Joanna Newsom

"On a Good Day"


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Published: Mar 17, 2010

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Have One on Me (Drag City), Joanna Newsom's tremendous third, is unambiguously big business: a lavish triple-set brimming with multiminute epics, a breathtaking and idiosyncratic monument to her ever-mounting ambition. And then there's "On a Good Day," just shy of two minutes, the shortest song in her catalog and easily the simplest thing here (just that inimitable vocal flutter — which has mellowed marvelously — and her utterly glorious harp playing) but none of that makes it any slighter a work than, say, the daunting nine-minute "Baby Birch." In four brief stanzas, sharing a single, unspeakably sweet melody, Newsom nimbly but lucidly sketches the emotional arc of her whole two-hour opus complete with a characteristically striking nature metaphor and an ever-so-subtly snide sign-off line. Oh Jo, we missed you so.