Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me

It feels curious to review Joanna Newsom’s third release, Have One On Me, as an album.

With a running time of more than two hours, it’s longer than any two albums from the similarly verbose, narrative-inclined Decemberists put together. Its 18 tracks, most of which are at least six minutes in length, generally inhabit the same sonic space: gentle, lilting avant-garde folk with arrangements heavy on both harp and on Newsom’s inimitable warble. As a result, it is difficult to comprehensively listen to, much less evaluate, Have One On Me. In some sense, this record comes as another step in a logical progression for Newsom, who followed up debut The Milk-Eyed Mender with Ys, a dense, ambitious collection of ten-plus minute compositions. But where Ys was rewarding upon a single listen, Have One On Me gradually blunts your attention with both repetition and excess. Ostensibly a triple album, there’s little here to suggest a good reason for this structure. All three discs are thematically similar, and the songs tend to bleed into each other such that it becomes difficult to discern where one disc ends and the next begins.

In spite of the bloat of Have One On Me, Newsom is still a storyteller almost without peer in the folk world. The wordplay and imagery honed on her first two records are expanded here, and the results, as on introspective travelogue “Good Intentions Paving Co.” and the tragically serene “Does Not Suffice,” are occasionally transcendent. You get the sense that a more discerning edit may have made a classic out of Have One On Me, but the relentless excess dooms it to unevenness.