Understanding Joanna Newsom’s “The Air Again”
Joanna Newsom hasn’t released a new album since 2015, but this week she performed some new work at a surprise concert in Los Angeles. I think some elements of the delightful song “The Air Again” will become clearer when we eventually have the official lyrics. Nevertheless, I thought I’d try my ear at listening to what I can pick up from the song so far, and add new findings as I dig. Sort of taking a page out of the newspaper game, and covering the story as it unfolds!
March 24 — Mineralogy
If you’ve read some of my other articles, you may have noticed that I use a few mining analogies now and then to describe the experience of listening and understanding her songs. Mines are a search, a labyrinth, a danger, a discovery, and a descent down the rabbit hole at times. Sometimes you strike gold, and sometimes you come up empty-handed. Joanna Newsom is also from California gold country — Nevada, California (later renamed to Nevada City) was a hub of gold miners and other characters at the height of the rush.
So it immediately piqued my interest when I heard one of her new songs touching on mining and gold. A few lines you can hear pretty clearly…
in a shimmering dust of gold
and
when it was warm, we would pan
and
after 30 years down in the mines
…along with many others. But there’s one line that stands out the most in its relation to mining:
canary, canary, canary, canary, canary,
canary, canary, canary, canary, canary
The song seems to describe a person named Maggie who is called “Canary” because of her “pale yellow hair”. Newsom has referred to many species of birds throughout her songs, even sampling the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s recordings of their calls.
The proximity of a canary to mining, however, evokes the expression “canary in the coal mine”. The phrase is used to describe an early warning signal, a foreboding of bad things to come. It comes from the literal use of canaries to detect poisonous gas down in a mine. This article from the Smithsonian describes it well:
Canaries, like other birds, are good early detectors of carbon monoxide because they’re vulnerable to airborne poisons, Inglis-Arkell writes. Because they need such immense quantities of oxygen to enable them to fly and fly to heights that would make people altitude sick, their anatomy allows them to get a dose of oxygen when they inhale and another when they exhale, by holding air in extra sacs, he writes. Relative to mice or other easily transportable animals that could have been carried in by the miners, they get a double dose of air and any poisons the air might contain, so miners would get an earlier warning.
So the allusion to a miner’s canary opens up the metaphor of a premonition within the song. We hear something like the phrase “canary always goes first!”
The canary — the bird — may also play a real part in the story here. Why are there forms “reaching for air”? And why does the song lead out with a series of lines turning around that haunting phrase…
let me breathe
March 25 — Geography
The start of an answer, at least for me, comes from a few more concrete references.
When I listen (and I could be wrong here, in small details and large!), I hear:
…we never stake
a claim or complain or take,not ’til I made a play
for a parcel that lay
on the Amador County line.
Had a notion that I’d find
employ by and by
at the Lonesome Willow Mine,
but they don’t enlist my kind.
The speaker is talking about staking a mining claim to a parcel of land. The reference to Amador County situates us in California gold country, south of Sutter’s Mill (where the 1849 rush got its start), and situated along the Mother Lode.
The second reference to the area is the speaker wanting to “find employ” at a mine near their claim, called the Lonesome Willow Mine, or sometimes the Lonesome Willowtree Mine, or sometimes the Old Lone Willow Mine. It was operating in the 1860s, but then was left unused until 1898. It’s located in Pioneer, California, and is right near the Amador County Line.
With these snippets in hand, there’s some sense that our story is unfolding, at least in part, in California’s Sierra Nevada gold country, in Amador County, to be more specific. It would also explain the reference of “up in Nevada”, because folks would have called it that, and known they were talking about the city north of there. (Though let’s not rule out a connection with the state just yet.) [Note on Apr 24: I was wrong about “up in Nevada” — see the section below about “Emma Nevada”. That said, the name is still a reference to Nevada City CA and the state of Nevada.]
In that same line, we have something worth uncovering a bit more:
but they don’t enlist my kind.
For me, this opens up questions of othering and exclusion. It may be a historical clue as well, if certain groups of people were refused employment in that mine or mines in the area.
Historiography
I want to take a detour now, at the risk of finding a dead-end. If we start with some of the pieces we have so far… Pioneer California, othering, gold mining, etc. — it’s not long before we find another mine in Amador County called the Pioneer Mine whose initial claim was staked by two freed slaves, named William Tudor and James Hager. It was discovered in the 1850s, and worked into the 1860s by that pair, and later sold to investors.
In 1893, it was sold to a mining company whose name references the Jason of Golden Fleece fame, and the mine was renamed. It became known as the Argonaut Mine. Or, as the Associated Press called it, when the mine was closed in 1942 because gold was deemed unessential for the WWII efforts, “the famed Argonaut gold mine”.
Why was this mine famed? It was a highly productive mine, certainly. It was also one of the deepest mines in the United States, at 5,570 feet. More importantly, just over 100 years ago, in 1922, a drama about it unfolded in the newspapers. A fire broke out in the mine, trapping forty-seven men below it. They retreated farther down, erecting bulkheads — dividing walls — to shield themselves. The headlines read, “Miners Entombed”, and mentioned that they “must put out fire first”.
The fire took days to put out, with rescuers pouring water down the shaft, then progress was slowed by poisonous gasses. Ten days in, the newspaper headline read, “Rescue Crews Race to Reach Miners”. The article mentioned that “Men from the Federal Bureau of Mines who make frequent tests in the main shaft of the Argonaut find the shaft so choked with gases that it is impossible to go beyond the deadline.” Those tests were performed with canaries.
