Joanna Newsom: Trending quotes (page 3)

“Water were your limbs
And the fire was your hair
And then the moon 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?”

“But it can make you feel over, and old
(Lord, you know it's a shame),
when I only want for you to pull over,
and hold me,
till I can't remember my own name.”

“Above them,
parades mark the passing of days
through parks where pale colonnades arch
in marble and steel,
where all of the Twenty Thousand attending your foot fall
(and the Cause that they died for)
are lost in the idling birdcalls,
and the records they left are cryptic at best,
lost in obsolescence”

“And a thimble's worth of milky moon
Can touch hearts larger than a thimble.”

“Recall the word you gave:
to count your way across the depths of this arid world,
where you would yoke the waves,
and lay a bed of shining pearls!
I dream it every night:
the ringing of the pail,
the motes of sand dislodged,
the shucking, quick and bright;
the twinned and cast-off shells reveal a single heart of white.”

“I don't necessarily see the elements that I invoke on the cover and in the songs as being in binary opposition. I know certain binary tensions emerge between these elements, but a lot of times they're more like archetypal elements; these free-standing, huge forces. Mortality, standing alone, as a thing; as opposed to, "Over here's life; over here's death. Here's bad luck, but here's blessing and redemption. Here's water; here's fire." Certainly those things come up again and again in the songs, but it's not intentional, and probably has more to do with the fact that those things emerge in real life, without any effort on our part whatsoever, than they are derived from any classical tradition. I think classicism in general might reflect more closely the natural order of human life, while postmodernism is somehow removed from the natural order, more cerebral and sterile, removed from real life on some level. So what seems like classicism in some of these songs might be just what I view as an accurate reflection of real life on this planet.”

“Hung from the underbelly of the Earth
While the stars skid away below
Gormless and brakeless; gravel-loose
Falling silent as gavels in the snow.”

“While yonder, wild and blue,
the wild blue yonder looms.
'Till we are wracked with rheum,
by roads, by songs entombed.”

“And, for the sake of that pit of snakes,
for whom did you allay your shyness,
and spend all your mercy, and madness, and grace,
in a day, beneath the bending cypress?”

“I do as I please.
Now I'm on my knees.
Your skin is something that I stir into my tea.
And I am watching you
and you are starry, starry, starry…”

“[The title] was the last thing that I chose, after all the songs and the cover art were finished. So none of the songs directly allude to that myth. But the main themes that emerge out of that myth are really close to the themes on the record -- mortality, decadence, an excess of water, isolation, rebirth. The myth is also significant to me because of the way that I encountered it, which relates to one of the huge events the record is about.
I also liked the power of the word itself. I liked how violent and cryptic it felt; it's such a daunting word to encounter. I like how it contrasted this finely rendered, carefully composed front cover -- the painting is information-dense, formal, and stylized; it looks the way something looks when a painter spends a year on it, which is what Benjamin [Vierling] did. So it has all this detail and carefulness to it, which was really important to me and relates very closely to the record. But I also felt like it needed some sort of ballast, or balance, next to it, to reflect the other elements of the record; its innate violence. I wanted a word that was like throwing a brick at the visual on the front cover; I liked that whenever someone looked at that cover they also had to encounter this short, weird word.”

“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.”

“This is the song for Baby Birch.
I will never know you.
And at the back of what we've done,
there is that knowledge of you.”

“It is too short —
the day we are born,
we commence with our dying.”

“We sailed away on a winter's day
With fate as malleable as clay
But ships are fallible, I say
And the nautical, as all things, fades.”

“By the time you read this
I will be so far away
Daddy longlegs, how in the world
Am I to be expected to stay?”

“I have a lot of interest in interior rhyming; not just rhyming at the end of the lines, but playing around with rhymes within the lines, playing with where the syllabic emphases in the sentences are, lining those up at strange moments in the line of the song. I’m not sure if that comes across or not.”

“And, when the bulbs do flash,
as bright as morning,
the crowd keeps on gathering
like an electric storm.”

“What’s redacted will repeat,
and you cannot learn that you burn when you touch the heat,
so we touch the heat,
and we cut facsimiles of love and death
(just separate holes in sheets
where you cannot breathe, and you cannot see).”