First Impressions:
Disc 1 (33 Minutes In): Alright, this is pretty good. It's nice to have Newsom back in the saddle, and it’s certainly refreshing to hear some new music from her after listening to Ys for the last couple of years. What happened to that album's complexity though? This one is good, but I think it might be a let down after what we saw from her the last time around. Granted, that's a high mark to hit for anyone, even the person who set it. Her voice sounds great since the vocal cord nodule operation though!

Disc 2 (64 Minutes In): Vocal nodules be damned, Joanna is back! Who needs a cluttered, detailed mess: this girl has got soul! Joanna is best suited to this cadence, this style of music. So wholesome, so honest, so pure: who cares if she sacrificed the intricacy of her last album? Who needs it when you’ve got Joanna back with a better voice than ever, and showcasing it like this? Long live the new Newsom!

Disc 3 (107 Minutes In): Well, damn it all, this album’s great. What little complexity in the arrangements that has been sacrificed is more than made up for by everything else. Listen to that harp! Those lyrics! This is a new Newsom indeed, and yet so definitely her at the same time. I may have to reconsider my opinion of both Ys and The Milk-Eyed Mender after hearing what she can really do. My favorite Joanna Newsom album is now officially Have One on Me. What a turnaround.

Verdict:
Have One on Me is a Joanna Newsom album in classic style: it’s intimate, with colorfully cadent narratives built of dense, puzzle-piece lyricism that tell the stories of a whole town (“There is a blacksmith and there is a shepherd and there is a butcher boy / and there is a barber who is cutting and cutting away at my only joy”) as well as unhurried, wandering melodies about “a little plot of land in the Garden of Eden". It’s an exquisitely engineered example of aural clockwork, resplendent in its rhetorically self-aware lyrics and its eccentricities of arrangement, the majority of which are still dominated by Joanna’s beloved harp. It’s also her best album yet, for three reasons.

With three separate sections, Have One on Me is a triple album in the old vinyl sense. There are smallish doses of music on each disc (six songs each in this case), all of which come together to form a musical three course meal, each disc to be savored individually as well as as a whole, each with its own narrative arc and palette of emotional hues. On all of the discs, however, sit quietly smoldering the same quality of poetic lyrics, all drawn from the eldritch forests and sun-drenched meadows of Newsom’s deepest imagination.

Disc 1, for instance, houses the robust eleven-minute title track “Have One on Me”, boasting the longest run time of the album, and is simultaneously boisterous and lamenting through Newsom’s vocal peaks and swoops, always singing only the most whimsical of lyrics, of course. “Pretty poppith you’re my friend / Mr. Daddy Longlegs are you at it again?” Disc 1 also serves as home for the previously released single, “’81,” a veritable treasure box of a track. Beginning with only Joanna’s trademark heartbreaking warble, a simple waltzing tune is layered under the power of her vocals, which refer to her stay in “the garden of Eden” where “ The wandering eye that I have caught / Is as hot as a wandering sun”. It’s the best example on the album of Joanna’s return to the simplicity of Milk-Eyed Mender, giving shape to empty space with sparse instrumentation and singing, and it’s a perfect harbinger of what’s to come.

Hosting such illustrious contents as “In California,” a melancholic masterpiece that tells of her torturous fate “To spend my life in spitting distance / Of the love that I have known / I must stay here, in an endless eventide,” as well as piano number “Occident,” Disc 2, while in keeping with the tone of the album, arrives at the common destination in a very different fashion. Gone are the child-like "Hearing the goose cussing at me over her eggs" imaginings of Disc 1, and in their stead we find more somber fare. It’s refreshing and depressing in the same breath, leaning more heavily on Joanna’s vocals with diminished instrumental adornment. There are folk-roots through and through.

Disc 3 seems to fall somewhere in between Discs 1 and 2, radiating an understated enthusiasm, a heartiness hedged by shadow, and carrying a wistfulness exactly suited to the closure of this already emotionally charged epic album. Cautiously hopeful lines (“There is a spring, not far from here / The water runs both sweet and clear / Both sweet and clear, and cold / Could crack your bones with veins of gold”) characterize this final and most orchestral of the discs. Deciding to finish with modest grandeur, Joanna has with this final disc, most notably at the end of “Kingfisher,” employed twirling teams of violin, hosts of unnamed woodwinds, and brooding gangs of brass to underscore her occasionally unintelligible but always melodious voice. It’s got just enough pomp to be attention grabbing, it's pure enough to belong on this album, and it’s Newsom enough for two.

When all is said and done, however, Joanna is as Joanna does, and you’ll either love her, and subsequently this album, or you won’t. There’s not much of a middle ground, and if you’re firmly on the other side of the Newsom divide this album may not affect you, but for those of you new to Newsom let me plead this of you: Go out and listen to the album. Buy it if you’ve got the change, listen to a friend’s copy if you don’t, beg, borrow, or . . . well, just give it a real go through. Chances are, you’ll fall head over heels for Have One on Me.

Track List:
Disc 1
1. Easy
2. Have One On Me
3. '81
4. Good Intentions Paving Company
5. No Provenance
6. Baby Birch

Disc 2
1. On A Good Day
2. You And Me, Bess
3. In California
4. Jackrabbits
5. Go Long
6. Occident

Disc 3
1. Soft As Chalk
2. Esme
3. Autumn
4. Ribbon Bows
5. Kingfisher
6. Does Not Suffice