A few days later, the headline read, “Still Hope to Save Entombed Miners”, as crews drilling from a neighboring mine shaft made steady progress (if they could trust their maps) towards connecting the two mines.
Then, a week later — 22 days since the miners were first sealed in — the rescue crew and their canary reached those entombed men. The news came:
FIND 47 MEN DEAD IN ARGONAUT MINE; TRAPPED 22 DAYS
Rescue Squads Come Upon Tomb Behind a Bulkhead Built by Miners Against Gas.
CLOTHES STUFFED IN WALL
Discovery of Barrier 4,350 Feet Down Comes After Drillers Finally Penetrate Rock.
HAD PERISHED DAYS AGO
Note on One Body Indicates All Died Within Five Hours of Start of Fire on Aug. 27.
The rescue team found notes scrawled on the walls from the brave people who fought against the invisible.
That’s all for now. Stay tuned — I’ll add more here as I pull the rocks back from the mineshaft.
April 9 — Mythology
I took a few days’ break from adding notes here to explore “Marie at the Mill” and “Little Hand”. And I’m glad I did, because in that detour I came across some striking connective tissue between the seemingly disparate songs about gold mining (“The Air Again”) and submarines (“Little Hand”).
I know the connection may be tenuous, and there are still many lacunae left from the lack of written lyrics. But I was surprised to run across the creatures called “argonauts” so soon after finding a mine by the same name.
Why would there be a gold mine called the Argonaut, anyway? In a nutshell, the name comes from Greek mythology — the story of Jason and the Argonauts. Jason and his crew aboard the ship Argo had many great adventures sailing to the edge of the known world to retrieve the Golden Fleece. Jason succeeded at stealing the fleece, but only thanks to the princess and magician Medea, who falls in love with her. We saw her in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, making streams flow backwards. She was the granddaughter of Helios, the sun god.
So the name “argonaut” became a common term for those who sailed “around the horn” to the edge of the known world, California, in search of a new kind of golden fleece. Bret Harte’s stories of gold mining were called Tales of the Argonauts, and the term was widely used in newspapers and elsewhere to describe the Forty-Niners.
Interestingly, the voyage of the Argo takes Jason’s crew through the “wandering rocks” of the Bosporus Strait (their own version of the Straits of Magellan around Cape Horn). The crew is able to escape their death by… you guessed it, sending a bird ahead of them. As told in the Argonautica:
First of all, after leaving me, ye will see the twin Cyanean rocks where the two seas meet. No one, I ween, has won his escape between them. For they are not firmly fixed with roots beneath, but constantly clash against one another to one point […] First entrust the attempt to a dove when ye have sent her forth from the ship. And if she escapes safe with her wings between the rocks to the open sea, then no more do ye refrain from the path, but grip your oars well in your hands and cleave the sea’s narrow strait, for the light of safety will be not so much in prayer as in strength of hands. Wherefore let all else go and labour boldly with might and main, but ere then implore the gods as ye will, I forbid you not. But if she flies onward and perishes midway, then do ye turn back; for it is better to yield to the immortals. For ye could not escape an evil doom from the rocks, not even if Argo were of iron.
Conchology
Let’s stay with the water for a moment. “The Air Again” walks us to edge of the water at least twice: “on the banks of the lake” and “on the shores of the lake”. The song seems to begin with the discovery of Maggie’s body on the banks, then in an almost cinematographic flashback, retraces the speaker’s experience with Maggie up until they found her dead body on the shores. They use metaphors to talk about it. The “moon (or loon?) in the lake”. The “pale lacuna agape” (if my ears don’t deceive me — and they could!).
Lacuna. It’s such a great word, especially for someone grief-stricken. “Lacuna” means a gap, an emptiness. Something missing. A lacuna of memory, a lacuna in the historical record (so reminiscent of the themes from Divers around memory and memorializing). The word even comes from the Latin for “lake”! And with Maggie’s “pale yellow hair”, and the image of a moon reflected in the lake…it’s such a powerful image to think of that lacuna being pale.
But that’s not all, of course. In “Little Hand”, we see a connection between a human experience and the natural world, in the form of Janthina janthina, the violet sea snail. I can’t say precisely why — I think the full lyrics will help shed light — but there is a similar phenomenon playing out in “The Air Again”. You see, the pallid lacuna, also called the pale lacuna, is a species of sea snail — Lacuna pallidula.
The pale lacuna is a sea snail, so it wouldn’t typically be found in a lake. And it’s indigenous to Ireland, Great Britain, and the Atlantic generally… so it wouldn’t be something you’d find in California necessarily.
If you want to read pure speculation, then go ahead and read this paragraph. As I mentioned, it’s still not clear to me what the deeper significance is, aside from the striking imagery and the similarity to pallor. These snails have an operculum, or trapdoor that they can close up — perhaps the “agape” refers to it being open? Their shape takes a similar form to argonaut shells, something of a golden ratio. They are found along the sea shore, so the memory of collecting shells along the sea and finding Maggie along the lake shore may evoke something from the speaker’s memory — most gold miners were not native to California. And since I went on a tangent about “janthina” coming from the word for the flower violet, I may as well mention that pale lacunae are part of the broader family of periwinkles. But apparently the etymologies of the flower (and color) periwinkle and the snail periwinkle converged on one word from two different origins.
