The title took me some time to get, I shamefully admit.
Perhaps I was confused by the sprawling epicness of the song, which spirals all over the place both aurally and emotionally, which is one of the things I kind of love about it. When I first heard the song, I was put off by Joanna Newsom’s nasal vocals, which sounded to me like someone doing a weird, cruel impression of Joni Mitchell, but was compelled by the song nonetheless; even if I didn’t like the vocals, I liked everything else, I thought. And yet, the more I listened to the song – I found myself playing it over and over again – the more the vocals grew on me, and the more I realized that I just liked everything about it. This sounds like something very much out of time, and yet timeless, something that should’ve been released decades earlier when its shapechanging and sense of humor would’ve been more in tune with the times but influential and adored ever since. And then I kept on listening.