I’d recently moved from my hometown and was spending all the money I’d saved working in a supermarket warehouse on CDs. In about two weeks, I’d come across [Madvillain’s] Madvillainy, [John Fahey’s] Blind Joe Death, Tower Recordings, Animal Collective, etc., etc., but this was the record that really stuck. A woman, a girl really, barely older than me, putting together these fantastical songs over a concert harp, and virtually nothing else.
Thing is, at the time, what is always read as cute or precious—the cascading harp chords, the insane caw of her voice, the mad metaphors, and rhymes—I never heard it as such. I heard folk music, I heard existential panic, I heard pained love. “Yonder, wild, and blue, the wild blue yonder looms.” I mean, that is ridiculous, intimidating, Shakespeare-level. “Never…