In 1778, the first naturalist to describe Lacuna pallidula, Emanuel Mendes da Costa, wrote eloquently in his book The British Conchology:
Shells are certainly a beautiful part of the works of Nature: we observe a vast variety in their genera, and those branching into innumerable variety of species; we see in them the most splendid colours, the most perfect symmetry, and cannot but wonder at all this seeming waste of beauty lavish’d on the depths of the sea, and only accidentally brought to the face of day. We are in general indebted for most of the shells as yet discover’d to the winds and tempests, which throw them up on the different coasts of the world, and probably know not, nor ever shall, the thousandth part of what the waters of the world conceal. — What would be our astonishment, could the beds and caverns of the ocean be thrown open to our view! […] — Then would be explain’d to us that astonishing variety which shells exhibit in their external forms; why some are radiated with such mathematical exactness, and some so lavishly adorned; why some are armed at all points, as if their existence was a state of perpetual warfare, and others apparently defenceless [sic.]; why some are surrounded with a texture that one might conceive capable of resisting every danger, while others can stand the conflicts of the troubled sea in dwellings so delicate and so seemingly insecure — But the Almighty hath drawn a veil over all this knowledge.
So for now, a veil has been drawn.
Whatever way this goes, I’m excited to see where this snail connection takes us. Even if it’s a slow journey. (See what I did there? Ok, I’ll see myself out.)
April 12 — Criminology
It feels pretty safe to say, given the lyrics we can hear so far, that the song generally revolves around a story of injustice, wrongful death, and, perhaps, revenge.
The song begins with the speaker discovering Maggie’s body “on the banks of the lake”, then steps back in time to tell the story up until that point. We see Maggie’s arrival to California — “Maggie [‘d?] blown to the west”. We see the relationship between the speaker and Maggie — “when it was warm, we would pan”. Then, her disappearance — “Maggie had gone. Must have skipped with someone”. The speaker searches for her (“I looked every day for you, Maggie”), but to no avail, until they hear of her death.
We then see the speaker accost the foreman (presumably a mining foreman), then they “left a hole in his heart”, with some colorful debate about how big the hole is, in cabbage-terms.
Later in the song, we see the speaker “lower the skip […] with a load of dynamite”, ostensibly into a mine shaft. Then, we see the speaker detonate the explosives — “I threw a charge down the shaft” — presumably as a way to kill the “pastor”.
I’m reminded, of course, of the inconclusive findings around the Argonaut Mine and how the fire there was initially started. As the official report stated:
The committee stated that it believed the fire started in the manway; it was unable to arrive at a definite conclusion as to origin but believed the origin to be either incendiarism or defective wiring.
There’s another line later on that caught my attention. I could make out “tree bent over the saloon”. At some point, I realized the words just before that weren’t “alive”, but rather “a live” — in California, we love our tall redwoods and our ancient sequoias, but the foothills of the Sierra Nevada are home to another dear tree: the California Live Oak. For some reason, I realized Newsom was singing about “a live oak tree bent over the saloon”. But why?
Perhaps it was a famous tree? As Amador County historian Jesse Mason wrote in 1881, “This tree […] has become noted wherever the name of California is known”. That sounds like a famous tree to me! He explains in more detail:
This tree which has become noted wherever the name of California is known, formerly stood near Louis Tellier’s saloon, and was a live-oak, with several branching trunks. It was never very beautiful, but was a source of so much of its history, that its likeness was engraved on the county seal, so that its appearance is not likely to be forgotten.
So, we have a famous live oak tree right next to a saloon! Various sources label the saloon as “The Pioneer Saloon”.
In light of our story of Maggie and revenge, it’s no surprise, then, that this was the famous “hanging tree” used for mob justice in Amador county. Mason continues:
Its use at first as a hanging-tree, was quite accidental; but in the course of time the tree was a terrible hint for the quick solution of a criminal case, and when the tree was injured by the great fire of August, 1862, so as to necessitate the cutting of it down, the feeling regarding its fate was not altogether sorrowful.
Coming back to the song with this context, I’m reasonably sure I hear:
a noose and a live oak tree bent over the saloon
At this point, I would just be speculating about the significance of this all, so I’ll try not to.
Because I can’t resist, though, and because I know Newsom loves polysemy and words… I’ll mention one curious observation. It has to do with the words ringing around — “do you sue for the rights?”, “the foreman”, the “dynamite” and the “charge”, and the tree where people were hung. In a criminal case, the jury used to be led by a “foreman” (nowadays “foreperson”), who was the spokesperson for the group. For example, Mason mentions that the Jackson hanging tree’s first victim was tried by a “jury of miners, Dr. Pitt acting as foreman”.
A “hung jury” is one that cannot make a decision, thus letting the accused person go free. And a “dynamite charge” is when the judge urges a hung jury to reconsider their indecision. So maybe our speaker is judge, jury, and executioner?
We’ll see, but my curiosity is piqued!
April 24 — Revision
As I’ve mentioned a few times, unpacking the references and meaning of these new works is fraught with the potential for misunderstanding. There’s a line I had been hearing incorrectly until now. I was recently walking about in Nevada City, California (on a trip to see our state’s superbloom — a story for another time!), and something on the plaque attached to the Nevada Theater caught my eye. The sentence reads:
Celebrities such as Mark Twain, Jack London and Emma Nevada have appeared on its stage.
