Divers Turns 10

"Love is not a symptom of time/ Time is just a symptom of love." This is the line that people seized upon when Joanna Newsom released Divers 10 years ago today. It's a beautiful koan, one that breaks my brain when I attempt to mine out its implications. And given that Newsom has yet to follow this album up a full decade later, that lyric has perhaps taken on new resonance.

When Divers dropped in the waning months of 2015, it ended a five-year gap between Newsom albums, which seemed like a long wait at the time. It was the first of her LPs not to offer a surprising new vision. Her 2004 debut The Milk-Eyed Mender had introduced a startling new talent, the fantastical folk singer with a harp and a polarizing voice. 2006's Ys transposed that aesthetic into a five-song chamber-music suite, presenting the classically trained composer at her most prim and proper; 2010's Have One On Me loosened her vision into a three-disc sprawl, bringing a sound that evoked ancient history and mystical realms into conversation with modernity. Divers distilled all that preceded it into a grand creative statement, a reflection on love and death that doubles as a relatively approachable entry point for newcomers.

Divers is not Joanna Newsom For Dummies. To the contrary, streamlining countless inputs and impulses into such digestible music, songs that subtly morph before your ears as they glide across your consciousness, is a triumph of sophistication. Nor is this a pop album in most senses; overhearing "Sapokaniken" recently, a friend who was unfamiliar with Newsom asked me if I was listening to a Broadway musical. (Hey, they did it for Sufjan…) The Californian's music has always been an exercise in world-building. She crafts intricate, stylized backdrops and populates them with linguistic flurries as elaborate as the arrangements, singing with a quirky affect that grates against some listeners. It's easy to dismiss her music as impenetrable or to praise it as fearless expression. For the lovers and the haters, Divers offered another feast. Yet each time I return to the album, I'm struck by how smoothly it ushers me into Newsom's universe.

That accessibility might be related to the way the album weaves aspects of popular music into Newsom's ornate sound — a tendency that began with the more stripped-down Have One On Me and plays out magnificently on these more orchestrated tracks. "Goose Eggs" becomes a country song before the harpsichord creeps back in; on "Waltz Of The 101st Lightborne," a gentle fuzz guitar emerges from the fluttering flute and fiddle; "Leaving The City" straight-up rocks. It remains a thrill to hear Newsom seamlessly incorporating so many elements into her unique vision. But I suspect my personal connection to this album above all other Newsom releases may have something to do with how directly she engages with real-life concerns here. Her recordings never lacked for piercing emotional expression, but at first it was channeled into mythology, fairy tales, bursts of whimsy. This time, for every dense thicket of language, there's a plainspoken sentiment like "I believe in you/ Do you believe in me?/ What do you wanna do?/ Are we leaving the city?"

Divers is defined by Newsom's young marriage to Andy Samberg, the comedian and musical parodist of Saturday Night Live and the Lonely Island fame. The surprising and delightful pairing had invited death into her life, she explained in 2013, "because there is someone you can't bear to lose." That's a subject of near-cosmic scope, but it's also grounded in familiar experience. The album's lyrics are mostly as studious and literary as ever — in one of the interviews where she revealed her hatred of bananas, Newsom told Rookie that although the word "research" felt too academic, her writing was informed by lots of "reading in depth about something that's prompted by the agitated curiosity surrounding a new idea." But sometimes, as on "You Will Not Take My Heart Alive," the poetry takes a turn toward the plainspoken, even raw. I get more of a sense that she's bearing her heart here. Real-world concerns had often fueled her carefully constructed environments, but on Divers they seem to intrude upon her sonic sanctuary. Her worries and cares have breached containment.

The resulting songs are masterful. As a writer, an arranger, a producer, a true musical artist in all senses, Newsom reached a new tier of skill and confidence with this song cycle. She was using those heightened powers to convey profound and relatable sentiments, but in her own inimitable fashion. For those so inclined, there was no shortage of detective work to do, no lack of dissection and debate to be had. She put a tremendous amount of thought into these songs and how they connected to each other, and she wasn't spelling it all out. She certainly wasn't compromising her singular, peculiar point of view. It was as complex yet fluid as an Olympian leaping from the platform and gracefully contorting her body as she careens downward — bold, breathtaking, impossible for anyone else to pull off. I'd say my love for it has only grown with time, but, well, you know.