Joanna Newsom & The Ys Street Band

Naturally, across a life, there are those moments or circumstances that are pivotal, where we make a choice or a discovery that bring us to greater to understanding... and then there’s all the other stuff that surrounds that experience that you forget was there in the first place. Maybe it’s because us midwesterners love an underdog, but I’m often curious about the retrospective analysis that makes us think about that sort of historical also-ran. I already wrote about how important John Martyn’s Solid Air was to me, how I discovered it at a thrift store and rediscovered it years later, but that certainly was not the only bit of vinyl covered in dust at that place.

In fact, that same day, there were some other pieces that were basically fresh out of the pressing plant. Just behind the John Martyn record, I discovered this Joanna Newsom & The Ys Street Band E.P. still in the shrink, along with something by The Dear Hunter and another by Menomena. I still hadn’t listened to Springsteen but I was familiar enough with the musical community to notice the dad-joke punning on the E Street Band. Each record had stickers from my favorite local store, run by a guy who was pivotal in my musical development.

One Saturday, my friends and I went to S’s record store looking for one of Of Montreal’s albums. We got to talking, and he loaned me Crazy Rhythms by the Feelies, just because I mentioned I liked it and it was playing on the stereo. This was the first time I met the guy, but he read me as the kind of earnest young kid who wouldn’t rip him off for a rare indie CD. I brought it back, of course, and he would loan me more and more things over the years. He introduced me to the Dap-Kings and death metal, let my band open for Russian Circles at an in-store event. His taste was wide-reaching and manifold, so I wasn’t surprised to hear Joanna Newsom come on over the speaker system here and there. And that’s what was going through my head when I saw the $13.99 price tag, firmly planted on the upper right side of the cover—did S drop the wrong box off at Goodwill? Should I tell him next time I see him?

I never did. But I did snag this and a couple of other finds, despite passing up the classic British folk record. I suppose I made my choice to dig into the music of my era, rather than the music of my parents’ time. And honestly, retrospectively, I’m still happy with that choice.

I’m not going to go ahead and suggest that this is a profoundly pivotal collection of songs, or that most people go out of their way to listen to them; this lady has a three-disc album of Great American Songbook-style songs about frogs to contend with. But despite how short it is, people in the Newsom listening community love this collection because it contains “Colleen,” one of her best-written British Isles-inflected songs, and an alternate take on “Cosmia”, one which removes the adornment of orchestration supplied by Van Dyke Parks and lets the song stand on its own, doubled in length.

Especially across these three songs, the effect of the instrumentation is not “harp singer-songwriter plus backing band”—that would veer into Ren faire territory and discount the quality of the songwriting. Instead, I think of her more like Alice Coltrane—she has complex music circulating around her, through her, and she reaches into that ur-myth at the center of all of us to transport us to a fanciful, narrative place. It was the same feel years later when J and I saw her live at a theater in our college city: she and her bandmates (fewer than we were expecting; I remember three) were able to summon something from sparse instrumentalism, the reedy sigh of the accordion/harmonium, the sustaining yawn of the tamboura. And, of course, the celestial plucks of the harp. Cosmica.

Verdict: Keep

Do you enjoy the live EP that comes out after an acclaimed album, or is it a historical also-ran for you?