a non sequitur, not continuing the same fire imagery, but rather expressing a new idea (Fig. 5.8, Fig. 5.9). In this way, it perhaps makes sense to view this F section and the subsequent

D section as existing outside the larger narrative, through the form of a flashback. This reading is supported by the dramatic textural contrast between these sections and the sections that come immediately before and after. While the F and D sections are set with just voice and harp, the preceding E section is densely orchestrated, with strings, clarinet, and accordion, and the accordion reappears at the beginning of the G section that follows. The relative textural repose of the quiet, thin, F and D sections suggests that they perhaps exist only in the mind, away from the hustle and bustle of life in the material world.

Figure 5.10. Lyrics of second D section [5:00-5:34]. Bold type indicates rhymes, blue arrows indicate sentence-level enjambment.

By contrast, the third and fourth lines of this D section seem to return us to the intimate

(and possibly romantic) plotline described in the E section (Fig. 5.8). The image of cutting hair and leaving it for the birds seems to evoke domestic bliss, but is likely an allusion to the biblical myth of

Samson and Delilah, giving a dark undertone to the relationship between the narrator and the addressee. 74

Thus concludes the first part of the song. Following the line “I am the happiest woman among all women” is another striking non sequitur, both musically and narratively (Figure 5.11). The music suddenly moves from the G major chord at the end of that line to a D-flat major harmony, a tritone away. The tempo slows drastically, and the melody that sets the four lines of text that comprise this section (Fig. 5.12) appears to be unmetered. The blissful reverie of the D section is interrupted by a stark return to reality—we abruptly return to the aquatic search that was abandoned after the E section in the previous strophe. The unmetered melody and comparatively static accompaniment of the G section are reminiscent of an operatic recitative. It provides a crucial function, reorienting the plot for the action that will follow.

Figure 5.11. Transition from the end of second D to the beginning of G [5:24-5:36].

Figure 5.12. Lyrics of G section [5:34-6:04]. Bold type indicates rhymes.

The H section that follows is a single-cell section, outlining a cyclic, pentatonic melody over an oscillation of F minor and D-flat major chords (Figure 5.13). The section begins slowly, with just harp, voice, and a single note held in the horn section of the orchestra, literally “holding on” from the previous G section. For the first twelve lines of the section, the narrator seemingly continues her 75 journey to find help for her addressee (Figure 5.14). In lines 6-8, she suggests a possible sexual relationship between them, as “the common folk condemn what it is I do to you to keep you warm, being a woman, being a woman” (Fig. 5.14). The tempo begins to pick up in lines 9-12, as we hear the first true description of “you” since they woke from their dream in the second B section—the speaker describes them endlessly climbing up a mountain, eternally unsatisfied, locked in a Sisyphean struggle with existence that reads to me as a metaphor for mental illness or psychic anguish. Her efforts to console them are futile.

Figure 5.13. Melody, chords, and lyrics of first phrase of H section [6:04-6:14].

Figure 5.14. Lyrics of H section [6:04-7:35]. Bold type indicates rhymes, alliteration, and assonance, red arrows indicate phrase-level enjambment, blue arrows indicate sentence-level enjambment. 76

The narrator’s sense of futility is intensified by the continually increasing tempo and expanding orchestration, starting in line 13 (Fig. 5.14). The broken blossoms seem to reference the

“bitter herb” that “blooms but one day a year” that our narrator set out to find in the C section—we learn that her journey to save her loved one has reached a fruitless end. Her reverie of spiders may seem like a non sequitur, but may actually be a retelling of the Sisyphean myth from the previous lines.

But while the itsy, bitsy spider goes up the spout again, like Sisyphus, these spiders are “gone now, dead and done;” perhaps a harbinger of things to come for the addressee. In the last line of the H section, the speaker echoes line 8, but this time as an exhortation to herself: “be a woman, be a woman.” In line 8, “being a woman” meant trying to keep her loved one warm. She repeats this line to herself as a sort of anthem, spurring her on to continue the emotional work of trying to save her companion.

In the next section, the speaker shifts and begins referring to herself as “we,” still addressing a mysterious “you” (Figure 5.15). This begs the question, who is the speaker positioning herself with? And is the “you” the same person as before? The second line of this I section, “We weren’t afraid cuz we know what you are and you know that we know what you are,” seems to indicate that

“you” no longer refers to the narrator’s loved one, but rather to some ominous presence, described in the next two lines as “awful atoll, oh incalculable indiscreetness and sorrow.” I read these last two lines of the I section as referring to the speaker’s loved one’s depression, first alluded to as a “dark dream” in the second B section, and then described more clearly in the H section immediately prior:

“awful atoll” refers to the painfully isolating nature of mental illness; like a “sibyl sea-cow,” depression is slow-moving and clumsy (“toddle and roll”), and yet has ominously prophetic potential. The music in this section is appropriately frantic; the vocal rhythm increases from the mixed quarters and eighths in the H section (Fig. 5.13) to mostly eighth notes, sometimes syncopated against a fast 12/8 meter (Fig 5.15). The orchestration grows suddenly more dramatic, 77 changing from harp accompaniment and violin doubling the vocal line in the H section to a thrumming bass line and swirling violin and viola countermelody in the I section.

Figure 5.15. Melody, chords, and lyrics of I section [7:35-8:09]. Colored brackets indicate similar rhymes.

The vocal rhythm slows drastically for the very brief J section, as the object of the narrator’s address seems to switch back to their loved one (Figure 5.16). The start of the first line of the K section is harmonically marked by an arrival on an F major chord—strikingly bright surrounded by the flatted landscape of the entire second strophe thus far (Figure 5.17). This harmonic change marks a turning point in the text, as Newsom’s poetically descriptive language gives way to the 78 bluntly colloquial statement of “that’s an awfully real gun” (Fig. 5.16). Newsom’s vocal timbre changes dramatically to call attention to the importance of the line; though the melody begins just a whole step below the end of the previous line, Newsom alters her voice from soft and flutey to husky and shaking, betraying the narrator’s fear (Fig. 5.17), We hear the narrator plead with her addressee: “stay with me for awhile,” “follow me, my sweetest friend,” and finally, “lay it down, nice and slow, there is nowhere to go, save up” (Fig. 5.16).

Figure 5.16. Lyrics of J, K, and A’ sections [8:09-9:52]. Bold type indicates rhymes, red arrows indicate phrase-level enjambment, blue arrows indicate sentence-level enjambment.

Figure 5.17. Transition from end of J to beginning of K [8:21-8:34].

The section I have designated A’ provides an ambiguous restatement of the A section from the beginning of the song, which should strongly signal the return of Part 1 after the contrasting Part 79

2. But this A’ section is altered in significant ways that obscure its recapitulatory formal function, eliding the boundary between Part 2 and Part 1. All previous iterations of A are five lines long, but this section contains seven lines. The second line is the only one set to a motive that doesn’t appear in the A section (Figure 5.18)—this seems to indicate that the last five lines form the “true” A section. But this assumption is challenged by both the poetic syntax and the orchestration of the section. The transition between lines 2 and 3 contains a disruptive sentence-level enjambment: the syntactic unit “there is nowhere to go save up, up where the light…” is split between the two lines, undermining the sense that line 3 signals the beginning of a new section (Fig. 5.16). Additionally, the same orchestral gestures continue unbroken through lines 1-4. Line 5, which is also set to the beginning motive of the A section, is marked by a much sparser orchestration and the addition of a solo fiddle. However, lines 4-5 feature a parallel sentence-level enjambment to lines 3-4: a prepositional phrase (“back on the patio”) is split between two lines by the repetition of the preposition (“back”) at the end of the previous line and the beginning of the following line, undermining the sense that line 5 begins a new section.

