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Wow, new music from Joanna Newsom for the first time in five years, and it’s magnificent. She’s probably best known for her compositions on which she plays harp, but there’s no harp on this song — just an incredible arrangement of a very different sort of music.

The title of the song is the name of the Native American area now known as Greenwich Village in Manhattan.

Track from Joanna Newsom LP/CASS/CD “Divers”, available on October 23, 2015 on Drag City.
Preorder now at: http://www.dragcity.com/products/divers
Buy “Sapokanikan” and preorder “Divers” now at: https://itunes.apple.com/album/id1027500473

VIDEO
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Produced by Sara Murphy, Albert Chi, Erica Frauman
Edited by Andy Jurgensen

Camera: Adam Kimmel, Aaron Tichenor
Telecine Colorist: Gregg Garvin
Production Company: Ghoulardi Film Company

Crew:
Jeff Kunkel, Robert Ellenberg, Aly Migliori, Louis Matta, Christian Gagnier, Nigel S. Clayton, Zander Fife, Dylan Tichenor, Cassandra Kulukundis

MUSIC
Joanna Newsom: Piano, Schiedmayer Celesta, Vocals
Neal Morgan: Drums
Ryan Francesconi: Guitar, Bass Guitar, Bouzouki, Baglama
Judith Linsenberg: Recorder
Andy Strain: Trombone

Produced & Mixed by Joanna Newsom & Noah Georgeson
Recorded by Steve Albini & Noah Georgeson
Written by Joanna Newsom

Arrangement of Trombone, Recorder, Bouzouki, Baglama, and Guitars by Ryan Francesconi

Lyrics:

The cause is Ozymandian.
The map of Sapokanikan
is sanded and beveled,
the land lone and leveled
by some unrecorded and powerful hand
which plays along the monument,
and drums, upon a plastic bag,
The Brave Men and Women, So Dear to God
and Famous To All of the Ages rag.

(Sing: Do you love me?
Will you remember?
The snow falls above me.
The Renderer, renders.
The Event is in the hand of God.)

Beneath a Patch of Grass,
her bones the old Dutch master hid,
while, elsewhere, Tobias and the Angel disguised
what the scholars surmised was a mother and kid
(interred with other daughters, in dirt, in other potters’ fields).
Above them,
parades mark the passing of days
through parks where pale colonnades arch
in marble and steel,
where all of the Twenty Thousand attending your foot fall
(and the Cause that they died for)
are lost in the idling birdcalls,
and the records they left are cryptic at best,
lost in obsolescence:

the text will not yield
(nor X-ray reveal, with any fluorescence)
where the Hand of the Master begins and ends.

I fell.
I tried to do well, but I won’t be.
Will you tell the one that I loved
to remember, and hold me?
I call and call for the doctor,
but the snow swallows me whole,
with old Florry Walker.

The event lives only in print.

He said,
“It’s alright, and it’s all over now,” and boarded the plane,
his belt unfastened,
(The boy was known to show unusual daring—
and called a ‘boy’, this alderman
confounding Tammany Hall, in whose employ
King Tamanend himself preceded John’s fall!)

So we all raise a standard
to which the wise and honest soul may repair;
to which a hunter,
a hundred years from now,
may look, and despair, and see with wonder
the tributes we have left to rust in the park:
swearing that our hair stood on end,
to see John Purroy Mitchel depart for the Western Front,
where work might count.
All exeunt! All go out!
Await the hunter, to decipher the stone
(and what lies under, now).
The city is gone.
Look, and despair.
Look, and despair.