Ys is an album that required three people who each had decades of experience to make. Joanna Newsom wrote and performed it — harp, vocals, arrangements that her background in classical piano and composition made possible but that her imagination pushed far beyond what training alone could produce. Van Dyke Parks orchestrated it — his arrangements transforming Newsom’s harp compositions into works that involve the full range of orchestral instruments with the detail and care he brought to Brian Wilson’s Smile forty years earlier. Steve Albini recorded it; Jim O’Rourke mixed it. The result is one of the most singular albums of the 2000s, a record that exists outside the normal categories of folk or classical or singer-songwriter because it exceeds all of them.
“Emily” opens the album and is addressed to Newsom’s sister — a letter that moves through childhood memories, a miscarriage, meteor showers, the specific quality of sibling love that includes everything the siblings have witnessed together. The lyric is dense with the kind of metaphor and imagery that requires multiple listens to fully enter: not because Newsom is being obscure but because she is being precise about emotional content that is genuinely complex.
The harp playing is extraordinary, but it is not primarily a showcase. The technical demands of what Newsom plays on “Emily” are enormous; the technical demands are entirely invisible, subordinated to the emotional content. This is the classical training serving the song rather than the song serving the training.
“And the meteorite is the source of the light / And the meteor’s just what we see / And the meteorite’s just a stone that fell / Down through the atmosphere.”
Daniel Radcliffe selected “Emily” as a Desert Island Disc. His taste is impeccable.