Every Album I Love is a series where I tell the stories behind my favourite albums. I’ll tell you how I fell in love with them, why I love them, and I’ll keep going until I’ve covered every album I love (or death).

I first heard Joanna Newsom’s music, as I’m sure many others did, when ‘This Side Of The Blue’ was used in a vodka advert. Honestly, it didn’t appeal at first. Her unique voice and distinctive musical and lyrical vocabulary initially grated on me. I’d also read some reviews and articles about her which focused on her ‘quirkiness’, playing a harp instead of more traditional ‘rock’ instruments, and writing lines like ‘I killed my dinner with karate’. It all seemed a little twee and irritating.

I’m not entirely sure how my mind was changed. Perhaps it was my need at that time to hear all the records that were being talked about. Perhaps I’d heard more of her songs somewhere. I genuinely can’t recall, but somewhere along the way I became interested enough to buy her debut album ‘The Milk-Eyed Mender’. It rapidly became one of my favourites. Her voice was wonderful, once you adjusted to it, with almost a magical quality to it which suited the tales of flora and fauna and voyages she span. The words which annoyed me out of context flowed beautifully on record. Many were words which rarely appeared in song, but used in a way that seemed entirely natural, not eager to impress.

The songs were almost uniformly wonderful, bookended by my two personal highlights from the album, ‘Bridges and Balloons’ and ‘Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie’. It was not one of those records with a couple of hit singles that everyone liked the best. There is no song on the album where I would be surprised if someone said it was theur favourite.

The first time I saw her live was around this time, and is one of my favourite musical memories. She bounded out onto stage, clapping her hands and performing the first songs entirely acapella. A perfect entrance and she proceeded to enthral the crowd, playing almost all of that debut album.

The Milk-Eyed Mender remains one of my favourite albums of all time, but that is certainly not the critical consensus. Her follow-up ‘Ys’ is widely considered her masterpiece, consisting of 5 long songs with orchestral arrangements by the legendary Van Dyke Parks (alongside other stellar collaborators), and themes and characters that return throughout the album. A concept album in all but name, it is ranked in the top 500 albums of all time according to Acclaimed music, whereas The Milk-Eyed Mender doesn’t trouble the top 1500.

I wrote recently about the ‘death of the album‘, and mentioned how albums, rather than songs are often seen as the true, serious currency of music. The albums that get the most acclaim tend to be those that are seen as cohesive, conceptual, epic, or all of the above. Albums that are ‘just’ a collection of songs tend to be underappreciated. I think this is in part because the former are easier for critics to write or talk about (having a good story behind the album also helps, see Bon Iver going off to a cabin in the woods or William Basinski finishing recording the Disintegration Loops as 9/11 happened).

The orchestral arrangements also heightened Ys’s acclaim. They are often taken as a proxy for seriousness and/or quality, as they provided a link to classical music. I think some people, whether they would admit it or not, whether they like it or not, still believe classical music is more serious and important than rock and pop.

Not that Ys isn’t a great album, because it certainly is, with some jawdroppingly beautiful moments, but (whisper it) it can also be a little dull in parts. Critics use of language when describing Ys is telling, with many describing as difficult, demanding or challenging. This is another idea that is common in criticism, that only art that takes work to enjoy is worthwhile. And that is true in some cases, there are many records, films and books that are wonderful whilst being extremely and instantly accessible.

Third album Have One On Me is also a critical favourite, if not quite to the level of Ys. Whilst it doesn’t have the cohesion and classical trappings of Ys, what it does have is length. The album was released on 3 CDs, and lasted the exact length of the train journey from Manchester Piccadilly to London Euston as I discovered when taking that journey often in 2010. Length is something else often taken as a proxy for quality in the arts. Wow, that triple album/4 hour film/1000 page novel must be amazing if they needed that much space and time to fit in all their ideas. Perhaps. Or perhaps they just have no quality control and/or lack a decent editor (looks at Billy Corgan for no particular reason).

Have One on Me is also an excellent record, containing some of Newsom finest songs, but I could quite happily do without the third disc. It’s hard for me to avoid the thought that Ys and HOOM are more acclaimed albums than The Milk-Eyed Mender due to their scope and ambition as much as their quality. Ultimately though, I really dislike ascribing ulterior motives to people when it comes to the music they do or do not like (as I hate it when it happens to me) so I have to trust that people genuinely prefer those two albums (a fan poll of her best albums I saw once had them at 40% each with 10% for her first and last records).

Perhaps people don’t like Newsom’s voice on that first album, when it was at it’s most distinctive, with some of the stranger edges sanded off on later records. Maybe they don’t rate the songs on Milk-Eyed Mender as much as I do. Maybe I’m just extremely basic (although it’s not as though I don’t enjoy challenging music, as the next few articles in this series should make apparent)

Whatever the reason, Milk-Eyed Mender is always the first album I think of when I want to listen to Joanna Newsom, and one of the first I reach for from my entire collection. It may just be a group of the best songs she had available at the time, rather than a cohesive, planned album, but what wonderful, joyous songs they are.