Joanna Newsom
“On A Good Day”

Hey hey hey, the end is near!
On a good day,
you can see the end from here.
But I won’t turn back, now,
though the way is clear;
I will stay for the remainder.

I saw a life, and I called it mine.
I saw it, drawn so sweet and fine,
and I had begun to fill in all the lines,
right down to what we’d name her.

Our nature does not change by will.
In the winter, ’round the ruined mill,
the creek is lying, flat and still;
it is water,
though it’s frozen.

So, ’cross the years,
and miles, and through,
on a good day,
you can feel my love for you.
Will you leave me be,
so that we can stay true
to the path that you have chosen?

So Joanna Newpocalypse is still raining (reigning, too?) upon us. Let’s look at this ditty. It begins the second disc of the album, and it’s also (like ‘81) about beginnings and endings. It sounds happy. Happy is a nice way to sound. Happy. It even sounds nice to sound like you sound happy. Happy. So. Right, it’s a joke. The end is in sight, ie, the end of the album is in sight. The end of your life is in sight. It’s in sight in that it inhabits logical space. But it’s hardly in sight in the way you’d mean it idiomatically.

The second stanza could be about lots of things, but I choose to believe it’s about Joanna Newsom’s (sorry, I mean the narrator’s) stillborn child with Andy Samberg.

The third stanza is obviously about the free will versus natural determinism problem, and thus it’s the most boring stanza on the album.

The last stanza probably deserves more scrutiny than I’m willing to give it here. My lungs are aching for smoke, but my legs are yearning for mute manic kinesthesia. I’d just like you to note how in the final three lines there’s an entire world of detail and meaning given by the supersession of pronouns: me, we, and you.