Only Skin

say it ain't Sadie.


Disappointed by the new Joanna Newsom songs my dearest and I were simultaneously listening to long-distance, I laughed when (4 minutes into a 12 minute song) he gmail chatted me:

He: She’s trying to get the media right? What’s she yapping about?
Me: Meteorites, silly.
He: Meterorite? What’s it up to?
Me: Sparkling, I guess.

She was sounding like Annie Potts headlining Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band, and we weren’t into it. Newsom’s first album had made me weep. It invoked my brother’s clover and fog backyard in San Francisco and the Buddhist commune on the coast of the Pacific where my mom goes to silent retreats and the German girl I saw picking hog plums there who tricked me into thinking I was looking down Godard’s lens. More importantly, it turned me into a melancholic wreck for the Golden Retrievers (Harmony and Moonshine) who patrolled the perimeters of our parents’ late seventies/early eighties Floridian mini-hippie commune; for the mint that overgrew the rosebushes; for the sugarsnap peas my Dad and I would use our shears to trim from their trellises; for the motorhome with the puffy Minnie Mouse sticker over the plastic toilet paper holder; for a mother who hadn’t gone back to college yet.

I never even noticed Newsom’s voice was weird until Davey told me. I just liked how the beginnings of her songs sounded like my Papa handing me a paper bag full of dirt and earthworms from the bait shop. Midway, they exploded into the soundtrack Moby Dick never had, as Melville’s kids [had they (sic) been more whimsical and less suicidal] might have arranged it. These were songs woven of wisteria, wagon wheels and a mourning that sat somewhere between watching the Twin Towers explode and getting stuck in the Molasses Swamp. Sadie’s pinecone-thrower was the catcher in the rye with the dog from the Neverending Story as her sidekick.

But I kept listening to Ys, and I changed my mind. It’s beautiful.

I can tell you that, inspired by her new album, your stuffed animals have grown up into one of those Badlands couples. They’ve fallen madly in love and they’re doing it. They’re hiding escape ropes made of stolen bandages and toilet paper under your bed. Any day now you’ll wake to an open window and Monkey & Bear will be all the way to the bamboo groves, boning away in their wigwam.

Ys replaces the solitary finger-plucking heartbreak of Milk-Eyed Mender with a full-blown orchestra of desire. It’s like the Nutcracker for big people. Songs are long, and their focus is now (and forever). Your hankering for dragons to have and to hold has been replaced by a need for someone steady who will wait at the top of the "wide white stairs." For the rest of your life. Your lover begins to speak with you. Not to give you answers, but to sing the questions in your conscience as a non-secondary back-up while you’re asking them. "Only Skin" fugues support on an even scale as (Newsom’s lover?) Bill Callahan of Smog appears 13 minutes and 40 seconds in to her repetition of a single question within a longer (16 minutes, 53 seconds) story: "Why would you say I was the last one?" Up to this point, she is singing back-up for herself.

Only skin. It’s only the body. Only the one thing that makes us bodily: desire. It’s only your life; only the only thing we know we will have: death. When he comes in, they’re both singing: "Oh, my bones that are gone, gone, gone." And isn’t this what happens, when it happens? Structure. The known. It turns scarecrow just as it always already was.

These songs engage the shivery, terrifyingly dependent components of subjectivity: the insistent betrayals of the body and the necessarily communal demands of existence. They are desire voiced, answered, lost, and kept. They also require patience, time, and commitment. Newsom promises that this sort of taxidermy is both profane (sawdust) and precious (diamonds).

Is this, then, what it is supposed to feel like? Like a song much longer than you'd expected it might be that you still don't want to end?

Well, ys. It feels like this: you meet someone and you fall asleep together. The next morning you wake up dreaming of the same thing. The next night he tows you on your own copper bike. You fall down together, all shins and elbows and bent ankles and he scrapes his knee. Neither of you can stop laughing. You take him home and, as you bandage the scrape, you can’t stop yourself from licking the wound. You just wanted to know what it tastes like down there, under the skin. It’s soft, not metallic at all. 8 months later the scar is still bright red, refusing to blend back into its surroundings: "Scrape your knee, it is only skin, makes the sound of violins."