Figure 5.18. Melody and harmony of lines 1-3 of A’ section [8:57-9:23]. Red annotations show beginning of A motive and new material.

These textual and textural ambiguities obscure the boundary between the end of the second strophe and the beginning of the third strophe, as there is no clear recapitulation of the A section that begins the song. This recalls the nonlinear narrative structure foreshadowed by the in medias res opening line, and realized through the time jumps throughout the poem. Additionally, the A’ section contains a thematic rounding that calls into question both the reliability of the narrator and the nature of the narrative. The “light weaving in a drunk dream” (Fig. 5.16) of A’ recalls the “dark dream” of the second B section (Fig. 5.4), which revealed that the booming, black airplanes of the opening scene only existed in a dream. “My baby out back, back on the patio watching the bats bring night in” seems to be located in a present time and place, while “estuaries wend endlessly toward seashores,” recalling our narrator’s earlier journey from the river to the sea, is occurring

“elsewhere” (Fig. 5.16). Did that journey really occur, or was it just in the mind of our narrator?

Indeed, the song seems to continue in the narrator’s home, albeit in the past, as she describes a bird colliding with a window (Figure 5.19). The vocal texture changes here dramatically, as the second half of each line of the B section—save for lines 5 and 7—is set against a chorus of multitracked backing vocals, giving the section a fantastic, otherworldly feel. This is not our first encounter with the motif of a distraught bird on Ys: in “Sawdust and Diamonds,” a taxidermied 81 dove represented, in turns, the narrator herself, as well as her doomed relationship. The dying bird is also a powerful motif in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening—a striking parallel considering the prevalence of women-entering-water imagery on Ys.60 In The Awakening, a bird with a broken wing descends to its death in the ocean, foreshadowing the drowning by suicide of the novel’s protagonist. It is not difficult to read the parable in these B and C sections as a dramatic retelling of what occurred between the narrator and her addressee earlier in the song (Figure 5.19). Just as her loved one came to her in their terror, the small bird appears at her home, in need of her help. She comforts her loved one by likening their fear to “a toothless hound-dog,” and tells the bird that she will keep it safe from dogs that would harm it. The beginning of the C section, in both instances, coincides with decisive action by the narrator: in the first C section, she takes her fishing pole and goes on a journey; in the second C, she takes the bird and sets off through the woods.

60 I discuss this parallel at length in Chapter 3: “Monkey and Bear.” 82

Figure 5.19. Lyrics of second B and C sections [9:52-11:24]. Bold type indicates rhymes, red arrows indicate phrase-level enjambment, blue arrows indicate sentence-level enjambment, brackets indicate motivic partitioning.

The second C section (C2), containing eight lines of text, is twice as long as the first C section (C1), which contains four lines of text. The C1 section contains three main melodic motives

(Fig. 5.5); I have labeled them x, y, and z in Fig. 5.19. The first four lines of C2 are set to motive x; lines 5 and 6 are set to motives y and z respectively, as are lines 7 and 8. But motives y and z together modulate from A major to D minor (Figure 5.20). This makes the transition from motive z in line 6, which is in D minor, back to the A major of motive y in line 7, quite jarring (Fig. 5.20).

This mirrors a jarring transition in the lyrics: lines 7 and 8 call into question the veracity of the tale the narrator told us in B2 and C2 (Fig. 5.19). Was this entire episode taking place in the mind of the 83 narrator to help her process her friend’s suicide attempt? Perhaps the speaker imagined that she was able to save the bird, despite not being able to save her friend. In A’, she tried to convince them that

“there is nowhere to go, save up” (Fig. 5.16); in B2 and C2, she takes the bird to a “higher place,” and she survives. But unfortunately, in the real world, “dogs still run roughly ‘round little tufts of finch down” (Fig. 5.19).

Figure 5.20. Melody and chords for lines 5-8 of second C section [10:56-11:24].

The A section that follows begins in medias res, shifting suddenly from the parable of the injured bird to a journey through ruins with a lover (Figure 5.21). As in “Emily,” botanical plenty is portrayed in light of its inevitable decay, “thundering blissful towards death” (Fig. 5.21). The beginning of the subsequent D section is marked by a decrease in energy and simplicity of lyrics, as its counterpart was in Part 1 (Fig. 5.7). This section seems to describe the narrator’s inability to help her friend: antiquated uses of both “shuck” and “jive” mean something akin to “to speak of 84 inconsequential things” or to avoid important subjects;61 when they cried, she “was gone.”

Newsom’s voice shakes uncharacteristically as she delivers these lines, an expression of the deep emotion that underlies them.

Figure 5.21. Lyrics of A, D, E, and F sections in Part 2 [11:24-13:38]. Bold type indicates rhymes, blue arrows indicate sentence-level enjambment.

The following E section revives images from earlier in the song. Fire was first referenced in the second B section in Part 1, when the narrator assured “you” that the monster from their dreams was not real: “the firebreather is beneath the clover” (Fig. 5.4). While the speaker assured her friend that “you caught some small death when you were sleepwalking. It was a dark dream, darling it’s over,” the reference to the “endless sleeper” in this second E section further calls that narrative into question (Fig. 5.21). It would seem that the addressee’s trials culminated not in the “small death” of

61 According to Merriam-Webster, “shuck” can mean “something of little value,” while “jive” can mean “to talk in a foolish, deceptive, or unserious way.” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shuck; https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/jive#other-words. According to Wikipedia, the phrase “shuck and jive” has significant racial overtones, originating in African-American culture to describe the practice of “joking and acting evasively” to avoid punishment from a white authority figure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuckin%27_and_jivin%27 85 a nightmare, but rather in the “endless sleep” of death, as they “sleep through the things that couldn’t have been if you hadn’t have been” (Fig. 5.21).

The increased activity of the music of E (Fig. 5.8) is further intensified by the addition of multi-tracked vocals, driving the song towards a climax. The energy temporarily dips at the beginning of F, as the backing vocals and orchestra recede, foregrounding Newsom’s voice and harp. But the multitracking returns in the third line of F, as Newsom croons a delicate descant over her own melody line, seemingly asking herself “Why would you say that I was the last one?” (Fig.

5.21). Four bars of instrumental interlude link F to the following section: constantly articulated quarter notes in the harp and strings drive towards the arrival on the downbeat of the D’ section.

Several musical features are altered in this presentation of the D material to give it a climactic function. While previous D sections were each four lines long, D’ stretches on for 16 lines (Figure

5.23). The vocal melody is altered; while the first four measures (odd-numbered lines of text) remain the same as in previous D sections, the last four measures (even-numbered lines of text) are an octave higher, in Newsom’s dramatic head-voice register (Figure 5.22). Odd-numbered lines of text feature a male bass voice on background vocals,62 while even-numbered lines feature Newsom’s multi-tracked vocals. The section gradually increases in tempo over its 16 lines, starting at dotted quarter note = 110, but reaching mm = 130 by its end. The orchestration is dense, with active countermelodies in the strings and woodwinds. The addition of banjo and mandolin picking give the section a folksy but also somewhat macabre feeling.

62 The voice of Newsom’s then-partner, alternative folk singer Bill Callahan. 86

Figure 5.22. Melody, chords, and lyrics of first two lines of D’ [13:39-13:51].

