'This is a really big world,' Joanna Newsom generously told one persistent questioner a decade ago. Comparing what she does to the mystery of a great joke, Newsom speaks like the folk music-trained poetry lover that she is, calmly imploring clarity mongers to remember that songs gather in meanings as they move through space and time, and though there's fun in pinning down sources and allusions, a fixed end point should not be the goal. She'll gently say that interpretation belongs to her fans: They have the right to unpack them, to argue endlessly in chat rooms or moving cars about the ' layers, layers, layers' of her lyrics and her semi-symphonic or chamber-popping song structures.
There's a point in most published interviews with Joanna Newsom where the harpist, singer and songwriter genially pulls the switch on her interlocutor's train of thought.
