“Adored, and erased”: Reflections on Making and Mastery in Joanna Newsom’s Make Hay
Part 1 of 3
Calm as Phileas Fogg returning at the 57th second, “Make Hay” appeared at the 1-year anniversary chime of Joanna Newsom’s Divers. The harpist had alluded to the piece in an interview with Rookie Mag, saying she’d cut the song from the record: “It kind of worked, I could justify it, but it was a weak link, harmonically speaking.” As she tells it, she accepted the fluster of crafting the album on her own terms. So what we have here is a song teetering on the edge — not included in Divers, but not fully apart from it. Its mirroring, echoing connection with “Time, as a Symptom” only serves to strengthen the ties.
If you haven’t yet made time to give it a listen, here it is:
In her interview, Newsom stresses that, at the end of the day, she is trying to make songs that people intrinsically enjoy:
I don’t believe someone should have to analyze the living daylights out of a song. I think the way a song feels and sounds on the first listen probably matters more than any listens after that. — Joanna Newsom to Rookie
On first listen, the song is both contemplative and jaunty, mixing lighter moments with more reflective ones. Its sound has accompanied me on bus rides stuck in traffic, and comforted me when I learned that my dear old friend (even in her 70s, she’d pedal up SF’s steep hills on our bike rides together) had passed away after a drawn-out battle with cancer. It’s also evoked the lighthearted adventures of childhood (especially the part, “down in our old gold mine…”!) and leaves me energized with the ascending trills at the end.
Not that I haven’t thought now and then about what the song means, where its rich allusions and diction lead. I sort of can’t help myself — when someone as talented as Joanna Newsom puts a haystack in front of me, you better believe I’ll be looking for a needle in it!
It’s been an enlivening, enlightening, and altogether humbling experience to explore some of Divers, and this song has been no less so. At the risk of analyzing the living daylights out of it, I’ll follow a thread of questions and associations that led me down an exciting and thought-provoking path. Take what you will and leave what you will — I hope these thoughts may bring to light at least something for your own explorations and interpretations.
Making sense of hay
Most of us don’t spend a lot of time thinking about hay, especially given that most of us don’t own the horses, cattle, sheep, or other animals who depend on it for food. It conjures up the bucolic, simple life before cars and trains moved us around and smokestacks peppered our cities. It calls to mind that stoic pair of American farmers, the wife’s eyes turned to her husband, who stares straight ahead, holding a pitchfork.
The vocabulary of the song demonstrates a technical understanding of how hay is made, from the process to the tools. Though the pitchfork is not mentioned, the agrarian, musical, and religious overtones of the symbol resonate with Divers.
The bell-like sound of the celeste, famous for Tchaikovsky’s spinning “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy”, can also trace its lineage back to the pitchfork, through the dulcitone.
Hay also calls to mind Monet’s studies in season and light.
The expression “make hay while the sun shines” — another way to say carpe diem — reminds us of hay’s relationship to the cycles of nature. Surviving the winter depends on growth through the summer. Two sides of the coin.
Newsom speaks of this duality, saying, “A lot of the record has this binary thing, where ideas are set up in opposition to each other and create a tension.” At first listen, this song leaves you with a lingering sense of déja vu, of repetition. Many of the lyrics sound familiar, though altered. The cadence starts out slowly (accentuated by the words “So long”), speeding up to a jaunty bounce, slows again to a deliberate pace, and then repeats the pattern.
This doubling intrigued me. I had to cut the song apart and paste it back together again, to get the sections lined up.
So much pairing! The song itself with “Time, as a Symptom”. One section of the song with the other. And even the repetitive coupled phrases. For instance, “where wind made the dust / and sin made the snake” and “we were gored, and abased, / and adored, and erased”. This mantric quality of words is deep-rooted, and in western culture recalls the words of Solomon:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
— Ecclesiastes 3:2–4
Some may know these verses from reading the bible, others from funerals, and others from the song written by Pete Seeger, whose father was an ethnomusicologist and whose mother-in-law was composer Ruth Crawford Seeger (admired by JN). The song has been sung by many artists, including Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band, The Byrds, Dolly Parton, and Judy Collins:
Turn, and turn, and turn.
Turning bends.
Turning pages.
Turning leaves.
Turning tides.
Turning earth.
Turning soil.
The hay bales stand like monuments to this turning — soft, golden megaliths.
While there are other forms of hay bales, the one above first came to mind because we’ve seen this shape before. In “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne”, in “Sapokanikan”, in “The Things I Say”, in “Goose Eggs”, in “Time, as a Symptom”…
I’ve mentioned before that rings and spirals allow us to return to much the same place, yet infused with change. Implicit in that shift is the movement, the motion that brings us to that new vantage point.
Our daily lives have us moving from place to place, weighing the various modes — should I walk? bike? ride with a stranger? The wheel is ever-present, but not always top-of-mind. Without going into the whole history of it, let’s just say we’ve progressed quite a bit from the log rollers of Stonehenge. For millennia, by some estimates 600 BC or earlier, humans have also leveraged that motion to craft objects such as beads and bowls. The tool they used is called a lathe, where the basic premise is to spin a block of material like wood, and to cut away with a chisel or other tool — holding the tool in a fixed place so that the resulting cut is circular.
Over the centuries, workers have used this relatively simple technique for many purposes. For making chess pieces. For making pottery, those “vessels that we fired”. For making watches. For making records.
Once again, we’re returning to familiar territory, the space of palimpsests and “erased” surfaces. Etching the discourse of the dead, like Washington’s words, or Edison’s inaugural speech. In terms that recall Baudrillard and Benjamin, the process of making records has its “masters” and copies.
Speaking to Dave Eggers about Divers, Newsom mentioned her keen interest in the whole process — writing, recording, mixing — with the goal of bringing it as close to what she hoped to express as possible. It’s almost as if she was (consciously or subconsciously) aware that the physical disc is not just a product, but an artifact. Against a backdrop of historical and imagined characters whose memory hinges on what they leave behind, how can your own permanence not be far from your thoughts?
(And the rattling nib writes,
“What did I make?”)
I agree with vinyl aficionado Zach Cowie, though, that “20 years from now she might be one of the only artists from this era that anybody remembers”. But that can be a daunting perspective to have if you’re the artist.
“Make Hay” certainly makes nods to its musical context. The speaker recalls that “I was the keeper of Hi-Fi”, which — as a side note — makes me think of Buck Swope’s sales pitch in Boogie Nights:
See this — this is Hi-Fi. OK? High Fidelity. You know what that means? That means this is the highest — quality — fidelity. Hi-Fi. Those are two very important things to have in a stereo system.
Circular reasoning as only P. T. Anderson could write!
The drive to stretch recorded sound’s soft and loud limits dates back to Edison: “And honey, it stretched out below us, / Humming every note / From the lowest to the highest” alludes to dynamic range, while transforming the pioneer’s range into a promised land of milk and honey.
We even witness a black disc of sorts — the circling vultures. Their presence is foreboding, casting a literal and figurative shadow. The musical machinery of the farmers below then begins to malfunction:
And all of us plough our row,
And the notes run
Out of measure and out of time and landing wrong?
Like the wheel stuck in the clay, like a scratch in the record, the halt comes unexpectedly. Cast in a mechanical light, the loss of death feels sudden — but also temporary. The humor of Tchaikovsky’s wind-up doll is that she will dance again, which was also integral to the pleasure nobles derived from automata:
Thanks for reading! That concludes part 1 of 3. We’ve just scratched the surface, so to speak. Click below for part 2!
