We owe Joanna Newsom an apology. Though it’s hard to recall a time when she wasn’t adored by music critics or guarded by her cultish fanbase, the singer-songwriter was divisive when she broke onto the scene. With The Milk-Eyed Mender, her 2004 debut album, Newsom was on the receiving end of backhanded compliments at best and misogynistic critiques at worst. Robert Christgau declared she was “chronically whimsical” for singing in “a fey little voice.” Some journalists described her singing as “squeaky,” a “lopsided trill” built around “childlike intonation” and teenage “awkwardness.” Others acted like her gender was to blame for ruining a voice that had potential, claiming the album was “overly sweet in spots due to Newsom’s girlish voice.” One publication led their review with “RIYL: Shrill, esoteric female singer/songwriters that play harp and sound like they’re ten years old with a possible, though not certain, mental problem” – but, of course, that didn’t stop that same publication from including it in their best albums of the year list (and using Newsom’s face in the lead graphic!). Even though their reviews praised, if not raved about, The Milk-Eyed Mender, journalists leaned on enough gendered criticism of Newsom to spawn an actual MA dissertation about it.
Newsom was a freshly minted 22-year-old driving a Chevy S10 pickup truck when The Milk-Eyed Mender came out, 20 years ago this Saturday. She had a youthful spark in her eyes and a coy smile that relayed her boundless eagerness – to observe, to try, to absorb as much as her eyes and ears and brain would allow. But that ardor was often mocked as youthful naivety, a set dressing for the larger picture: a girl with “pixie-like features” who could pass for a fairy if you looked too quickly, a hippie draped in handmade knits and thrifted Gunne Sax dresses, a wannabe nomad fixated on eccentricities with one hand on a harp and the other on a piano. It was hard for people to admit that a record this smart and deceptively intricate came from a young woman as petite and self-possessed as herself. Even now, one of Google’s auto-suggested questions after searching her name was Why does Joanna Newsom sound like that? when all I was looking for was the tracklist.
In the 2000s, the so-called freak-folk scene, or New Weird Americana, was largely a man’s world. Listeners fawned over Devendra Banhart, Animal Collective, Vetiver, Akron/Family, and even Sufjan Stevens. But no matter how groovy or wayward their songs were, they never sounded anywhere near what Newsom was doing on The Milk-Eyed Mender. If Will Oldham hadn’t called her one of his favorite storytellers and opined on her genius to Drag City Records, would critics have seen what he saw on first listen?
I wish I could remember my first impression of Newsom’s voice. Her music has soundtracked my life for so long now, and likely yours too, that the idea of her voice being the most striking part of her music — not the harp as spirited lead instrument, her casual use of archaisms, or her clever, neck-deep storytelling — is so obvious that I almost forgot. I never needed to index it as anything other than essential. Her singing style is so immediate and unguarded that it’s not so much its tone that drew me in (which so many take issue with), but the delivery. Newsom describes it as “intuitive,” the result of years of admiring how Texas Gladden, Karen Dalton, Ruth Craword Seeger, and Vashti Bunyan used their voices to essentially offset classical training while abiding by traditional compositions. Though she learned how to play piano at age five and picked up the harp shortly afterwards, Newsom never took voice lessons. It wasn’t until a week before recording her first EP, 2002’s Walnut Whales, that she started singing, and she firmly believes a sense of audible terror seeped into those recordings as a result.
While other artists sought out the freak-folk genre for its lo-fi aesthetics, fuzzy tape hiss, and expanding boundaries, Newsom found it enticing for its atypical compositions and lyrical openness. When she started gaining a following for her songs on Walnut Whales and 2003’s Yarn And Glue, though, feedback from fans made it apparent that some were more captivated by the shoddy recording techniques than her songwriting. Newsom was excited to clean up her audio while recording The Milk-Eyed Mender and push her ideas even further, putting more emphasis on her instruments and her lyrics than the voice arching over it all. “I was so afraid that I would put all this energy and love into this record and then it would not be liked because it wasn’t strange enough for the people who flocked to it originally for its strangeness,” she told The Believer two months after The Milk-Eyed Mender’s release. “I don’t believe in leaning on that [lo-fi] sound to provoke an emotional response from an audience. I think that’s cheating.”
