The Golden Age: Joanna Newsom’s “On A Good Day”
*MP3: Joanna Newsom - “On A Good Day”
All the greats did it in under three minutes. Buddy Holly, in his very brief and compact career, remained ever economical with his music, rarely straying above 180 seconds (one wonders what the ‘60s would have done to him). The Beatles executed tiny pop symphonies with terrifying precision, though things got a bit long-winded towards the end. Holland, Dozier, and Holland filled Motown’s ledger by filling its catalog with brief but infectious songs.
The folksters were not among this crowd. They followed the old American folkways of music, which in turn followed the paths of European minstrels and their legendary ballads that stretched for miles in duration. Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger—they wrote and covered songs meaty with verses and dense in poetry. They, more than anyone else, wanted to speak-sing, and it was their example that was absorbed into rock and roll very quickly.
Years later, indie bands mine all kinds of sources, tripping from short punk explosions to psychedelic sprawl. Much of music, outside of the closely handled pop mainstream, now strays to the longer, more ruminative running length. Perhaps urged by the increasing ease of self-production, many bands now suffer from the absence of self-editing. The forefathers of rock and roll had limited equipment and studio time to produce their work. They got in and got out, where many bands now only seem to get off.
And then there’s Joanna Newsom. I can’t speak with any authority about her catalog, having only recently come by it, but what I’ve heard, mostly from this years Have One on Me, leans towards the rambling tendencies of her folk forebears. This isn’t a bad thing. Newsom’s lyricism is, at first listen, stunning, and will probably later become essential. Her spare, extremely folky music is perfect accompaniment, though a triple album’s worth of it is daunting.
And then there’s “On A Good Day.” The song is one minute and 59 seconds long and needs no more to complete itself. The protagonist sings to a love recently lost. Like Pixar did in Up, she reflects upon an entire life spent between two people in a very brief amount of time, “right down to what we’d name her,” only this life never happened, and never will. She deflects any free will in the situation, using the metaphor of a frozen creek really being a torrent of water, though the eye can’t see it. She ends contradicting herself, bitterly acknowledging that the lover chose this path, but wanting away with the feeling quickly.
One minute and 59 seconds, with only Newsom’s gentle harp recalling medieval music motifs to her side. Though much of Newsom’s other work takes a great deal of time to unfold, here one imagines her waking up from a dream, as Coleridge did with “Kubla Khan,” and immediately sitting down to write briefly what she saw, only later setting music to it as an afterthought. This song hurts, and Newsom’s sometimes cloying voice sings through it and carries it.
Perhaps Newsom’s denser ballads are more praiseworthy for their lyricism, but this is one of the shortest songs she’s done, and it’s all the more striking and effective because of it. Sometimes the truest of emotions can only be plainspoken, naked in language as the day they were conceived in thought. Great pop songwriters have a knack for feeling this out and never letting it stay past its welcome. For the wary listener, it takes on one minute and 59 seconds to be drawn into Joanna Newsom’s world. With such a forceful and immediate song to guide listeners in, it’s little wonder that such a quirk-ridden artist is slowly gaining the attention that The Beatles and the balladeers had in their time.
- The Golden Age is a weekly column written by Erik Martz from Minneapolis, Minnesota.