Figure 5.23. Lyrics of D’ section [13:38-15:28]. Bold type indicates rhymes.

The lyrics of this section paint an allegorical picture of death and rebirth. In the first E section, the speaker compared her loved one to the “smell of a stonefruit being cut and being opened” (Fig. 5.8). Now it appears all that is left is the cherry stone. Buried in the ground, the stone blossoms into a tree, which the addressee then uses to make a small toy house for the narrator.

Perhaps, like the cherry stone, the addressee’s fate is not quite sealed yet.

Similarly to in “Sawdust and Diamonds,” the narrator invokes death and bodily transcendence to signify her devotion to her loved one. Though she starves, freezes, crosses the desert, and even dies, her love will remain true. But while the metaphysical turn in “Sawdust and 87

Diamonds” occurred at a moment of repose, here the narrator’s musings occur at the point of musical climax, as in “Monkey and Bear.”

The song ends in a rounded way, similarly to “Monkey and Bear” and “Sawdust and

Diamonds” from earlier on the album. After an instrumental interlude, the F section is restated, followed by another A section (Figure 5.24). The line “if the love of a woman or two, dear, couldn’t move you to such heights” recalls the narrator’s plea to the addressee from the A’ section: “there is nowhere to go, save up” (Fig. 5.16). While the narrator did everything she could—“what it is I do to you to keep you warm, be a woman, be a woman” (Fig. 5.14)—she could not cure her loved one’s depression.

Figure 5.24. Lyrics of final A section [16:04-16:53]. Bold type indicates rhymes, red arrows indicate phrase-level enjambment, blue arrows indicate sentence-level enjambment.

While the larger form of the piece clearly articulates a ternary form, the return of the beginning of Part 1 is obscured by motivic and textual incongruities in the A’ section (Fig. 5.18).

Notably, this section—along with sections J and K—participates in the song’s focal narrative event, the addressee’s suicide attempt (Figure 5.25). There are multiple points within the song where the present reality is revealed to be a dream or a fiction—each of these can be traced back to the suicide attempt (Figure 5.25). These revelatory moments call prior narrative givens into question, challenging the listener’s sense of what is real and what is allegorical. They can be read as our narrator’s struggle to make sense of such a traumatic experience, culminating in the obscured formal structure of the piece. 88

The first of these shifts of reality occurs in the second B section in Part 1, when the narrator dismisses the addressee’s inner turmoil as only a nightmare, from which they have just woken up. By the H section in Part 2, the narrator has realized that the addressee’s struggle with life is all too real and seemingly inescapable, a fact that culminates in the addressee’s suicide attempt in sections J, K, and A’. At the end of the C section in Part 2, the bird parable is revealed as a fiction, calling into question whether or not the addressee actually survived their suicide attempt and, perhaps, what it means to survive such an event in world where “dogs still run roughly round little tufts of finch down.” Finally, the resurrection of the cherry pit in the D’ section leads us to believe that the addressee has in fact survived, which is confirmed by the narrator’s pledge of fidelity in the final A section (Fig. 5.25).

Figure 5.25. Formal layout of “Only Skin.” Orange brackets indicate larger sections, blue brackets indicate significant narrative events and shifts in reality.

Moreover, for the first time on the album, the narrative and musical climaxes do not line up, but rather occur at different parts of the song. The narrative climax falls at the boundary between

Part 2 and Part 1’, in the K and A’ sections (Figs. 5.16, 5.17), when the gun is revealed and it becomes clear that the second person character is attempting suicide. But the musical climax arrives in the D’ section, towards the end of Part 3 with the cherry tree allegory (Figs. 5.22, 5.23). While this section recycles the melody and harmony of previous D sections, the musical material is made climactic through the addition of backing vocals, more complex orchestration, a higher vocal register, and increased tempo throughout the section. This climactic mismatch further contributes to the song’s formal ambiguity—the narrative climax emphasizes the recapitulation of Part 1, while the musical climax, as in previous tracks, occurs closer to the song’s conclusion.

The formal and narrative obfuscation is well-suited to the thematic content of the song: the trajectory of mental illness is rarely linear, disrupting the lives of everyone it touches. In a broader sense, in this piece Newsom undertakes a narrative challenge that is not present in the other songs on Ys: that of describing and representing another person’s emotional experience. While in “Monkey and Bear,” “Sawdust and Diamonds,” and, as we will soon see, “Cosmia,” the narrators distance themselves from their own subjectivity through the employment of anthropomorphic animals, in

“Only Skin” the narrator draws near to another person, seeking to understand and remediate their experience. As such, her narrative is necessarily flawed; she makes assumptions that later turn out to be untrue, or only partially true, due to her limited perspective. In so doing, Newsom explores the human experience of loving another person that you can never truly know.

Chapter 6 “Cosmia”

“Cosmia” is the fifth and final track on Newsom’s Ys. At 7:18, it is the shortest song on the album. Cosmia refers to the genus of one of the most ubiquitous species of moths in North America, the American dun-bar moth (Cosmia calami, Figure 6.1). The imagery of the moth participates in the theme of nighttime present throughout the album: in “Emily,” the narrator’s memories occurred at night, and she relives them in her dreams; nighttime serves as the backdrop for menacing nightmares in “Sawdust and Diamonds” and “Only Skin;” and in “Emily,” “Monkey and Bear,” and “Only

Skin,” nighttime is the backdrop for a transformative journey. In “Emily,” the narrator associates nighttime with her sister and the tender memories she shares with her. But in the following three tracks—“Monkey and Bear,” “Sawdust and Diamonds,” and “Only Skin,”—night is presented as a site of terrible power and transformative potential—something to be feared, but also cautiously embraced. The moth in “Cosmia” embodies this ambivalence; she is nocturnal, living the bulk of her life in the night, but is constantly searching for light as a way out of the darkness.

Figure 6.1. American dun-bar moth, Cosmia calami.63

63 Marcie O’Connor, “Prairie Haven: Native Habitat Restoration in Western Wisconsin,” https://www.prairiehaven.com/?page_id=14962 91

The typical moth behavior or circling around a lantern is mirrored by the loosely palindromic ternary form of the song. Part 1 comprises section A, its refrain, A+, and sections B and C, and is followed by the contrasting Part 2, which contains sections D and E. Following Part 2 is Part 1’, a reprise of Part 1 in which Part 1’s material is presented in a rotation—B and C first, followed by A and A+ (Figure 6.2). The largely symmetrical shape of the song recalls “Only Skin” and, to some extent, “Sawdust and Diamonds.”

Figure 6.2. Form chart of “Cosmia.” Orange brackets indicate larger parts.

The song opens with a simple harp ostinato, prolonging a G maj#11 harmony (Figure 6.3).

The cyclic contour of the ostinato—descending from C#5 to D4, and then back up to C#5—also seems to mirror the circles a moth traces around a lantern. The first A section takes a very simple, single-cell format as its structure. The vocal melody arpeggiates the (apparent) tonic triad of B minor at a slow rhythm: there are only four lines of text in this section, which lasts nearly a minute.

Between each line of text, the harp ostinato continues for two measures, giving the section a sparse, stretched-out feel (Fig. 6.3).

Figure 6.3. Vocal melody and harp accompaniment of first phrase of A1 section [0:11-0:23].

It is immediately clear from these four lines of text that the narrator is an active participant in the story, and that her addressee, “you,” refers to another person.64 She sees “you” eat, she hears

“her” call, she is surrounding by a menacing cloud of moths (Figure 6.4). In the third line, the narrator introduces a third character into the story: “she” calls to the speaker, seemingly from afar

(Fig. 6.4).

