Ys

Ys contains five songs. The shortest is seven minutes. The longest is seventeen. Together they run just under an hour, and each one is so densely packed with imagery, melody, and narrative that they feel simultaneously longer and shorter than their actual durations. Joanna Newsom wrote them during a year she has described as crushingly difficult, one that included the sudden death of her best friend, a serious illness of her own, and the collapse of a relationship. The album is named after a mythical Breton city that sank beneath the ocean.

Newsom recorded the harp and vocals first, live with engineer Steve Albini, in December 2005. Then she brought in Van Dyke Parks, the eccentric arranger who had co-written the Beach Boys' legendary lost SMiLE album with Brian Wilson, and asked him to write orchestral arrangements for each song. Parks had made his own cult classic, Song Cycle, in 1967, and Newsom had fallen in love with it before reaching out to collaborate. Parks spent several months writing the arrangements, which were then recorded with a full orchestra at a separate studio between May and June 2006. Jim O'Rourke mixed the whole thing in New York. The result is one of the most carefully assembled records of the modern era, harp and voice and string orchestra locked together in arrangements of extraordinary intricacy.

If you have never heard Joanna Newsom, this is the most demanding possible starting point and also the most rewarding. Her voice is unconventional in ways that require a moment of adjustment, and her lyrics operate at a level of poetic density that rewards the kind of attention you would give to a novel. "Emily," "Monkey and Bear," "Sawdust and Diamonds" are three of the most ambitious songs written in the last twenty-five years. Give it a full, uninterrupted listen and let the whole thing breathe.