Joanna Newsom on Andy Samberg, Stalkers and Latest Harp-Fueled Opus

Newsom is about to release Divers, her fourth studio album, which reaffirms her as an artist of wild ambition and even wilder ability. By the album’s lyrical standards, an Austin Powers reference sounds downright au courant. The single, “Sapokanikan,” poses pointed questions about who gets valorized by history and who gets paved over, taking its title from a Lenape Indian trading village that once occupied the site of present-day Washington Square Park. Newsom alludes in the lyrics to Titian, borrows lines from Percy Shelly’s “Ozymandias” and quotes a 1918 Times article about a fatal freak accident involving New York’s 95th mayor. Elsewhere, she sings about oyster harvesting, old stone mills and, for good measure, Einsteinian space-time. She is unafraid of big fat themes like mortality, love and memory. Her lyrical hyper-abundance matches her music, which draws from a range of unhip genres like Celtic folk, baroque classical, and Sixties orchestral pop.

The result is both dazzling and daunting. The complex rhythmic interplay on the album’s (relatively) hardest-rocking moment, “Leaving the City,” actually required Newsom to create her own notational language — “like, these crescent moons and squares and triangles” — to map its moving parts, and the deliberateness with which Divers was fashioned screams from every bar. In a clever, concept-album-ish touch, the very last word is a perplexing fragment (“tran—”) that the very first word (“sending”) completes, turning the record into a time-bending loop. Which is apt, since one of Divers‘ headier concerns, as Newsom puts it, is “the question of what’s available to us as part of the human experience that isn’t subject to the sovereignty of time” — a theme she was intrigued to see dramatized in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, which she really liked, and which came out when she’d already finished writing the album, but before she’d finished recording it. “I was like, ‘Damn you, Nolan!'” she mock-bellows.