It’s taken almost forty years for someone to be sufficiently inspired by Van Dyke Park’s epic Song Cycle to attempt an equally grand and ambitious musical undertaking, but with the release last year of this album by 25 year old Bay area harpist/composer Joanna Newsom (San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is a second cousin), the wait has proven worthwhile.

Song Cycle aficionados will immediately recognize a staggeringly great recording of familiarly off-kilter, lush, odd metered Van Dyke Parks arrangements backing Newsom’s cleanly lit vocals, and crisply rendered harp. They will not be ambushed by the music’s unusual twists and turns or feel hopelessly lost as it skitters, not quite out of control, along narrow roads not often taken in either pop or folk music.

More a storyteller than a conventional pop songwriter, Newsom, who has studied both musical composition and writing, sings, yelps, pleads and almost davens (prays) her way through five extended fanciful folk fables in a voice that’s both secure and insistent and simultaneously sweet, wide-eyed and innocent. It’s a winning combination, in part because she avoids preciousness.

What this unusual set lacks in melodic consistency in the traditional songwriting sense, is more than made up for by the urgency and oddness of Newsom’s delivery and the unusual meters, coupled with her ability to propel the winding narratives with capping triads that drive the stories to their conclusions. Chinese and West African rhythms and melodic scales shape much of the undertaking, though hints of spare Appalachia can also be inferred.

Newsom’s long, fable-like tales range far, though the themes of escape and transformation and loss, longing and incompleteness seem behind many. One is seemingly told from the perspective of a marionette and the puppeteer. Another is a parable about a bear and a monkey; lovers given an opportunity to escape from servitude only to find the need to work and earn money in the world. Eventually the bear wanders off and sheds even its “bearness.” The opener, “Emily,” sounds like an intimate conversation with an older sibling about growing up and leaving home. There’s a hint in the credits: background vocals are by “Emily Newsom.”

Story threads sometimes go astray and precise meanings get lost in the rush of indelible images and perhaps that’s intentional. The epic “Only Skin,” for instance, which appears to be about the cycle of life generally and motherhood and nurturing specifically, begins with what turns out to be a dream about black airplanes “lowering and shifting like beached whales.” The child/dreamer “froze in (his) sand shoal, prayed for (his) poor soul; sky was a bread roll, soaking in a milk bowl.” Newsom enjoys a good rhyme but the lyrics unfold, ribbon-like beyond sing-song safety.

“Only Skin” moves from the dream to the awakening, and then the narrator goes fishing, cuts the kid’s hair and feeds it the birds, goes into town to sell candy, the kid grows up, the mother begs him not to leave, a bird hits the picture window and is rescued before it can be swooped up by a vulture and taken to higher ground where it flies away. Life goes on “Life is thundering blissfully towards death,” there is renewal, described by a cherry pit that grows to be a tree. On it continues to a somewhat confusing conclusion. Interpreting poetry isn’t my strong suit, but if this song isn’t about life going on obla-di, obla-da, then I’m even more inept at this than I thought.

The precise interpretation isn’t really critical though, to becoming immersed and beguiled in the grand sweep of both the poetry and especially the musical invention.

Van Dyke Parks’s orchestrations are woven with great complexity, yet they manage never to intrude upon Newsom’s space, thanks to her compositional and vocal sophistication and the masterful mix.

In the opener, “Emily,” she refers to a meteor shower: “That the meteorite is the source of the light, And the meteor’s just what we see; And the meteoroid is a stone that’s devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee. And the meteorite’s just what caused the light, And the meteor’s how it’s perceived; And the meteoroid’s a home thrown from the void, that lies quiet in offering to thee.” Charming, clever and instructive, don’t you think?

Steve Albini’s recording of Newsom’s vocals and harp produced at The Village Recording Studio in West L.A. is a model of crystalline clarity, transparency and naturalness. Every harp pluck combines transient delicacy and purity with harmonic completeness and goose bump-inducing physicality.

Van Dyke Parks’ orchestrations are complex and saturated, with ripe, instrumental colors produced by a 24 piece string section, clarinets, flutes, oboe, bassoon, trumpet and french horn backing a core grouping of six musicians on electric bass (veteran Leland Sklar), electric guitar, percussion, accordian (Parks) banjo, mandolin, marimba and cymbalum.

The recording by Tim Boyle at Entourage Studios in L.A. is equally enticing and the mix by indie rock musician/producer Jim O’Rourke at Sear Sound in New York City is brilliant.

The finished product was then mastered to lacquer at Abbey Road by Nick Webb and pressed well, I don’t know where on at least 150g vinyl. I don’t think it’s a full 180. I don’t know if it’s all high rez digital, or all analog or a combination of the two. Nor do I know if Webb cut from high rez digital or a 30 IPS 2 track analog master (that’s what it sounds like, however it got that way). When you hear this, none of that will matter. It soundsAAA.

The gatefold paper-on-cardboard packaging is equally spectacular, featuring the fanciful Aesop’s Fable’s-like cover painting by Benjamin A. Vierling and a full-sized stapled-in libretto and credit booklet printed on heavy stock, glossy paper.

From the recording to the orchestrations to the mixing, mastering, pressing and cover, this production cost Ms. Newsom a great deal of money. It was money well spent.

I have no doubt that Ms. Newsom grew up listening to vinyl on a fine audio system in a family with a great collection of records. There’s no other explanation for the care taken in the creation of this one. It’s still possible to rescue the future of recorded sound from the dreadful state in which it finds itself, but it will take talented, caring young heroes like Ms. Newsom to do it.

Back in the early ‘90s Rolling Stone or some other magazine published a list of the 100 worst rock records ever made. A fool named Jimmy Gutterman had Song Cycle near the top of the list. Never mind that Song Cycle was not a rock album!

However you want to categorize this album, it was issued by one of the best indie labels to critical acclaim throughout the young, hip indie world. My friends, I’ve got to admit it’s getting better! Maybe not on the pop charts, maybe not on television where “American Idol” reigns, but among the important taste makers of a young generation.

Joanna Newsom’s Ys will not be for everyone but it’s a groundbreaking, original album that requires numerous plays to settle in (though the sound will get you immediately), but once it does, it will be on your turntable often and for a very long time.

Last time I went looking, it was out of stock on vinyl at most venues where I shop. Hopefully it will be available again, and when it is, don’t hesitate.

Please search this site for a Van Dyke Parks feature and interview (unrelated to this album).