Joanna Newsom
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLBWIkywK4o[/youtube]
Time, As a Symptom (lyrics):
[tab]Time passed hard
And the task was the hardest thing she’d ever do
But she forgot
The moment she saw you
So it would seem to be true:
When cruel birth debases, we forget
When cruel death debases
We believe it erases all the rest
That precedes
But stand brave, life-liver
Bleeding out your days
In the river of time
Stand brave:
Time moves both ways
In the nullifying, defeating, negating, repeating
Joy of life;
The nullifying, defeating, negating, repeating
Joy of life
The moment of your greatest joy sustains:
Not axe nor hammer
Tumor, tremor
Can take it away, and it remains
It remains
And it pains me to say, I was wrong
Love is not a symptom of time
Time is just a symptom of love
(and the nullifying, defeating, negating, repeating
Joy of life;
The nullifying, defeating, negating, repeating
Joy of life)
Hardly seen, hardly felt–
Deep down where your fight is waiting
Down 'till the light in your eyes is fading:
Joy of life
Where I know that you can yield, when it comes down to it;
Bow like the field when the wind combs through it:
Joy of life
And every little gust that chances through
Will dance in the dust of me and you
With joy-of-life
And in our perfect secret-keeping:
One ear of corn
In silent, reaping
Joy of life
Joy! Again, around–a pause, a sound–a song:
A way a lone a last a loved a long
A cave, a grave, a day: arise, ascend
(Areion, Rharian, go free and graze. Amen.)
A shore, a tide, unmoored–a sight, abroad:
A dawn, unmarked, undone, undarked (a god)
No time. No flock. No chime, no clock. No end
White star, white ship–Nightjar, transmit: transcend!
White star, white ship–Nightjar, transmit: transcend!
White star, white ship–Nightjar, transmit: transcend!
White star, white ship–Nightjar, transmit: trans-[/tab]
Anecdotes (lyrics):
[tab]Sending the first scouts over
Back from the place beyond the dawn:
Horse, bear your broken soldier
Eyes frozen wide at what went on
And Time, in our camp, is moving
As you’d anticipate it to
But what is this sample proving?
Anecdotes cannot say what Time may do
I kid with Rufous Nightjar
When our men are all asleep:
“It ain’t about how rare you are
But how hard you are to see
Take, you and me—"
“When are you from?” said he
In our blind of winter leaves
As we sighted out their fliers
In the grayscale of the night
Fumbled on the bare ground
To bury round landmines
While the dew lay down and dried
We signal Private Poorwill, when morning starts to loom:
“Pull up from your dive!”
Till we hear the telltale Boom
Too soon—
Hotdogging loon, caught there
Like a shard of mirror in the moon!
Now they’ve stopped giving orders
But I follow anyway
Laying in our state of torpor
Waiting out the day
While the dew burns away
Rushing, tearing, speeding home:
Bound to a wheel that is not my own
Where round every bend I long to see
Temporal infidelity
Then all along the road, the lights stream by
I want to go where the dew won’t dry
I want to go where the light won’t bend—
Far as the eye may reach—nor end
But, inasmuch as that light is loaned
And, insofar as we’ve borrowed bones
Must every debt now be repaid
In star-spotted, sickle-winged night raids
While we sing to the garden, and we sing to the stars
And we sing in the meantime
Wherever you are?
In the folds and the branches
Somewhere, out there
I was only just born into open air
Now hush, little babe
You don’t want to be
Down in the trenches
Remembering with me
Where you will not mark my leaving
And you will not hear my parting song
Nor is there cause for grieving
Nor is there cause for carrying on
—and daughter, when you are able
Come down and join! The kettle’s on
And your family’s round the table
Will you come down, before the sun is gone?[/tab]
This lady is likely the artist of the current generation I hold in highest esteem.
Her songwriting takes me somewhere else, truly.