Emma Nevada — an interesting name in a city named Nevada! I think others have already realized this, but it was a new discovery for me. Emma was born in a gold mining camp near Nevada City, and eventually moved with her family to another stop along the Pony Express, the silver mining town of Austin, Nevada. She was born as Emma Wixom, and took Emma Nevada as her stage name. Of course the connection to “Marie at the Mill” comes to mind, with her “Marie Barna” stage name and her many other names.
Emma studied music, then became an opera singer in Europe, recognized as “one of the great coloratura sopranos of the day”. She made some tours back in the U.S., and in particular a story is told about a performance she gave in her town of Austin, NV. The newspaper article in the February 1902 Los Angeles Herald tells it from the perspective of her tour manager:
“I want to give a concert in Austin, Nev.,” she said.
I almost fell out of my chair. “It isn’t possible,” I gasped.
“I’ll make it possible.”
“The expense would be enormous. We could never stand it.”
“I don’t ask you to stand it. I will pay everything — any amount — only take me there. They say I am ashamed of them.”
The manager goes on to tell of the journey there, and the enthusiastic reception Emma receives from the people of the town. They continue…
I never expect to hear anything again like the greeting they gave her; and I know she’ll never again sing as she did that night — she sang and sang until her voice literally gave out, and the crowd saw that she couldn’t keep it up any longer. Then they cheered and started for the stage in a bunch. Nevada spread out her hands and told them that if they would wait until she got out and got on a heavier, high-necked gown she’d come back and kiss them all, and give them a piece of her wedding cake. She had just married Dr. Palmer, and she had packed a trunk full of wedding cake to take to Austin. She ran off to the dressing room, and in a little while she came back in a dark gown. We brought the cake in big pans, and she fulfilled her promise. The crowd was wild with delight.
So, there we have it! “Emma Nevada, coming back to share her wedding cake.” And this cake was something of a marvel… the October 1885 Plainfield Evening News reported that “Miss Emma Nevada’s wedding cake was six feet high, weighed 150 pounds, and cost $600” (about $21,500 in today’s dollars). The wedding was clearly an elaborate affair… she even wrote about it earlier that year to a friend back in California:
Paris is in a state of great excitement over this approaching marriage. […] The dressmakers, linenmakers, shoemakers, and all sorts of makers are hard at work on my trousseau and concert dresses.
She goes on to write:
I am engaged […] for a five months’ concert tour all over America to commence the 2d of November. I preferred concert this season as there are so many places in America that cannot afford an opera and I am an American girl and don’t see why the small cities should be slighted when one song might gladden the hearts of thousands. We expect to be in San Francisco about the middle of January and will visit all the largest cities in California and Nevada.
Perhaps this was the concert tour where she returned to Austin, and brought the wedding cake? She certainly “gladden[ed] the hearts” of those in the crowd!
That letter was addressed to a certain Mrs. Susan Mills. Just like Marie Barnard, and Joanna Newsom, Emma studied music at Mills College (then called Mills Seminary).
I can’t say for certain what, if any, deeper significance this reference carries for the song, though it’s certainly a fascinating thread between the stories of Emma, Marie, and Joanna.
Either way, I do know that I need to add to the collection of photographs…
July 1 — Pulmonology
I want to pick back up on a path we were following before, related to crimes and courtrooms. I’ve been thinking about the “arrest” we witness towards the end of the song. I know the verse doesn’t tell explicitly of a police arrest (justice might be handled differently in the song), but Newsom chooses her words carefully, as I’ve written about before.
Instead, we hear of a “silent arrest”, in an image that’s layered and rich as a rock formation:
like they’re reaching for air
beneath the smothering eiderdown,
veins of gold still outstretch
in a silent arrest
for miles and miles around
The word “arrest” here evokes more immediately the meaning of stopping, like the gold veins stuck in rock that miners hope to unearth. In fact, the formation of gold veins starts out in a fluid form, when superheated metals try to escape out through faults and other fissures in earth’s crust, leaving deposits of gold along the way. This description from a company in Amador County puts it succinctly:
The gold that you find at Roaring Camp Gold was likely part of the earth for millions, or even billions of years. And, it was likely much closer to the core of the earth. However, thanks to the volcanic activity deep beneath the surface of the earth, the gold is pushed upward, much closer to us, and therefore within our reach. When the gold is pushed upward, it often forms veins within the crust of the earth.
This image doesn’t do Newsom’s description justice, but you can imagine it at a “miles and miles” scale and buried underground.
In a second layer of meaning, the lyrics personify the gold deposits, “like they’re reaching for air”, where the outstretching becomes an image of human arms and fingers. And why are they reaching for air? We see a visceral and violent image — they are being smothered by a duvet or mattress made of eiderdown. The eider duck’s feathers have long been prized as stuffing for “featherbeds”, both to lie on or cover oneself. The word became synonymous with mattresses and quilts. In an article about the eiderdown industry, Edward Posnett describes the feathers in a way that’s reminiscent of the gold veins we were just discussing:
It is difficult to describe the weight of eiderdown in a language in which the epitome of lightness is a feather. Unlike a feather’s ordered barbs arranged around a solid shaft, under a microscope, eiderdown offers a portrait of chaos: hundreds of soft threads branch out from a single point, twisting around one another.
Like the spiral shape we kept seeing in Divers, I’m intrigued by this branching shape. Anyway, apologies for that tangent about soft fuzzy ducks. Let’s return back to the gruesome image of suffocation.
