Blindspotting: Joanna Newsom, "Ys"

The Legacy: Two years after wowing blogosphere critics with her debut LP, 2004's The Milk-Eyed Mender, Newsom returned to slay them with her magnum opus. Ys (named after a mythical city, natch) made a small army of music pundits go bug-eyed with wonder, which is to say that while it didn't really sell — it peaked at No. 134 — it wasn't really designed to. Like a number of the acclaimed records of its era, it's a proudly insular work, a statement made both by and for the artist who made it. It was also, in its way, influential as hell; in 2025, to listen to Ys is to hear the repeated echoes of a creative explosion that shook and/or laid the foundations of countless indie rock records to follow.

This is not to say you could find another album like it if you tried, but if you lean in, you can hear the rough outline of the decade to come, at least as far as a certain subset of artists is concerned. In fact, if you were to task a lab full of mad scientists with creating an album that distilled all the various highs and lows of the indie music of the aughts, I'm not sure they could do any better than Newsom did it with Ys; here, laid bare, is the sonic template smoothed out and ridden to wider mainstream fanfare by a hundred other old-timey musical storytellers. I guess this makes her the Velvet Underground with a harp.

First Impressions: For a variety of reasons, my goal with this column is to write out my thoughts on the day that I first listen to the album in question. These really are supposed to be first impressions, after all; the longer I chew on this stuff, the more refined my response will be, and that runs counter to the Blindspotting spirit. But this record, you guys... it confounded me. Because it's so resolutely its own thing and because it's so insanely beloved by so many people, I felt like I'd be showing my ass if I tried to bang out a few hundred words after listening to it one time, so I just kept on listening and listening, and three weeks later, here I am, pretty much where I started. Which is, essentially: I don't get it.

I mean, look, I hear music when I play Ys. This is a recording of a woman singing and playing notes. And on a certain, not-insubstantial level, the album is genuinely lovely — Newsom co-produced it with Van Dyke Parks, who's made a name for himself as every nerd's favorite orchestrator since working with Brian Wilson in the '60s, and the strings are just as proudly if perhaps unnecessarily rococo as one might expect given his résumé. If all you were listening to while listening to Ys was Newsom's harp and Parks' strings — plus solid albeit genuinely eyebrow-raising contributions from Leland Sklar and Grant fucking Geissman — you'd be in for an hour of easy listening in the best sense.

But that isn't what you're listening to. Atop the bucolic musical bed, you've got Newsom's voice and lyrics, both of which are aggressively acquired tastes. In one overwhelmingly positive review, I saw her voice compared to that of "a small, asthmatic child," which is both fair and unfair; it's the latter because it creates the impression that she can't really sing, but the former because she doesn't really sing like anyone else you've spent much time listening to. (I hear shades of Björk, but the 17-year-old tells me I'm full of shit.)

The lyrics are similarly divisive, although that argument takes place against the backdrop of a fairly positive consensus that says her obvious love of language outweighs her tendency toward knotty narratives and arcane vocabulary. Ys is apparently an intensely personal album, but you are nothing if not forgiven if that would never occur to you while listening to it; the whole record is full of lines about various flora and fauna doing various mystical and/or unlikely things, frequently using various words that went out of fashion in the 17th century.

If I told you that these songs incorporated melodies that could politely be described as "unexpected," would it surprise you? Dear reader, I hope not. Honestly, I suspect most people reading these words have long since come to terms with Ys, and I'm sure you're all laughing at the way I've spent the better part of a month paralyzed by the thought of weighing in on a deeply confounding critical darling.

Here's where I think I've finally arrived. I read one Ys review that said something about how we're conditioned to have a negative kneejerk reaction against any work produced by an artist who proudly exists within their own definitive sphere, and I've thought about that a hell of a lot while cycling through this record. In my younger days, I would absolutely have dismissed this as the work of a pretentious madwoman and not thought twice about it, and that would have been absolutely on me. Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile. So much music sounds so much the same that an extreme outlier like Joanna Newsom is to be celebrated.

Now that I've said those nice things, let me eagerly back away from Ys, never to return.

Favorite Song: I'm so tired, you guys. Leave me alone.