Joanna Newsom — easy to appreciate, hard to enjoy

There's pop music and there's Joanna Newsom.

It's impossible to put into conventional context a musician who plays harp and sings 20-minute symphonettes backed by a full orchestra. Newsom is, quite simply, peerless. Given its confounding novelty, her music is an acquired taste.

There is nothing predictable in a Joanna Newsom song. Read her lyrics — she'd like you to; the 28-year-old California native is meticulous in her vocabulary and meter — and you understand (vaguely) them as poetry. Listen to them sung, syllables stretched, emphasis inverted, and suddenly you're drawn into the music in a whole new way.

Those lyrics are dense with allegory. She waxes about romantic devotion in a song from a few years back titled "Monkey and Bear," about romantic doubt in a new one titled "Good Intentions Paving Company." Her voice brings to mind a nautilus shell, delicate and porcelain-smooth but built with a peculiar curvature that may be a model of asymmetrical perfection.

In her personal life, she seems restless. She's modeled for Armani and appeared in promotional photos wearing an animal pelt on her head. She starred in MGMT's music video for the song "Kids." She's been romantically involved with comedian Andy Samberg and musician Bill Callahan. She's second cousin to San Francisco's Gavin Newsom.

Her artistic output is equally mercurial. Her earliest work was recorded on a Fisher-Price tape deck, just her voice and harp playing off-kilter, squeaky vignettes, later rerecorded and released by Chicago indie rock label Drag City. Her second album, "Ys" (pronounced "eese," the name of a mythical British city supposedly swallowed by the sea) was arranged by composer Van Dyke Parks and featured a 29-piece orchestra. Her latest, "Have One on Me," is a two-hour-long triple album. It's gentle and mostly acoustic and very beautiful, yet its length and musical density are beyond challenging, almost hostile. Take her art on her terms or don't bother with it at all.

This is where many people stop; they prefer to not bother. And this is where the arguing and hand-wringing begins. Do her fans love her — and boy do they love her — simply to be difficult and different? To embrace something others won't or can't? Can anyone really enjoy music so far from normal musical expectations? Isn't this stuff so original that it's utterly contrived?

Sure. But an audience's intention doesn't matter as much as the fact that there are people trying to appreciate the art. Harmony Korine's films are wretched tales. Damien Hirst's installations reek of dead animals. Some people appreciate challenge more than form.

Then again, some people find dead sharks and teenage drug addicts and weirdly warbled ballads legitimately beautiful. Everyone's got their fetish. Who's to question its authenticity?

So besides the beauty of strangeness, is there anything to latch onto in Newsom's music?

There's this verse of "In California," a nine-minute-long, pizzicato-strings and brushed-drum fable:

When moving across my land

Brandishing themselves like a burning branch

Advance the tallow- colored, wall-eyed deer

Quiet as gondoliers

While I wait all night for you in California

Watching the fox pick off my goldfish

From their sorry, golden state

And I am no longer afraid of anything

Save the life that here awaits

And there are the shuffling drums and slurring trombone in the aforementioned sorta-swinging, almost-jazzy "Good Intentions." The hazy, pizzicato noise at the end of "Does Not Suffice." The choir of recorders in "Kingfisher" (and the line "and with your knife/you evicted my life/from its little lighthouse/on the seashore"). The vocal serif Newsom affixes to the end of a word, her woozy harp, her loping piano, her languid, occasional backing band.

The music glistens with detail. There's almost too much of it in the album's 18 tracks. It adds up to a dream world of Newsom's devising, a two-hour visit to a distant, different place.

This is how Newsom makes us question what music means in 2010 — can anyone be this precious and still cut so deep? She makes us question what it means to be a music fan in 2010 — what's the motivation for liking music so detached from our regular old lives?

Part of appreciating her music is the asking of these questions. The other part is actually appreciating the music. Between the two parts is a lot to chew on.

Jonathan Zwickel: 206-464-3239 or jzwickel@seattletimes.com