The metaphor connects these gold veins to a writhing attempt to get free of a smothering mattress, arms flailing and outstretched, until there comes a “silent arrest”. The movement stops. The muffled screams are no longer heard, and things go eerily silent. It’s like something out of a horror film, or a Joaquin Phoenix film.
For me, the veins “reaching for air” also bring to mind another image. That image is: veins reaching for air. The pulmonary veins stretch out across the lungs, filling up on oxygen and then carrying that oxygen-rich blood to the heart, where it is pumped throughout the body. And “respiratory arrest” — a sort of silent arrest — occurs when a person cannot breathe (which can happen for a range of reasons).
This is not going to sound too profound, but I’ll say it nonetheless. I’m struck by the life-threatening lack of oxygen in this song, whose title promises what we all need — the air, again. (We might have the air now, but we can’t hold our breath forever, and sooner or later we’ll need it again.) I’m reminded of the poison gases that canaries would detect in the mines, and how breathing that poison could lead to respiratory arrest. We see the canary descend into the depths “to sing where the waters rise”, which calls to mind the risk of drowning in mines, another form of respiratory arrest. It’s no wonder we hear the plea,
let me breathe
and the finality of the line, “she will never breathe the air again”.
I don’t know if this is intentional on Newsom’s part, but in that plea I hear echoes of George Floyd’s dying words — “I can’t breathe”. The oppression of the police officers who killed him, and the oppression towards Maggie and the narrator in the song speak to the “wickedness of men”.
I’m also unsure if Newsom intended this, but having lived through a pandemic caused by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), having seen the need for people to be put on ventilators to keep breathing… I know this song feels like something from the 1870s, but for me it’s just as much a song from the 2020s. And how we wore masks to keep from breathing in the poisonous, “peril air”.
I won’t go into depth here, but the theme of respiratory arrest comes up as well in “Little Hand”, with the danger of submarines running out of air, the reference to “iron lungs”. I may get into that more at some later point.
I will draw on a familiar story that I referenced when writing about “Little Hand”, though. Captain Nemo, from Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, had an array of cutting-edge technology on his ship. At one point, they make an excursion from the submarine to explore the sea floor, and the French narrator (Prof. Aronnax) discovers how they will accomplish such a feat. Nemo explains:
“You know as well as I do, Professor, that man can live under water, providing he carries with him a sufficient supply of breathable air. In submarine works, the workman, clad in an impervious dress, with his head in a metal helmet, receives air from above by means of forcing pumps and regulators.”
“That is a diving apparatus,” said I.
“Just so, but under these conditions the man is not at liberty; he is attached to the pump which sends him air through an india-rubber tube, and if we were obliged to be thus held to the Nautilus, we could not go far.”
“And the means of getting free?” I asked.
“It is to use the Rouquayrol apparatus, invented by two of your own countrymen, which I have brought to perfection for my own use, and which will allow you to risk yourself under these new physiological conditions without any organ whatever suffering. It consists of a reservoir of thick iron plates, in which I store the air under a pressure of fifty atmospheres. This reservoir is fixed on the back by means of braces, like a soldier’s knapsack. Its upper part forms a box in which the air is kept by means of a bellows, and therefore cannot escape unless at its normal tension. In the Rouquayrol apparatus such as we use, two india-rubber pipes leave this box and join a sort of tent which holds the nose and mouth; one is to introduce fresh air, the other to let out the foul, and the tongue closes one or the other according to the wants of the respirator. But I, in encountering great pressures at the bottom of the sea, was obliged to shut my head, like that of a diver in a ball of copper; and it is to this ball of copper that the two pipes, the inspirator and the expirator, open.”
Jules Verne came across the invention at the 1867 Paris World’s Fair, and incorporated the new device into Nemo’s story. The “two […] countrymen” were Benoît Rouquayrol and Auguste Denayrouze, both from an inland region of southern France. Denayrouze had served in the navy, and while he was recovering from an illness, he met Benoît, who had been tinkering on some inventions, and already had a few patents. Auguste could see that the inventions might be helpful for the navy, and the pair collaborated on several more innovations. They were pioneers of SCUBA equipment for breathing, including the demand valve regulator.
So what was Benoît inventing before he met the seafaring Auguste and started work on diving equipment? Coal mining equipment. In particular, Benoît was working on tools for rescuing miners, tools to help people breathe while navigating the poisonous and explosive firedamp air or flooded mine shafts. So the connection between divers and miners is not as tenuous as we might think at the outset!
February 29, 2024 — Homophony
It’s been nearly a year since Newsom first played “The Air Again” in LA. And it’s been a while since I’ve added anything here (though I’ve been enjoying a revisit to “Sapokanikan” and “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne” in the interim!).
When I was writing about “Waltz”, I shared some observations on the melodic structure, repetition, and gradual speeding up, only to slow down again. It made me a little more aware of a related (though different) structure in “The Air Again”. Newsom begins slowly, with chords that underscore the melody line. It has a weight and seriousness about it. Then we nearly burst into a gallop for the next few verses. The piano line and voice start diverging even more, with an almost giddy or frenetic or dizzying effect. I’m not saying these are the words I’d use to describe the lyrics, I’m just trying to capture some of the pace and counterpoint going on musically. Then, arriving at a climactic moment, we hear a repeated line. Her voice gradually moving from singing to almost a whisper, while the piano trails off into a single note. The song slows down, and we pick back up with the slowness, the weight. If you’ll let me oversimplify — the pattern repeats a few times throughout the song. It builds up to a flurry, it fades away to a whisper, and again.