Figure 6.4. Lyrics of A1 section [0:00-0:57]. Bold type indicates rhymes, blue arrows indicate sentence-level enjambments.

The harp ostinato continues for the next two lines of text, a refrain which repeats the words,

“And I miss your precious heart,” establishing an emotional connection between the narrator and

“you” (Figure 6.5). The vocal melody is much more active and wide-ranging than in the A section. It begins a major ninth higher than the last note of the A-section melody, in a much brighter part of

64 Rather than either of the two other possibilities Whitesell posits, it is clear that the speaker is not addressing herself in the second person, since she refers to herself in the third person. It is also clear that “you” is not a second-person focal character, since the narrator is also an active participant in the story. 93

Newsom’s range. The vocal rhythm is much faster than in the A section—it seems to get stuck on the oscillating C#-A sixteenth-eighth note pattern in the first measure (Fig. 6.5). These features combine to make the A+ section more marked than the preceding A section.

Figure 6.5. Vocal melody and harp accompaniment of A+1 section [0:57-1:09].

The following B section departs from the harmonic ostinato that has underlaid the song thus far, switching to a more active harmonic rhythm (Figure 6.6). The lyrics of this section repeat once, as in the A+ section, which is notable because Newsom’s songs rarely contain any lyrical repetition, let alone in two sections immediately following one another. While the A+ section revealed that the narrator and the addressee had a close personal relationship, but for some reason do not anymore, the B1 section seemingly does not reveal anything new about the plot or the characters. The dried rose petals and undereye circles suggest old age or great weariness, perhaps even death.

Figure 6.6. Vocal melody and chords of B1 section [1:08-1:27].

In the following C section, the tonal center pivots from B minor to its relative, D major, and the harmonic rhythm becomes more active, usually changing on every quarter-note beat. Both the music and the lyrics acquire a sort of folksy flavor; musically this is underscored by the pentatonic melody and plagal cadences from G to D (Figure 6.7). The lyrical evocation of “lonely nights down by the river” paints a traditionally folksy picture of lonesome rural life. This line also recalls the narrator’s nights by the river with her sister in “Emily,” giving the lines a sort of homey feel, highlighted by the direct address to “my little darlin’” (Fig. 6.7). But the regretful concluding line “I couldn’t keep the night from coming in” ends the couplet on an ominous tone, undermining the idyllic nature of the section.

Figure 6.7. Vocal melody and chords of first half of C1 section [1:27-1:53].

After its first presentation, the C section immediately repeats with only minimal changes to the lyrics (Figure 6.8). This repetition, coupled with the increased harmonic activity, strong cadences, soaring, singable melody, and images of folk life make this section extremely focal, perhaps even chorus-like. But this section’s significance remains to be seen: who brings the narrator bread and water? Who does she address as her “little darlin’”? What does the night symbolize? To answer these questions, we must move forward. 95

Figure 6.8. Lyrics of C section. Bold type indicates rhymes, red arrows indicate strongly disruptive phrase-level enjambment, blue arrows indicate weakly disruptive sentence-level enjambments.

After the end of the C section, an ostinato enters in the harp right hand, which serves to destabilize the meter for the entirety of the D section that follows. When the harp ostinato first

4 enters, it seems to be playing sixteenth notes, still in the 4 meter of the C section (Figure 6.9). But after three beats of this, the violin figuration begins to project a subdivision of three, rather than four (Fig. 6.9, measure 2). The introduction of a suspended cymbal on the downbeats of measures, beginning in m. 3 of this section, marks them as such, outlining a clear 12/8 meter.

Figure 6.9. Harp and violin, instrumental transition between C and D sections [2:10-2:24]. Blue annotations show grouping dissonance between harp and violin.

The instability of this grouping dissonance is exacerbated by the melodic contours of the harp and violin, which alternately move in similar or parallel and contrary motion. These features continue for the duration of the D section, giving it a dreamlike, unstable feel that matches the repeated line in the lyrics, “I will sleep for the rest of my days” (Figure 6.10).65 When Newsom’s voice enters, she supports the metric groupings of three articulated in the violins and her left hand on harp, while her harp right hand continues to play the dissonant quadruple groupings of the ostinato (Fig. 6.10). The dreamlike, surreal nature of this section is underscored by the extremely distant harmonic relations between chords. Measures alternate between B minor and Bb major 7th harmonies—this distinctive semitonal movement is similar to a SLIDE transformation between triads. Because of this, there is no clear tonal center for ~30 seconds of music, from 2:10-2:40, until the appearance of an F major chord, in measure 5 of Fig. 6.10.

65 I borrow the term “grouping dissonance” from Harold Krebs (1999), who conceives of this type of metric dissonance as “the association of at least two interpretive layers (of pulses) whose cardinalities are different and are not multiples/ factors of each other.” Since, in this instance, 3 and 4 have a common multiple of 12, these dissonant groupings align at the start of each measure of 12/8. 97

Figure 6.10. Vocal melody, chords, and harp ostinato of D section [2:24-3:15]. Red annotations show SLIDE transformations between chords, blue annotations show grouping dissonance between vocal melody and harp ostinato.

The start of the E section is marked by syncopated attacks by a high-pitched, wooden, non- resonant percussion instrument. The music is suddenly much faster, and returns to the duple

4 divisions of a 4 meter (Figure 6.11). The question “Why’ve you gone away?” is suddenly more urgent, more accusatory, than it was in the preceding D section, due to the increased tempo of the music, the shift from F major to the parallel key of F minor, and the change in harp texture to broken octaves and wider intervals. 98

Figure 6.11. Vocal melody and chords of E section [3:16-3:43].

The next section, B2, is marked by the sudden return of B minor, a striking tritone away from the F minor tonal center of the E section. While the music of the B section returns, the lyrics from B1 do not. Rather, the narrator continues to directly address “you,” delivering the ambivalent command, “Don’t come near me, don’t go missing,” and addressing Cosmia directly for the first time, as she begs her for help (Figure 6.12). While B1 was accompanied by high orchestral strings, low orchestral strings highlight the harp and voice in B2, giving the section a more ominous, urgent feel.

Figure 6.12. Lyrics of B2 section [3:43-3:58]. Bold type indicates rhymes, blue arrows indicate weak sentence-level enjambments.

As expected, the C section follows the B section, providing a brief major-key respite from the gloom of its minor surroundings. The lyrics are the same as in the first presentation of the C section (Fig. 6.8), but this time, they participate in a trans-sectional march towards darkness. In section B2, the narrator pleads with Cosmia in the “lissome light of evening;” in C2, she “cannot keep the night from coming in;” and in the following A2 section, nighttime has fully fallen, as the 99 moths circle the porch light (Figure 6.13). The orchestration cuts out at the beginning of the A2 section, revealing the harp ostinato from the beginning of the song (Fig. 6.3). This A section seems starkly slow and cautious—a consequence of its rotated formal placement, now following the B and

C sections rather than preceding them.

Figure 6.13. Lyrics of A2 section [4:42-5:35]. Bold type indicates rhymes.

After the A section, the harp ostinato continues, but the melody changes to become considerably more restless. While the melody of A simply arpeggiates the tonic B-minor triad (Fig.