Staying true to her artistic vision paid off. The Milk-Eyed Mender starts so quietly that it sounds like you’re waking from a dream. A slow fade into the rhythmic plucking of “Bridges and Balloons” eases you in gently as Newsom sings of wanderlust, each bite-sized description of wicker beetle shells and ships from The Chronicles Of Narnia more romantic than the last. It formally introduces our world through her eyes: a place of discovery, of contagious restlessness, of grand emotions and an even bigger sense of wonder. Her instruments of choice that blend into the picture as the album progresses — harp, piano, harpsichord, Wurlitzer electric piano, slide guitar — build out this perception.
What begins with a swell then nosedives into gorgeous harp melodies on “Sprout And The Bean” and clever turns of phrase in “The Book Of Right-On” that position her delicate, sparse notes as something to fear. With few words, she makes it clear that nobody can fuck with her: This girl kills her dinner with karate, her fighting skills are fabled, and she runs with a pack that’s fiercely loyal. Sure, it’s a metaphor, but is it really? “I don’t have to remind you to stick with your kind,” Newsom sings. “Even when you touch my face, you know your place.” It’s a lesson to her suitors and critics alike; she won’t waste her time showing you her claws when the lore speaks for itself. Fellow artists who’d been erroneously painted as demure recognized this untamed force within Newsom, and within a year she was asked to contribute to albums by kindred luminaries, appearing on Smog’s A River Ain’t Too Much To Love and Vashti Bunyan’s Lookaftering.
Only three songs on The Milk-Eyed Mender were brand new originals — “Sadie,” “Inflammatory Writ,” and “Swansea” — while the rest were updated takes on previously released tracks. Anyone with ties to the scene back then knew enough of Newsom to anticipate the album even though it was technically her full-length debut. Not only did she have those two EPs and memorable tours tucked under her belt, but Newsom regularly contributed keyboard parts for San Francisco’s the Pleased, played harp on Vetiver’s self-titled album, and was tight-knit with Golden Shoulders, singing and playing piano on their record Let My Burden Be. Comically, a certain swath of music fans already knew Newsom from her project with Hella’s Zach Hill and Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier and John Dieterich: Nervous Cop, an experimental rock band with one glitchy self-titled album from 2003 in which her harp solos tether their popcorn-like drumming and aquatic synths. In floating between projects to lend her skills, Newsom revealed the playful, free-flowing side of her personality and the urge to gravitate towards unknown possibilities.
Since her career has taken off, Newsom is often cast as an inward, overly studious character. But her actions, especially early on, show she just wants to explore life for all it has to offer – most of which is guided by fun. Revisiting The Milk-Eyed Mender, it’s audible how much joy she wrings simply from trying new things. That gaiety contradicts her prim reputation, a reminder that Newsom is still a goofball despite her unbreakable penchant for archaic terms and songwriting as literary puzzles. The same woman who sang “Never get so attached to a poem you forget truth that lacks lyricism” as a teenager also sang “bitch” repeatedly in that same song, hopped on a Hard Skin oi track, roasted a cameraman when giddily retelling her favorite joke (about “midgets” bickering over who has the smallest dick, of all things), and goes toe-to-toe with her A-list comedian husband when given the opportunity with a self-parodying Brooklyn Nine-Nine cameo or an absurdist Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping role.