Part of that dizzying effect comes from the tempo of the song, and part of it comes from the dilation between homophony (rhymes with “cacophony”) and polyphony. The beginning chords emphasize and support the vocal melody, which is a form of homophony. Meanwhile, as the tempo increases we also hear more and more the piano taking on its own melodic lines, creating more polyphonic moments. Of course this is simply a solo performance, and who’s to say how Newsom might record and arrange the song? We can only wait and see.
Homophony (from the Greek for “same” and “sound”) doesn’t just apply to music, though. Most of us are probably more familiar with homophonic words. Words like “reads” and “reeds” are homophones, and so are “rushes” and “rushes” (noun and verb — both Newsom favorites!).
Part of the risk and the fun of trying to guess at the lyrics for these new songs is that there are traps all around. Joanna Newsom didn’t set them, the English language did! And I hope if you’re reading this, you’ll keep in mind that I’ll probably mess up a few times, or a lot. There’s a term for this, coined by Sylvia Wright, who misheard the lines her mother read aloud to her —
Ye Highlands and ye Lawlands,
Oh where have you been?
They have slain the Earl o’ Moray
And layd him on the green.
She misheard them as referencing instead the “Earl Amurray and Lady Mondegreen”. She invented a whole story for herself of Lady Mondegreen’s role in the tragic tale, and became emotionally invested in it. Which is where the term for misheard lyrics came about — “mondegreens”.
Leaving aside cows being walked, we do see many examples of homophones in JN’s published lyrics, and shouldn’t be surprised to find them in her new work.
For example, I’m especially curious to find out if the choir/mob of cherubim are singing/howling at different times “hymn” or “him” or both. Time alone will (hopefully) tell.
What I’m sharing below is old news — I’m certain of it. When it first struck me, though, my jaw dropped in astonishment at the genius of Newsom’s craft. It would be a disservice not to mention here.
Towards the end of the song, we hear:
she will never breathe the air again, air again, air again […]
And at an earlier point in the song, where I believe Newsom sings about wicked men, we hear:
arrogant, arrogant, arrogant […]
Most scholars agree that the term “homophone” applies to single words like reed and read, but when it comes to phrases that sound alike, it depends. Some might tell you those are also homophones, and others use the term “oronym”. The quintessential example is captured in this childhood classic:
I scream,
You scream,
We all scream
for ice cream!
So “ice cream” and “I scream” are oronyms. And so are “arrogant” and “air again”. Beautifully, the repetition of the words calls to mind echoes in a cavernous space, a voice moving away, or a repeated call (a person, or a birdcall). Keep in mind that the miners who carried canaries would get an early warning not just from watching the canary but also from listening to its repeated song. Those are just a few thoughts — I’ll let you expand on the auditory image it evokes for you.
We hear a transformation during the delivery of these echoed lines (sung → whispered, loud → quiet, fast → slow, polyphonic → homophonic). In each of the occurrences, that repetition of words with that transformation of delivery can take on a vastly different tone or connotation — judgment, frustration, desperation, insistence, courage, longing…
But what about the other repeated line we hear?
canary, canary, canary, canary, canary,
canary, canary, canary, canary, canary
If you needed proof that Joanna Newsom is a genius, there it is. The words “arrogant” and “canary” aren’t oronyms. Nor are “air again” and “canary”. But the following sounds are:
- air / a- / gain
- arr- / o- / gant
- ar- / y / can-
And sung in quick repetition, the start of one word and the end of another weave together to create a tapestry of echoes. Not to draw too many parallels to Divers, but where before, Newsom looped a whole record to infuse new meaning, now she loops a single word to unlock new layers of significance. They’re not just oronyms, they’re cycloronyms!
I have so much admiration for this use of cycloronyms in the March 2023 performance, and am looking forward to how the auditory layering may play out ultimately on a record. Time alone will only tell.
May 15, 2024 — Orology
Last week, Joanna Newsom performed in Salt Lake City and played the song “No Wonder”. Tonight, she began her residency at Hollywood Forever, and took the opportunity to play “The Air Again” again. She introduced the song saying it was new, but not to her! It does make you wonder how long she’s been working on it.
So it’s as good a time as any to touch on a few objects we encounter in the song, with the caveat that we still don’t have all the glue words that glom them together.
Early in the song, we hear the phrase, “when it was warm we would pan,” which refers to what’s called “placer mining”. At the beginning of the California Gold Rush, prospectors could find gold that had washed out of the mountains into stream beds and river banks. The images of miners sitting by the river with a pan, or miners diverting streams to run through sluice boxes come largely from this era. With time, easier pay dirt became scarcer, and prospectors turned more to digging mines as a way to extract gold. Because the gold in mines is still inveined in the rock that surrounds it, this activity is called hard-rock mining.
As the mining process became more intensive, you can see how the prospecting moved from individual (panning) to collective (sluices and stream diversion) to something more industrial or even corporate (hydraulic and hard-rock mining). By the time of the Argonaut Mine fire in 1922, the miners who perished weren’t trying to strike it rich… they were simply collecting a paycheck from a corporation.
Towards the end of the song, Newsom sings something like the following…
the churn drill
and the stamp mill
and the Pelton wheel
and the smelting furnace
We’re shown the tools of hard-rock mining, which only makes sense in the context of the mine shaft, the skip (a sort of carriage or elevator cart for raising and lowering people, supplies, and ore), and the mules (more on that some other time).
