Joanna Newsom Recruits Paul Thomas Anderson for Return Video
Joanna Newsom has detailed her first LP in five years, Divers, out October 23rd via Drag City. The whimsical singer-harpist teased the album with a video for new song “Sapokanikan” – which revered filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson directed – where Newsom strolls the streets of New York City, singing the winding tune into the camera. “Sapokanikan” is classic Newsom, built on an intricate piano part and gradually swelling with triumphant brass and percussion.
The “Sapokanikan” video marks a reunion with Anderson, as Newsom appeared in the director’s 2014 film, Inherent Vice, and provided its offbeat narration. Divers, the musician’s first album since 2010’s Have One on Me, was recorded by Steve Albini and Noah Georgeson. Newsom and Georgeson mixed the LP, with musical arrangements from Newsom, Nico Muhly, Ryan Francesconi and the Dirty Projectors’ Dave Longstreth.
In a statement, the musician described the 11-track set as “a wheeling circuit of sci-fi sea-shanties and cavalier ballads; a family of polysemic song-sets; a paranomasaic Liederkreis of harmonic sympathies and knotted hierarchies; a fanfare of brazen puns and martial lullabies, blazing in sorrow and horseplay and love, in turns symphonic and spare.”
The album is available to pre-order via iTunes and the Drag City website, and “Sapokanikan” is available to purchase now.
Divers Track List
1. “Anecdotes”
2. “Sapokanikan”
3. “Leaving the City”
4. “Goose Eggs”
5. “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne”
6. “The Things I Say”
7. “Divers”
8. “Same Old Man”
9. “You Will Not Take My Heart Alive”
10. “A Pin-Light Bent”
11. “Time, As A Symptom”