In “Inflammatory Writ,” Newsom skewers herself and her nemesis — writer’s block — in delightful, ridiculous metaphors. While plodding on the piano, she sings about rejecting sweet meals in favor of the nonexistent savory option and how pining for a muse can only ever leave you without one. “Ambition came and reared its head and went far from you,” she sings, as if mocking herself in a mirror. After tossing and turning (and asking the real question: why are we so spent after coming up empty handed?), she ends with a joke at the expense of every white guy determined to replace David Foster Wallace or Ernest Hemingway in the pantheon. “While across the great plains, keening lovely and awful/ Ululate the lost Great American Novels,” she sings. “An unlawful lot left to stutter and freeze, floodlit/ But at least they didn’t run, to their undying credit.”
More than the humor or the playfulness, what’s most often overlooked in The Milk-Eyed Mender is the great sadness coursing through it. The album is transfixed by romance — a crush unspooling, the difficulty of learning to love oneself, the inverting power dynamic of a relationship, anxiety keeping her awake on the mattress next to her lover — in a way that allows Newsom to bemoan how it leaves her emotionally bruised and physically exhausted. By reimagining the core tenets of blues and Appalachian music through her harp, she brings a weight to her songs that’s further extrapolated through witty wording and knotted metaphors, like on the sighing “Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie” as she struggles with agency amidst desire, or how sharp couplets dissolve into glissandos in “Cassiopeia” to reflect her restlessness-turned-insomnia.
Later in 2004, Newsom expressed frustration over claims that The Milk-Eyed Mender was an album of feminine innocence or doe-eyed childhood. If anything, its most youthful moments stem from the universal ability to feel sadness and wonder deeply — or those two intertwined — as a kid with an unobstructed lens. She even admits it upright on “Peach, Plum, Pear,” singing, “I am blue and unwell.” Newsom confronts the post-education job market in “”En Gallop”” with a bleak outlook, wandering aimlessly while depressed and trying to believe life will fall in line. Regret and guilt hang heavy as well; “Sadie” takes its name from Newsom’s childhood dog, who brings her pinecones and bones to throw but she puts it off for later – until, inevitably, there’s nobody to throw them for. Even during the album’s most beautiful moments, like “This Side Of The Blue,” she wields semiotics to berate herself as a clumsy pianist, a writer who can barely write, and a person surrounded not by moments but their absence.
Newsom never set out to become a full-time artist; tracing the evolution of these songs, however, suggests there was never any other option for her. She’s a naturally gifted whittler whose hands twitch when they aren’t refining. Just look at how “Peach, Plum, Pear” went from a slow, dreary keyboard song to the uptempo polished version on harpsichord to, mere months later, a past-tense reflection on how far she’s grown, particularly in regards to navigating that sadness. When she performed “Bridges And Balloons” live on WFMU, she experimented with her singing, splitting her vocal melodies from the harp line and, at one point, sliding into a growl. You can see the moment during her “”En Gallop”” performance at Seattle’s Crocodile Cafe where Newsom speeds up the refrain in the higher register and elongates the pause before her left hand plucks the bass notes. They’re all sparks of creative impulses from an artist who’s just started an inextinguishable bonfire of a career, as seen by early versions of “Only Skin” the following year. Her brain is constantly churning, reworking, and envisioning how to imbue her work with brighter colors using fewer brushstrokes or more specific decisions.
In the years to come, this trait swelled into a form of perfectionism that allows Newsom’s albums to dumbfound its listeners and, to an extent, to tower over Newsom herself. She rewrites and edits and tweaks parsimoniously, as if unwilling to let any note or syllable drift out of a speaker without well-vetted intent. It’s one reason for the increasingly large gaps of time between her albums, and that quirk holds her hostage until she finally makes peace with her songs in their final form. The Milk-Eyed Mender is a rarity in her catalog as a result. It’s an album with flashes of unguarded vocal delivery, irregular harp plucks, millisecond timing differences between piano notes – all endearing in their own ways for the spirited intent that guides them. To hear Newsom perform so earnestly without the knowledge of an audience eager to devour her music and decrypt her lyrics? It’s a first-time experience we’ll never get again, but returning to it with an expanding appreciation each year is the next best thing.
