Divers, revisited

Joanna Newsom's seminal album, 10 years later

When Joanna Newsom released Divers in 2015, I had never heard of her. Her music wasn’t on streaming platforms — she famously called Spotify the “banana” of the music industry. The gall of this woman, I thought, to dislike bananas, and to force me into listening to this bootleg on YouTube.

I hated the album. I thought the music gods (Pitchfork, the internet at large) were playing some big joke on me. How could this utterly pretentious, inaccessible ren-faire background music be considered one of the best albums of the year, up there with To Pimp a Butterfly and Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit?

Well, here I am in 2025, humbly holding my metaphorical fedora in my hands to say this: Reader, I was wrong. This may well have been one of the albums of the decade. Actually, it feels as though everything that has happened to me in the last 10 years has been preparing me to someday enjoy Divers. Somewhere in between reading Fred Moten footnotes and straining to hear volcanic sound samples in a Bjork album, between watching a nora chipaumire dance performance and finishing The Sound and The Fury, my pre-frontal cortex developed. And when I listened to the album again recently, I found myself wondering at how I had ever thought it inaccessible.

Perhaps you cannot relate. You probably emerged from the womb totally equipped to like Joanna Newsom, even the screechier, sparser early stuff, that I only now tolerate because of my fondness for Divers. But there is something amazing about returning to a thing five, 10, 15 years later, only to discover that you now love what you once hated. (Of course, it often works the other way around, but that is far less enjoyable.) It’s one of the keenest ways to feel the passage of time.

Time is what Newsom is interested in most, in Divers. Within the album, she imagines multiple universes, occurring simultaneously and cyclically (well before Marvel ever went there). In one song, “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne,” she envisions a failing battalion embarking upon a never-ending spaceship war. In album standout “Sapokanikan,” she compares the razing of Native American territory in Manhattan — and the bodies buried beneath it — to the Shelley poem “Ozymandias” and the Van Gogh painting “Patch of Grass.”

This richness of allusion, which I originally found so pretentious, in 2015, is precisely what I find alluring about this music today. Newsom is Minnie Riperton meets William Wordsworth, a veritable treasure trove of references — of birds, poems, art, you name it.

As humans, we love to find patterns in things. It probably brings us a sense of control, and even safety, evolutionarily speaking. And at the risk of sounding banal, when so little happening in the world today makes any sense, I find immense comfort in sitting down, putting the vinyl on, and spending the next hour and a half on Google. The deeper I dive into any particular song on the album, the more interpretations I uncover. In some ways, it’s like being back in my ENG340 Romanticism class 10 years ago at Princeton, opening up my massive textbook to “Ode to a Nightingale” or “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” and scouring it for meaning.

On Divers, the music itself veers towards the sublime, in the Samuel Taylor Coleridge sense of the word: it produces a feeling of awe, even fear, at the sheer, incomprehensible scope of this album. Glittering harp chords, swelling arpeggios, sweeping soundscapes — Newsom even called in the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra for one of the tracks. In an interview, she revealed this delightful titbit:

“I’ve had collaborators say, “I don’t understand what you mean when you say that you want this solo violin to be played in a rattling manner that evokes the sound of a rope stretching on a ship connecting to a dock.”

What’s fascinating about Newsom, as a person, is that she could so easily land in deep nerd territory.* She could fall into a level of geekdom and affectation that is typically reserved for Redditors, RPGers, and, yes, renaissance fairs. But instead she comes across as unfailingly cool, despite her profoundly obscure interests and highfalutin turns of phrase — who else sings lines like, “Lost in obsolescence / The text will not yield, nor x-ray reveal / With any fluorescence” without batting an eyelid? It’s honestly inspiring. We could all lean a little further into our dorkiest proclivities, if it has results like this.

Last weekend, two friends and I spent an afternoon listening to Divers, sitting in total silence, eyes closed. It was total bliss. While we listened, occasionally passing the charcuterie and sipping our natural wine, I became aware that this was likely the sort of activity that typified people who are In Their Thirties. At 21, I probably couldn’t have fathomed that 10 years later I would find myself in such a situation. And yet here I was, experiencing the height of enjoyment. Time — it’s a clever bitch.

*And perhaps she does, and I am simply too far gone to see it.