6.3), the melody in this A’ section dwells mostly on the 7ths, 9ths, and 11ths of the underlying chords, giving the section a sort of dissonant crunch (Figure 6.14). Additionally, while the A sections are all made up of four phrases of four measures each, the last phrase in A’ is truncated, leading directly into the following A+ section two measures early (Fig. 6.14). This section provides information that is crucial to the narrative of the story: the moth flies away, attracted to the moonlight. The invocation of “true light” and “prayer” in the third line of this section suggests that maybe the moth’s journey through the night is a metaphor for the afterlife. But the restless music of this section points towards the section that follows. The startlingly colloquial direct address of “Will you call me when you get there?” grabs our attention as the phrase ends two measures early, barreling directly into the A+ section.

100

Figure 6.14. Vocal melody and chords of A’ section [5:35-6:12]. Blue annotations show phrase rhythm—the last phrase is truncated, only two measures long.

The start of the next section is marked by suddenly dense orchestration, as the lyrics and melody from the prior A+ section return (Figure 6.15). After the reiteration of the original four measures of the A+ section, the music enters a climactic, disorienting, metrically destabilized section, where the voice repeats the words “and miss” eight times. Each repetition of “and miss” forms a motivic cell three eighth notes long, beginning with the sixteenth rest before the word “and”

(Fig. 6.15, see orange bracket). The cell cycles through the different metric positions it can occupy, beginning on each eighth-note subdivision, but ending its repetitions just before it returns to its starting position on the downbeat (Fig. 6.15, blue numbers).66 Each instance of the word “miss” receives a phenomenal accent from a loud attack in the violins. Since these attacks occur in a different metric position each time—for instance, beginning on beat 2, then the “and” of beat 3— and drown out the sound of the harp ostinato, the meter becomes extremely destabilized in this

66 The rhythmic cell is three 8th-notes long, and each measure contains eight possible metric positions at which it could begin. Since three and eight are coprime—that is, have a common multiple of 24—this cycle will achieve closure after 24 8th-note beats. For more information, see Richard Cohn, “A Platonic Model of Funky Rhythms,” (Music Theory Online 22, no. 2, June 2016). https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.16.22.2/mto.16.22.2.cohn.php. 101 section, and each iteration of the “and miss” cell seems to occupy a quasi-metrical status. In the last measure of this repetition, the harp texture changes from arpeggios to block chords on each eighth note beat, with the left hand articulating beats 1 and 3, which helps to demystify the meter. The narrator speaks two more lines of text, entreating Cosmia to “release your precious heart / to its feast for precious hearts.” The harp chords continue for a few more bars before coming to rest on a

Bm9 chord at the end of the song.

Figure 6.15. Melody, chords, harp ostinato, and select violin attacks of A+ section [6:13-7:00]. Orange brackets shows repeating rhythmic cell, numbers above brackets indicate metric position in which the cell begins (1 = first 8th note of measure, 4 = fourth 8th note of measure, etc.).

102

While this A+ section clearly serves a climactic function, it does not seem to serve a concluding function, despite its temporal placement at the end of the song. The vocal line does not achieve melodic closure, decaying from the last line of text into a series of fragmented vocables. The harp accompaniment achieves even less closure: the change to block chords in the harp in the last minute of the song represents a severe departure from the texture of the rest of the song, and indeed from the rest of the album. Nowhere else on the album does the harp play repeating successions of block chords, let alone so starkly and percussively. The last several measures of the harp part seem to ramp up the energy before ending abruptly.

What does this sudden change at the end mean for the narrative of the song? To my ear, it is hugely significant that we are ending in a different place than we started, and in an unexpected place.

At the beginning of the song, the narrator was afraid of the moths: “moths surround me, thought they’d drown me.” But by the end of the song, she has become one with them: “beneath the porch light we’ve all been circling / beat our dust hearts, singe our flour wings.” The narrator’s approach to Cosmia herself also ends in a different place than is expected. While at the beginning, she misses her terribly, and then later begs, “don’t come near me, don’t go missing,” it is later revealed that she left because she saw “true light,” and the narrator changes her tone to one of acceptance: “will you call me when you get there?” But Cosmia has not gotten there yet, and the narrator has not yet heard from her. The story is not over, as the abrupt musical ending reveals.

103

Chapter 7 Conclusions

In the five songs on Ys, Newsom employs a variety of formal structures, including multi-part strophic, terminally climactic, and large ternary forms. In this chapter, I compare and contrast the strategies she uses for building tension and achieving climax within these formal structures, and investigate the ways that musical climax may coincide with, oppose, or undermine narrative climax. I conclude by returning to the theoretical framing of my introduction, and suggesting avenues for future research.

“Emily” is a multi-part strophic form, as the larger supersection containing sections A, B, C, and D is repeated over the course of the song. After the initial presentation of the D section in

Strophe 1, tension grows through the denial of this climactic section in Strophe 2. In Strophe 3, the arrival of the D section is afforded extra power through the omission of the C section that is expected to precede it, as well as through its presentation in a higher register (Figure 7.1). The climactic D section is the last major musical and narrative event of the piece, which then concludes with a short instrumental outro. As “Emily” is expressed in the lyric mode and occurs largely through memories, the poignant D section is also able to serve as a narrative climax, as it contains an emotional poem the narrator wrote for her sister.

Figure 7.1. Form chart of “Emily.” Orange brackets show larger strophes, blue arrow indicates musical and narrative climax. 104

By contrast, “Monkey and Bear” presents a straightforwardly linear narrative. As a result, its narrative climax is not achieved through repetition of an emotionally focal section, as in “Emily,” but rather through the culmination of a character’s transformation in the E and F sections in the second part of the song. While in “Emily,” energy was built from the denial and eventual realization of expectations, in “Monkey and Bear,” the E and F sections represent a musical departure from the rest of the song, and energy is built through the repetition of the same musical phrase many times with increasing intensity. After this musical departure, the song ends in a rounded way, with a chilling quotation from the C section that calls into question the nature of both slavery and freedom as they are presented in the narrative (Figure 7.2).

Figure 7.2. Form chart of “Monkey and Bear.” Orange brackets indicate larger strophes, blue bracket indicates musical and narrative climax.

Newsom’s most masterful approach to form is in her differing treatment of the large ternary forms in the last three songs on the album, “Sawdust and Diamonds,” “Only Skin,” and “Cosmia.”

In “Sawdust and Diamonds,” a small amount of motivic material forms the basis of the A, A’, A”, and C sections, although it is varied extensively in each presentation. The B section contains more dramatic melodic and harmonic movement, and becomes focal for that reason. Indeed, the last line 105 of the last B section is spun out into the B+ section towards the end of the song, which is made climactic through its soaring, melismatic vocal melody. The song ends as it began, with an exact repetition of the initial A section (Figure 7.3). No narrative climax resolution is reached; rather, the story continues on, spurred by the final question and underscored by the song’s rotated form.

Figure 7.3. Form chart of “Sawdust and Diamonds.” Orange brackets indicate larger strophes, blue arrow indicates musical climax.

While “Only Skin” features the same basic ternary form as “Sawdust and Diamonds,” it carries a more linear—albeit fragmented—narrative. The multiple shifts in perspective and reality in the narrative push against formal structure of the piece, culminating in a narrative climax in the J, K, and A’ sections which obscures the recapitulation of Part 1 (Figure 7.4). As a result of this fragmentation, the musical climax of the work does not coincide with the narrative climax; rather, the climactic D’ section occurs near the end of the song, as in the previous songs on the album. In a differing strategy from any of the other songs on Ys, the climax is achieved through the transformation of a previously low-energy section into a focal point, through added instrumentation, backing vocals, higher vocal register, and increased tempo. While the song ends with the same music with which it began, the lyrics of this section are not repeated, as in “Sawdust and Diamonds.” 106

Rather, the final A section provides a retrospective look at the previous narrative events, and points toward the future.

