On Our Album of the Decade: Joanna Newsom’s ‘Divers’
by Alex Murdock
Joanna Newsom’s Divers has probably saved my life. I don’t think I’ve seen or heard a more compelling reason not to die than “Time, As A Symptom,” a track which takes the album’s themes into sharp focus and puts hurt, joy, love, birth, and death all on the same playing field. In the album’s doctrine, these feelings are equals, and we each carry the burden of all of them. “Stand brave, life-liver,” she implores in a moment of genuine artist-listener communication.
One of the big questions that’s come to me as I mull over this writeup has been: why isn’t this record better recognized? It was well reviewed in the year it came out, but has been all but forgotten since. In other album of the decade lists, Have One On Me has gotten a fair amount of shine, but Divers has been ignored. Some of this can be attributed to a decline of interest in indie folk music; inarguably the genre has lost popularity since the late aughts and beginning of this decade, and so Divers was inherently going to be much less of a triple-A release than 2010’s Have One On Me was. Also, by the time 2015 rolled around, it had been a full decade since her landmark album Ys, and Joanna Newsom herself was no longer at the vanguard of indie music; she was an established artist in her 30s releasing another great album that incorrectly could be seen as more mature than it is vital. Joanna Newsom was no longer exciting in the way that a band like Big Thief is right now. So, it goes that Have One On Me is Joanna’s most significant album this decade, because that is how it has been remembered by the cultural consciousness.
I want to re-examine this. I don’t think Divers has been given the time it deserves or even needs to be properly understood. This is a complex album, and years later I am still unpacking it. Joanna is often spoken about as a writer more than a musician — I see her compared to Shakespeare more often than I see her compared to musical contemporaries or influences — and this is consummately appropriate. Her writing requires the same kind of focus, attention, and discussion that is given to classic literature. Listening, and re-listening, and reading along are rewarded with personal revelation and connection. This has always been true of her work, but on this album her writing is at its most vital and personal as well as its most complex. This is an album about being human and loving someone and living your life, and so much of it holds universal poignancy. There’s a timelessness to it, as well; in the sense of it being “classic” but also modern, but also in the sense that many of the songs could have taken place today or a thousand years ago. Ultimately, they fall to something in-between: they are both and neither. This is intentional; “time moves both ways,” after all.
Interspersed throughout the album are war scenes Newsom has painted with detail and precision. The juxtaposition of these passages with the more “personal” moments on the album serve to illustrate the pace of time; how it slows down, speeds up, how it can do those things simultaneously, and how it can sometimes just fall still. These passages also serve to anchor the album with rich and concrete stories that are easy to grasp and place yourself into — not to say that any of the songs fail at this (quite the opposite), just that these passages give the album a focal point to return to.
Divers starts with one such scene, “Anecdotes,” which lovingly details a military camp after (or so we can assume) significant traveling and a skirmish. The characters in this track are named after Nightjars, birds which symbolize death, and the symbol does not go without accompaniment here: at the start of the song a horse carries a “broken soldier” and in the rising action of the song one “Private Poorwill” is killed by his own landmine. Poorwill is a great double entendre here; there’s the obvious turn of phrase where a man named “Poor Will” is killed within a few lines of being introduced, then there’s the correlation to the Whippoorwill, a type of Nightjar. In “Anecdotes,” lives end like lanterns going out in a city at night, and Joanna uses this to play with the pace of time in the song, which, as she says, is moving, despite how she feels or what she wants — “anecdotes cannot say what time may do” and later “round every bend I long to see/temporal infidelity.” But, in spite of how she feels, the narrator has to face the progression of time, and rejoin her family “before the sun is gone,” an image that’s hard to take at face value when placed after so much death.
The domestic scene that closes the album’s opening song — which is so expansive it feels like an act all to itself — neatly ties it to the more personal moments on the album, vulnerable songs like “Goose Eggs,” “Sapokanikan,” and “The Things I Say” where time moves all too quickly. “Goose Eggs” illustrates the progression of a friendship over several years and how hard it is to hold onto these important relationships and the moments that define them. “Sapokanikan,” meanwhile, illustrates the complete history of New York City, starting with its existence as nature, into its stewardship by the Native Americans, American conquest, and eventually towering metropolis. Finally, the city lays in ruin with another military scene that feels ancient, though sequentially it should be the future. The characters feel the unique smallness and horror of looking on at a fallen empire. “Look, and despair.” While all of this sounds very grandiose, and distinctly not personal, it’s made intimate in context and by Joanna’s relationship with New York City. This is an expression of her own feelings about the place: the frustration and awe and sadness brought on by living in a massive city that you don’t want to live in; she was tethered there by then boyfriend/now husband Andy Samberg’s SNL tenure, and living there never gelled with her. New York haunts this album front to back, which is fitting beyond Newsom’s personal connection: it is “the city that never sleeps,” a place where history lives and dies all the time. She is keenly aware of this, and draws connections to the poem “Ozymandias” to highlight the absurdity of it all.
If I’ve made Divers sound like a horrible downer, let’s dispel that notion: this album is a radical manifesto of optimism. Divers looks at many of the most painful parts of being alive honestly and, without at all trying to downplay their significance, takes them as part of a larger tapestry. If our hurt never really goes away, then the same is true of our joy. Says Joanna:
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
In 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 what 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
These are some of the lyrics to “Time, as a Symptom,” the last song on the album. I cannot emphasize enough how well this song sticks the landing at closing such a monumental album, and my continued wonder about how it manages to do it with possibly the most direct and thematically focused writing on it. Its message is simple, but not a given: no tragedy can erase the value of your life, no pain can take away or stain the joy and love and wonder you have felt. It can be hard to find meaning in life, and death may always loom near, but the things that make life worth living hold that same presence. Every little gust that dances through the dust of me and you does so with joy of life. I have wrestled with mental health my whole life, and at this point I know I will for the rest of it. Life has never been easy, but “Time, As A Symptom” stays with me now. More than ever I know why I should live; why any of this has value. The song ends the album with an explosive breakdown, calling up, once again, the nightjar. Death comes as soon as birth, but time moves both ways. The album ends, musically and lyrically, with a transition back into “Anecdotes.”
As much as I can talk about these songs and express points I think they make, it’s hard to fully communicate what makes these songs so important. They are something to form a personal relationship to, and I feel like a bumbling fool in front of some sacred monument trying to explain why “Time, As A Symptom” makes me feel like I should continue being alive. While this is an album you can tackle from an intellectual standpoint and analyze metaphors and images and motifs, it’d never illustrate the true emotional weight, value, and significance of this album. There’s so much to mine here, and I truly believe that this is an album that can follow you through your life and mean different things to the different iterations of you. My relationship to this album is always evolving, and I avoided talking about more of the individual songs (this album talks extensively about love and I’ve barely even mentioned it!) because I do not want to place parameters around what these songs can be, both for my own sake and for anyone reading this who might want to dig into the album afterwards. What I wanted to illustrate with this essay is how much this album means to me, and how much can be found in it. I don’t think my interpretations should be gospel, and I’d much prefer people find their own meanings in the album. All that being said, what I am willing to say definitively about Divers is that it is a flawless, timeless, and simply essential addition to the oeuvre of one of our greatest living writers. This is my favorite album of the decade, possibly my favorite album of all time, and it has significantly changed how I think about myself, my relationships, and my life. I’m better for it.
