There are records you can have on in the background, and then there is Ys, which will not allow it.
Joanna Newsom recorded this album in 2005 largely at Electrical Audio in Chicago — Steve Albini’s room, which is not where you’d expect to find a woman with a harp and an orchestral vision borrowed from the American Songbook. But the dry, unadorned acoustic of that studio is exactly why the record sounds the way it does: present, immediate, like she’s sitting across from you on a wooden chair.
The Arranger in the Room
Van Dyke Parks wrote the string and orchestral arrangements, and that fact alone should make you sit down. Parks had spent decades navigating the space between American folk mythology and something more formally strange — Song Cycle, his work with Brian Wilson, the whole beautiful wreckage of that tradition. He heard what Newsom was doing and met it on its own terms. The strings on “Only Skin” don’t illustrate the song. They argue with it, contradict it, and then suddenly agree, all across seventeen minutes.
The sessions that captured those arrangements used a fifty-piece ensemble recorded in Hollywood. Engineer Jim Rondinelli worked with producer Steve Albini on the vocal and harp tracks, while the orchestral recordings were handled separately, the two worlds stitched together with unusual delicacy. There’s no reverb slathered over the joins. The seams are part of the texture.
Five Songs
The album runs to just five tracks, the shortest of which — “Sawdust & Diamonds” — clocks in around seven minutes. That one is nearly a cappella, Newsom’s voice and harp in a room, and it is devastating in a way that sneaks up on you. Her voice had changed noticeably by this point: less of the girlish catch that some people found difficult on The Milk-Eyed Mender, more control, more color. Whether she trained between records or simply grew into it, I couldn’t tell you, but it’s the right voice for this material.
“Emily” opens the record with a meditation on astronomy, sisterhood, and the Milky Way that somehow never tips into pretension. Newsom had studied literature at Mills College in Oakland, and the lyrics carry that weight without announcing it. She’s not showing off. She’s just working in a longer line.
“Cosmia” closes things, and it’s the one that gets me every time — something about the final movement, the orchestra pulling back to almost nothing, Newsom’s voice left alone in the room. I’ve heard this record probably forty times and I still don’t want that track to end.
The Full Attention Tax
This is not an album for distracted listening, and I mean that as praise. Ys asks you to give it an hour, and in exchange it gives you something that most records across any genre simply cannot — the feeling that you’ve been somewhere. That the music unfolded in time the way a long conversation with someone you trust unfolds. You don’t remember every word, but you come away changed.
Producer Albini has always had a reputation as someone who gets sounds, not someone who shapes songs. Leaving Newsom and Parks alone to shape their vision while he simply captured it faithfully was exactly the right call. The album sounds like documentation of something real.
Put it on after everyone else is asleep. Give it the full hour. Don’t check your phone.