Figure 7.4. Form chart of “Only Skin.” Orange brackets indicate larger parts, blue bracket indicates narrative climax, blue arrow indicates musical climax.

Like “Only Skin,” musical climax in “Cosmia” is achieved through the climactic treatment of a previously non-focal section, the A+ refrain (Figure 7.5). The emotional climax of the narrative occurs in the A’ section, when the narrator asks Cosmia, “Will you call me when you get there?” But as the nature of this question hints, no narrative resolution is reached: Cosmia has not yet reached her destination, and the narrator has not yet heard from her. Perhaps to mirror this lack of narrative resolution, the song ends abruptly, with no musical closure.

107

Figure 7.5. Form chart of “Cosmia.” Orange brackets indicate larger parts, blue arrow indicates musical climax.

On a larger scale, what does this ending mean for the trajectory of the album? The five songs are rife with formal diversions and journeys leading to unexpected places. In “Emily,” tension is built through the evasion of the climactic chorus-like section; when it does finally reappear, it is in the “wrong” key. In “Monkey and Bear,” the protagonists’ journey does not lead to freedom in the promised land in the hills, but rather to a different kind of freedom for Bear through corporeal transcendence. This is mirrored in the form by the terminally-climactic ending. In “Sawdust and

Diamonds,” though the narrator seems to escape her prison and claim agency, the song ends in the exact way that it began, implying a sort of circularity to the narrative. In “Only Skin,” the speaker’s journey does not lead where she expects, and it is unclear where the song’s recapitulation begins, obscuring the overall form. Viewed through the same lens, the driving eighth note block chords that conclude “Cosmia”—and Ys—strongly imply continuation: though we’ve come to the end of the album, the journey is not over.

In the introductory chapter, I posed the question: how do formal functions operate within

Ys? In the previous chapters, I have identified several methods that Newsom uses to build musical climactic function in a song. In “Sawdust and Diamonds” and “Cosmia,” in the absence of narrative 108 climax, musical climax is realized as a dramatic vocal cadenza. In “Emily,” she builds tension by ending the second strophe with a C section, which, in Caplinian terms, does not have a strongly concluding function. The musical climax is achieved via registral, melodic, and textural transformations of a previously occurring section, and coincides with the narrative climax. In

“Monkey and Bear,” a highly repetitive single-cell section becomes climactic through increasing textural and narrative intensity. While in “Only Skin” the narrative and musical climaxes do not coincide, musical climax is achieved through similar methods as in the other songs: thicker texture, higher vocal register, and increased tempo. Moreover, musical climaxes in all the tracks occur at relatively penultimate temporal locations. In “Emily,” and “Cosmia,” the musical climaxes are followed only by brief instrumental postludes. In “Monkey and Bear,” “Sawdust and Diamonds,” and “Only Skin,” the climax precedes a brief return to material from earlier in the song, which forms the conclusion. This approach to musical climax differs significantly from the verse-chorus paradigm in popular music, in which each chorus section serves as a relative climax. Rather, this climax model more closely resembles the dramatic structure of literary works, in which denouement follows closely after the drama’s high point.

By separately considering musical and narrative climax, my work takes steps towards developing a theory of formal functions for unconventional musical forms. This approach could be fruitfully applied to other music that takes a non-normative approach to form, from songs like

Newsom’s with labyrinthine structures to the more austere formal schemes of punk rock.

Additionally, my thesis provides a model for the analysis of narrative and form in popular song, which has hitherto been under-explored. This lacuna in the research is likely due to the prevalence in popular music of cyclic structures with a high degree of repetition. Since Newsom’s music largely eschews these repetitive structures, her work provides an ideal avenue for the investigation of form and narrative. 109

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Appendix A: Ys Full Lyrics

“Emily”

A: The meadowlark and the chim-choo-ree and the sparrow Set to the sky in a flying spree for the sport of the pharaoh. A little while later the Pharisees dragged a comb through the meadow. Do you remember what they called up to you and me, in our window? 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. The yoke, and the axe, and the old smokestacks and the bale and the barrow And everything sloped like it was dragged from a rope in the mouth of the south below

B: We've seen those mountains kneeling, felten and grey. We thought our very hearts would up and melt away From that snow in the night time, just going, and going, And the stirring of wind chimes in the morning, in the morning Helps me find my way back in From the place where I have been.

C: And, Emily, I saw you last night by the river. I dreamed you were skipping little stones across the surface of the water, Frowning at the angle where they were lost, and slipped under forever, In a mud-cloud, mica-spangled, like the sky'd been breathing on a mirror. Anyhow, I sat by your side, by the water. You taught me the names of the stars overhead that I wrote down in my ledger. 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.

D: 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.

A: You came and lay a cold compress upon the mess I'm in, Threw the window wide and cried, Amen! Amen! Amen! The whole world stopped to hear you hollering. You looked down and saw now what was happening The lines are fadin' in my kingdom, Though I have never known the way to border 'em in. So the muddy mouths of baboons and sows and the grouse and the horse and the hen Grope at the gate of the looming lake that was once a tidy pen. And the mail is late and the great estates are not lit from within. The talk in town's becoming downright sickening.

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B: In due time we will see the far butte lit by a flare. I've seen your bravery, and I will follow you there. And row through the night time, so healthy, gone healthy all of a sudden In search of the midwife who could help me, who could help me, Help me find my way back in. There are worries where I've been.

C: Say, say, say in the lee of the bay, don't be bothered. Leave your troubles here where the tugboats shears the water from the water, Flanked by furrows, curling back, like a match held up to a newspaper. Emily, they'll follow your lead by the letter. And I make this claim, and I'm not ashamed to say I knew you better. What they've seen is just a beam of your sun that banishes winter. Let us go! though we know it's a hopeless endeavor. The ties that bind, they are barbed and spined and hold us close forever. Though there is nothing would 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.

A: Come on home, the poppies are all grown knee-deep by now. Blossoms all have fallen, and the pollen ruins the plow. Peonies nod in the breeze and while they wetly bow, with Hydrocephalitic listlessness ants mop up-a their brow. And everything with wings is restless, aimless, drunk and dour. The butterflies and birds collide at hot, ungodly hours. And my clay-colored motherlessness rangily reclines. Come on home, now! all my bones are dolorous with vines.

B: Pa pointed out to me, for the hundredth time tonight The way the ladle leads to a dirt-red bullet of light. Squint skyward and listen, loving him, we move within his borders, Just asterisms in the stars' set order. We could stand for a century, starin' with our heads cocked in the broad Daylight at this thing, joy, landlocked, In bodies that don't keep, dumbstruck with the sweetness of being, Till we don't be told, take this, and eat this.

D: 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.

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“Monkey and Bear”

A: Down in the green hay where monkey and bear usually lay, They woke from a stable boy’s cry. He said “someone come quick! The horses got loose, got grass-sick, They’ll founder! Fain, they’ll die.”

B: What is now known by the sorrel and roan? By the chestnut and the bay and the gelding grey? It is, stay by the gate you are given. Remain in your place, for your season. O, had the overfed dead but listened To that high-fence, horse-sense wisdom.

A: But, “Did you hear that, Bear?” Said Monkey, “we’ll get out of here, fair and square. They’ve left the gate open wide.”