The churn drill has been around for a while, first developed in China. It has an interesting connection to the invention of the sewing machine, whose needle travels up and down just like the churn drill’s rotating bit. The drill was largely used to take core samples, which lets prospectors know if they’re on the right path, but could also be used to create a hole to insert explosives into. According to Keith Haddock,
The drill bit consisted of a steel rod sharpened to a chisel point. Water poured into the drill hole and formed a slurry from the churning action of the drill bit and the drill cuttings.
The churn drill preceded more sophisticated core drills, including the Newsom drill, invented by John Branner Newsom (son of Stanford professor J. F. Newsom, himself a mining expert and prospector) and first used to drill a new shaft and air vent without explosives for the Idaho-Maryland mine in Grass Valley, CA. But I digress. Before I move on, I should caveat that I don’t know if there’s a family relation here with the singer, but the drill cores are something residents of Nevada City would recognize, as they’re displayed in local parks.
Another familiar sight in Gold Country is the stamp mill. Arranged like a series of telephone poles with cranks, the stamp mill crushed the hard rock that had been chipped out of the mine, hauled horizontally in carts to the shaft, and then and lifted vertically up in skips. With placer gold, millennia of erosion from the elements has done the work of separating the gold from the surrounding quartz and other rock. But with hard-rock mining, the ore has to be pulverized mechanically.
Silenced, silent monuments to the past.
Of course, they were not always silent. Across the Mother Lode, “stamp batteries” would pound out their thudding rhythm, shake the earth, and be heard for miles around.
The stamps needed a power source. There’s a reason present-day California’s biggest electric utility, PG&E, was founded in Nevada City. Mining operations taxed the land around them in many ways, and one was in extracting power. Early on, miners used wood-burning steam engines, but eventually they found ways to harness water and the gravity of the mountains to run any number of things. From compressing air, to powering drills, to operating stamp mills — hydraulic power became the mainstay of hard-rock mining. Which brings us to the gold rush’s version of a water mill: the Pelton wheel.
The photo above is a Pelton wheel towering over a small park in Nevada City. The plaque tells how the wheel was in continuous use from 1928–1987 by Pacific Gas & Electric, and created “enough electrical power for 16,000 households”. The inventor, Lester Pelton, took inspiration from observations of typical flat waterwheel paddles and something to do with a cow’s nose to create the two cup-like waterwheel paddles that took better advantage of a stream of water’s momentum. He first put his invention into action at the Mayflower Mine in Nevada City, and the rest was history.
Once the ore passed through the stamp mills, workers would process it in a variety of ways to separate out the gold from other materials in the rock. One method involved poisonous mercury, which would stick to the gold in an “amalgam”. Another method involved adding cyanide to combine with the gold in a black slime. Eventually, these chemically-bound mixes would be smelted — heated to a certain temperature and then exposed to other chemicals that react with impure metals but not the gold. The smelting furnace would therefore allow miners to purify the metal.
I’ll end for now with one last point, given I have “Marie at the Mill” still stuck in my head from tonight’s performance. Within a given hard-rock mine, you’d find two main realms — one for extracting the rock ore from the earth, and the other for processing the ore into gold. The mine and the mill.
May 17, 2024 — Otology
Last night, and again this evening, Joanna Newsom graces us with her music at Hollywood Forever. Leaving aside the sheer enjoyment of hearing her perform, the glimmer of hope for a new album… we also now have multiple performances of this song to listen to. Which of course gives us more opportunities to guess incorrectly at exactly what JN is singing! So all the normal caveats still apply, and the Mondegreen Risk Meter still reads red.
If my ears don’t fail me, I thought it’d be fun to speculate about a line that has eluded me previously. The section sounds something like this:
“After thirty years down in the mine,
help me lead out the mules.
Help me free the poor fools.
Let them see for the very first time.”
They were blind, blind, blind.Then we [well…who knows what we did, honestly!]
she opened her neck like a scrim.
I saw the Father appear,
heard her sob in my ear
like a mob of cherubim,
howling — “Him! Him! It was him. It was him!”
It’d be fair to call “the Father” our main antagonist of the song. We first see him making an overture to Maggie — “the Pastor tried in vain to ask her hand”. Then it doesn’t seem like we see him for a bit, though we do hear people “like a choir of cherubim singing […] hymns”. It’s a safe bet that the “father” we see here is referring to the Pastor, especially since we hear soon after:
So I threw a charge down the shaft
in a cart with the Pastor,
who spat
and evangelized.
Don’t get me started on the onomatopoeia in Newsom’s singing “spat”. It’s spot-on.
Let’s return back to that elusive line, then. Just before, we see the speaker “taking stock of my plans”, and then deciding to go into the mine shaft, where they “lowered a skip” full of dynamite. At this point the dynamite is just lowered into the mine, but not exploded — it still needs the charge.
At that point, the speaker encounters someone else in the mine:
Maggie said, “I am here.”
I’ll admit I don’t know exactly what the next line is, but I feel confident saying that one of them speaks. My bet is on the speaker, not Maggie, because they know they’ve been boobytrapping the mine with another kind of mine (the TNT kind). And so the speaker wants to rescue the mules.
