'The wild blue yonder looms' : Joanna Newsom's wildness

Notions of 'the wild', an untamed and natural space, exist as idealisations that imply dissatisfaction with contemporary urban and industrial landscapes. Nostalgic longing for integration between domestic and wild spaces may be communicated by various modes in popular culture. Reynolds argues that nostalgic feeling is not limited, as was argued seminally by Davis (1977), to sentimental longing for one's real past experiences, but instead can invoke a fabled or imagined past (Reynolds 2011: xxix). Nostalgic longing in popular music, and particularly in folk genres, is often communicated by invoking a binary between an idealised, utopian past and an inimical, malignant present. Joanna Newsom's work elicits this binary subtly, using musical and extra-musical intertextuality to reference a fantastic provincial past while also portraying the natural world with a foreboding sense of imminent threat. Reynolds describes the 'freak folk' movement, in which Newsom's work is often categorised, as invoking 'the unsettled wilderness of early America; a self-reliant existence, outside society and remote from urban centres' (Reynolds, 2011: 344). This paper will examine the communication of a 'wildness' dichotomy in Newsom's oeuvre, created particularly through inter- and extra- textual associations, in which the wild is simultaneously nostalgically idealised and feared.