C: “So, my bride. Here is my hand. Where is your paw? Try and understand my plan, Ursula. My heart is a furnace, full of love that is just and earnest. Now you know that we must unlearn this allegiance to a life of service and no longer answer to that heartless Hay-monger, nor be his accomplice. That charlatan with artless hustling! But Ursula, we’ve got to eat something And earn our keep, while still within The borders of the land that man has girded, All double-bolted and tightfisted. Until we reach the open country, A-steeped in milk and honey. Will you keep your fancy clothes on for me? Can you bear a little longer to wear that leash? My love, I swear by the air I breathe: Sooner or later you’ll bare your teeth.

D: “But for now, just dance, darling. C’mon, will you dance, my darling? Darling, there’s a place for us. Can we go before I turn to dust? Darling, there’s a place for us. Darling. C’mon will you dance, my darling? 114

The hills are groaning with excess, Like a table ceaselessly being set, oh, My darling, we will get there yet.”

A: They trooped past the guards, Past the coops, and the fields, and the farmyards, All night, till finally The space they gained grew Much farther than the stone that Bear threw To mark where they’d stop for tea.

B: But, “Walk a little faster, don’t look backwards, Your feast is to the East, which lies a little past the pasture. When the blackbirds hear tea whistling they rise and clap. Their applause caws the kettle black, And we can’t have none of that! Move along, Bear, there, there, that’s that!”

A: Though cast in plaster, Our Ursula’s heart beat faster Than Monkey’s ever will.

C’: But still, They have got to pay the bills. Hadn’t they? That is what the Monkey’d say. So, with the courage of a clown, or a cur, Or a kite, jerking tight at its tether, In her dung-brown gown of fur, And her jerkin of swansdown and leather, Bear would sway on her hind legs, The organ would grind dregs of song for the pleasure Of the children who’d shriek Throwing coins at her feet, then recoiling in terror.

D: Sing, “dance, darling, C'mon, will you dance, my darling? Darling, there’s a place for us; Can we go, before I turn to dust? Darling there’s a place for us. Darling, C'mon, will you dance, my darling? Keep your eyes fixed on the highest hill Where you’ll ever-after eat your fill. O my darling…dear…mine…if you dance, Darling: I will love you still.”

E: Deep in the night shone a weak and miserly light where the monkey shouldered his lamp. Someone had told him the Bear’d been wandering a fair piece away from where they were camped. Someone had told him the Bear’d been sneaking away to the seaside caverns, to bathe, And the thought troubled the monkey, for he was afraid of spelunking down in those caves, 115

Also afraid what the village people would say if they saw the bear in that state, Lolling and splashing obscenely, well, it seemed irrationally, really, washing that face, Washing that matted and flea-bit pelt in some sea-spit-shine old kelp dripping with brine. But Monkey just laughed, and he muttered, “When she comes back, Ursula will be bursting with pride, Till I jump up, saying, “you’ve been rolling in muck!” saying, “you smell of garbage and grime!”

F: But far out, Far out, By now, By now, Far out, by now, Bear ploughed Cuz she would not drown.

E: First the outside legs of the Bear up and fell down in the water, like knobby garters, Then the outside arms of the Bear fell off as easy as if sloughed from boiled tomatoes. Low’red in a genteel curtsy, Bear shed the mantle of her diluvian shoulders, And with a sigh, she allowed the burden of belly to drop like an apron full of boulders. If you could hold up her threadbare coat to the light where it’s worn transluscent in places, You’d see spots where, almost every night of the year, Bear’d been mending, suspending that baseness. Now her coat drags through the water, bagging, with a life’s worth of hunger, limitless minnows, In the magnetic embrace, balletic and glacial, of Bear’s insatiable shadow.

F: Left there, Left there, When Bear Left Bear. Left there, Left there, When Bear stepped clear of Bear.

C?: Sooner or later you’ll bare your teeth.

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“Sawdust and Diamonds”

A: From the top of the flight Of the wide, white stairs, Through the rest of my life, Do you wait for me there? There's a bell in my ears, There's the wide, white roar. Drop a bell down the stairs, Hear it fall forevermore, Hear it fall, forevermore.

A’: Drop a bell off of the dock, Blot it out in the sea, Drowning mute as a rock, And sounding mutiny.

A’’: There's a light in the wings, hits the system of strings from the side, where they swing, See the wires, the wires, the wires. And the articulation in our elbows and knees makes us buckle, and we couple in endless increase as the audience admires. And the little white dove made with love, made with love, Made with glue, and a glove, and some pliers Swings a low sickle arc, from its perch in the dark, Settle down, settle down, my desire.

B: And the moment I slept I was swept up in a terrible tremor. Though no longer bereft, how I shook! And I couldn't remember, And then the furthermost shake drove a murthering stake in and cleft me right down through my center, And I shouldn't say so but I knew that it was then, or never.

A’: Push me back into a tree, Bind my buttons with salt, And fill my long ears with bees, Praying please, please, please Oh, you ought not, no you ought not.

A’’: And then the system of strings tugs on the tip of my wings Cut from cardboard and old magazines, makes me warble and rise, like a sparrow. And in the place where I stood, there is a circle of wood A cord or two which you chop and you stack in your barrow. And it is terribly good to carry water and chopped wood Streaked with soot, heavy-booted and wild-eyed As I crash through the rafters, and the ropes and the pulleys trail after, And the holiest belfry burns sky-high.

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B: And then the slow lip of fire moves across the prairie with precision, While, somewhere, with your pliers and glue, you make your first incision. And in a moment of almost-unbearable vision doubled over with the hunger of lions, “Hold me close,” cooed the dove, who was stuffed, now, with sawdust and diamonds.

C: I wanted to say: Why the long face? Sparrow, perch and play songs of long face Burro, buck and bray songs of long face! Sing, I will swallow your sadness, and eat your cold clay Just to lift your long face; And though it may be madness, I will take to the grave Your precious long face And though our bones they may break, and our souls separate, Why the long face? And though our bodies recoil from the grip of the soil, Why the long face?

A’: And in the trough of the waves Which are pawing like dogs, Pitch we, pale-faced and grave, As I write in my log. Then I hear a noise from the hull, Seven days out to sea, And it is that damnable bell! And it tolls — well, I believe that it tolls It tolls for me and It tolls for me!

A’’: And though my wrists and my waist seemed so easy to break, Still, my dear, I'd have walked you to the edge of the water. And they will recognize all the lines of your face In the face of the daughter, of the daughter of my daughter. And darling, we will be fine; but what was yours and mine Appears to me a sandcastle that the gibbering wave takes. But if it's all just the same, then will you say my name, Say my name in the morning, so that I know when the wave breaks.

B: I wasn't born of a whistle or milked from a thistle at twilight, No, I was all horns and thorns, sprung out fully formed, knock-kneed and upright. So enough of this terror, we deserve to know light and grow evermore lighter and lighter. You would have seen me through, but I could not undo that desire.

B?: Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh desire! Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh desire! Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh desire. Oh desire, desire, desire.

A: From the top of the flight Of the wide, white stairs, 118

Through the rest of my life, Do you wait for me there?

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“Only Skin”

A: And there was a booming above you that night, Black airplanes flew over the sea. And they were lowing and shifting like beached whales, shelled snails, As you strained and you squinted to see the retreat Of their hairless and blind cavalry.