Pit ponies, as they were called, are a fascinating part of hard-rock mining history. Because the work of moving ore became too heavy for people, miners lowered horses and mules (more common in U.S. mining) deep into the mine tunnels to help. They were kept underground for years at a time, in subterranean stables. As Doug Graeme writes, “Contrary to popular belief the mules were not blind when taken out after living underground, but they did need a little time to adjust to daylight.”
Returning to Maggie, the mules, and our speaker — they’ve now come to the surface with the mules. Then, they do something (who knows what), and after that Maggie is opening her neck.
We know what happens next. The Pastor appears, and Maggie levels her charge — “It was him!”.
Not to get too fixated on my loose idea from before, but this scene evokes a witness stand, jury, and courtroom tone. And in a brilliant metamorphosis, the churchgoers “hymns” are reformed into Maggie’s accusation.
OK, enough stalling, Michael!
I was saying the new performances have given me another aural angle. And what I heard was something too impossible, but I secretly wanted it to be true. Could Maggie and the speaker be crafting a poison pen letter? What I heard was:
Then we wrote to the Rector, “Beware Genuflecting”
If you were a Rector, you sure wouldn’t want to get one of these slipped into the Poor Box —
I mean, genuflecting (kneeling) is kind of part of the job description, right? Especially if you’re doing it with your back towards the parishioners. Any of them could be packing!
My imagination went wild.
While I can’t say exactly what the lyrics are, I’m leaning in this more sensible direction:
“After thirty years down in the mine,
help me lead out the mules.
Help me free the poor fools.
Let them see for the very first time.”
They were blind, blind, blind.Then we rode to the rectory, where, genuflecting,
she opened her neck like a scrim.
I saw the Father appear,
heard her sob in my ear
like a mob of cherubim,
howling — “Him! Him! It was him. It was him!”
It stands to reason that they’d see the Rector at the rectory. The image of Maggie genuflecting and opening her neck is haunting, to say the least.
Before I wrap up, I’ll just say a word about another word I’m not too sure of. I think Maggie opened her neck, but the metaphor is still opaque. I hear the word “scrim”, but in the vicinity of a church and with a confession of sorts in proximity, I’m still lightly tempted by the word “screen”. Time alone will tell, as they say.
June 3, 2024 — Hamartiology
Building on the apparent hypocracy of the Pastor, I thought I’d say a word or two about the nature of “sin” in the song. We hear about evil in the lines:
she was never alive,
but by the grace, and the whim,
and the will, and the yen,
and the wickedness of men.
We hear the echoes of a preacher’s sermon here, and echoes of scripture passages. The phrases “but by the will of God” and “but by the grace of God” have a biblical ring to them. If you assume that a good Christian would say that God gave Maggie life, then it’s a perversion that “men” would be the source of her being “alive”. I think we’re meant to hear that perversion, here in the twisted Pastor’s flock.
And what of the other words? “Whim” calls up fickleness and unpredictable desires. Interestingly enough, a whim is also a device you’d find in a mining operation. It was a system of pulleys used to haul up and lower materials from the depths of the mine.
And the word “yen”? You’re probably familiar with its meaning as a longing for something. However, Newsom’s diction here is impressive. The word only surfaced in the 1870s, and originated from an interpretation of words miners would have heard from the Chinese immigrants (despite efforts to exclude them) working in the gold fields and mines. The expression yīn-yáhn (transcribed as “yen-yen” and shortened to “yen”) meant “opium craving”. It’s not a stretch to imagine these men finding an opium den to spend their gold in.
Elsewhere, we hear more of “wickedness”:
On the sluice she was spread
loose, and languid, and dead
from a kindness that she had shown.
Maggie’s kindness stands in opposition to that murder. Without the full lyrics, we can only speculate what that kindness may have been, but it could have been related to prostitution. If we interpret it that way, there’s a certain irony in juxtaposition of the murderer’s wicked morals and Maggie’s kind morals.
Speaking of juxtaposition, I want to dwell a minute on the horrific scene of the crime. Maggie’s body defiled and left to rot, unburied.
Later in the song, we hear that grippingly beautiful passage about the veins of gold, which I already spent some time on. With the new performances, I’ve been listening again, and was haunted by the beauty of the passage. If I hear it correctly, Newsom sings:
Like the screech of a flare,
like they’re reaching for air
beneath the smothering eiderdown,
veins of gold still outstretch
in a silent arrest
for miles and miles around —
undefiled underground.
That image of the gold veins buried and safe, “undefiled”, stands out to me in contrast to the scene we find “on the shores of the lake”. There are numerous ways to interpret that word here, as it relates to the woman, the earth, the rock, a grave, and so forth. But in Newsom’s masterful way, “defiled” has layers of polysemy that she weaves into her writing. You see, “defile” means to debase or pollute, but it also refers to a military arrangement of troops in an orderly line and a narrow passage where troops would have to pass in single-file. Feeling claustrophobic yet? Does it remind you of the narrow passages of a mine?
My mind returns to JN’s inventiveness on Divers with the word “undarked”. If “defiled” means “lined up in single-file”, then “undefiled” would imply the inverse… scattered chaotically, or branching out into many lines. It reminds us of the shape of the gold veins, or the maze-like passages of the gold mines, or the branching roots of a tree. I find it fitting that Newsom then sings something to the effect of:
Let me join in that line.
[…]
I’ll stop there and try not to belabor it, but instead invite you to explore your own passageways of interpretation for “undefiled underground”.
I’ll pause here for now, but hope to keep finding more nuggets to share as time passes.
Read more…