B: You froze in your sand shoal, prayed for your poor soul. Sky was a bread roll, soaking in a milk-bowl. And when the bread broke, fell in bricks of wet smoke. My sleeping heart woke, and my waking heart spoke.

A: And there was a silence you took to mean something, run, sing, For alive you will evermore be. And the plague of the greasy black engines a-skulkin' has gone east While you're left to explain them to me, released From their hairless and blind cavalry.

B: With your hands in your pockets, stubbily running To where I'm unfresh, undressed and yawning. Well, what is this craziness? This crazy talking? You caught some small death when you were sleepwalking. It was a dark dream, darlin', it's over. The firebreather is beneath the clover. Beneath his breathing there is cold clay, forever, A toothless hound-dog choking on a feather.

C: But I took my fishing pole, fearing your fever Down to the swimming hole, where there grows the bitter herb That blooms but one day a year by the riverside, I'd bring it here, Apply it gently to the love you've lent me.

A: While the river was twisting and braiding, the bait bobbed and the string sobbed, As it cut through the hustling breeze. And I watched how the water was kneading so neatly, gone treacly, Nearly slowed to a stop in this heat in a frenzy, Coiling flush along the muscles beneath.

D: Press on me, we are restless things, Webs of seaweed are swaddling, And you call upon the dusk of the musk of a squid, Shot full of ink, until you sink into your crib.

E: Rowing along, among the reeds, among the rushes, I heard your song, before my heart had time to hush it! 120

Smell of a stone fruit being cut and being opened, Smell of a low and of a lazy cinder smoking.

F: And when the fire moves away, Fire moves away, son. Why would you say I was the last one?

D: Scrape your knee; it is only skin, Makes the sound of violins. And when I cut your hair, and leave the birds all of the trimmings I am the happiest woman among all women.

G: And the shallow water stretches as far as I can see. Knee-deep, trudging along, The seagull weeps, "so long," Humming a threshing song.

H: Until the night is over, hold on! Hold on! Hold your horses back from the fickle dawn. I have got some business out at the edge of town, Candy weighing both of my pockets down. 'Til I can hardly stay afloat, from the weight of them, And knowing how the common-folk condemn What it is I do, to you, to keep you warm, Being a woman, being a woman. But always up the mountainside you're clambering, Groping blindly, hungry for anything, Picking through your pocket linings, well, what is this? Scrap of sassafras, eh Sisyphus? I see the blossoms broke and wet after the rain. Little sister, he will be back again. I have washed a thousand spiders down the drain, Spiders’ ghosts hang soaked and dangling Silently from all the blooming cherry trees In tiny nooses, safe from everyone. Nothing but a nuisance gone now, dead and done. Be a woman, be a woman.

I: Though we felt the spray of the waves, we decided to stay till the tide rose too far. We weren't afraid, 'cause we know what you are and you know that we know what you are. Awful atoll oh, incalculable indiscreetness and sorrow, bawl, bellow, sibyl sea-cow, all done up in a bow, Toddle and roll teeth an impalpable bit of leather, while yarrow, heather and hollyhock awkwardly molt along the shore.

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J: Are you mine? My heart? Mine anymore?

K: Stay with me for awhile, that's an awfully real gun. I know life will lay you down, as the lightning has lately done. Failing this, failing this, Follow me, my sweetest friend

A’: To see what you anointed in pointing your gun there. Lay it down, nice and slow, there is nowhere to go, save up, Up where the light, undiluted, is weaving in a drunk dream At the sight of my baby, out back, Back on the patio watching the bats bring night in, While, elsewhere, estuaries of wax-white wend Endlessly, towards seashores unmapped.

B: Last week our picture window produced a half-word, Heavy and hollow, hit by a brown bird. We stood and watched her gape like a rattlesnake And pant and labor over every intake. I said a sort of prayer for some sort of rare grace, Then thought I ought to take her to a higher place. Said, "Dog nor vulture nor cat shall toy with you, And though you die, bird, you will have a fine view."

C: Then in my hot hand, she slumped her sick weight. We tramped through the poison oak, heartbroke and inchoate. The dogs were snapping, and you cuffed their collars While I climbed the tree-house, then how I hollered. Well, she'd lain, as still as a stone, in my palm, for a lifetime or two. Then, saw the treetops, cocked her head and up and flew. While, back in the world that moves, often according to the hoarding of these clues, Dogs still run roughly around, little tufts of finch-down.

A: And the cities we passed were a flickering wasteland but his hand In my hand made them hale and harmless. While down in the lowlands the crops are all coming, we have everything. Life is thundering blissful towards death In a stampede of his fumbling green gentleness.

D: You stopped by, I was all alive. In my doorway, we shucked and jived. And when you wept, I was gone, see, I got gone when I got wise. But I can't with certainty say we survived.

E: Then down, and down, and down, and down, and down, and deeper Stoke without sound, the blameless flames, you endless sleeper 122

Through fire below, and fire above, and fire within. Sleep through the things that couldn't have been if you hadn't have been.

F: And when the fire moves away, Fire moves away, son. And why would you say I was the last one?

D’: All my bones they are gone, gone, gone. Take my bones, I don't need none. Cold, cold cupboard, lord, nothing to chew on, Suck all day on a cherry stone. Dig a little hole, not three inches round, Spit your pit in a hole in the ground. Weep upon the spot for the starving of me, 'Till I a grow fine young cherry tree. Well when the bough breaks, what'll you make for me? A little willow cabin to rest on your knee. What'll I do with a trinket such as this? Think of your woman, who's gone to the west. But I'm starving and freezing in my measly old bed, Then I'll crawl across the salt flats to stroke your sweet head. Come across the desert with no shoes on. I love you truly, or I love no one.

F: Fire moves away, Fire moves away, son. Why would you say That I was the last one? Last one.

A3: Clear the room! There's a fire, a fire, a fire, get going, and I'm going to be right behind you. And if the love of a woman or two, dear couldn't move you to such heights, then all I can do is do, my darling, right by you.

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“Cosmia”

A: When you ate I saw your eyelashes, Saw them shake like wind on rushes. In the corn field when she called me, Moths surround me, thought they'd drown me.

A+: And I miss your precious heart. And I miss your precious heart.

B: Dried rose petals, red brown circles Framed your eyes and stained your knuckles. Dried rose petals, red brown circles Framed your eyes and stained your knuckles.

C: And all those lonely nights down by the river Brought me bread and water, water in. But though I tried so hard, my little darling, I couldn't keep the night from coming in. And all those lonely nights down by the river Brought me bread and water and the kith and the kin. Now in the quiet hour when I am sleepin' I cannot keep the night from comin' in.

D: Why've you gone away, gone away again? I'll sleep through the rest of my days if you've gone away again. I’ll sleep through the rest of my days, And I’ll sleep through the rest of my days, And I’ll sleep through the rest of my days.

E: Why've you gone away, away? Seven suns, seven suns, Away, away, away, away.

B: Can you hear me, will you listen? Don't come near me, don't go missing. And in the lissome light of evening, Help me, Cosmia, I'm grieving.

A: Beneath the porch light we've all been circling. Beat our dust hearts, singe our flour wings. But in the corner, something is happening. Wild Cosmia, what have you seen?

A’: Water were your limbs, and the fire was her hair, And then the moonlight caught your eye and you rose through the air. Well, if you've seen true light, then this is my prayer: Will you call me when you get there?

A+: And I miss your precious heart And miss, and miss, and miss, And miss, and miss, and miss, and miss, and miss your heart. But release your precious heart To its feast, for precious hearts.