Course:Have One on Me (Joanna Newsom album)

CRWR 501P 003
Advanced Writing of Poetry
	Instructor:Dr. Bronwen Tate; Email: Bronwen.tate@ubc.ca; Office: Buchanan E #456;
Important Course Pages
	Inspirations & Influences;
Categories
	Sources of Inspiration and Influence Aardvark Book of Poems Book of Poems by a Living Poet Choufleur Conflicted, Ambivalent, or Antagonistic Feelings CRWR 501 People Encountered Before Twelve Essay Fiction Films Fox Gemini Music Orchid Otis Places Poem Composed Before 1945 Poetic Prose Sadcactussometimesblooms Song, Painting, Film, Etc. Souris Yarrow Yellow Silver

Have One on Me is a 2010 album by the singer-songwriter and harpist Joanna Newsom.

The best word I can use to describe Have One on Me is maximalist. It is an album about excess as a weapon, especially a self-destructive one. Many of the songs are 8-10 minutes long, and it’s a triple album. The whole thing is two hours long, and the arrangements are incredibly complex, featuring a variety of folk instruments around the central harp or piano.

The narrator is heavily based on Lola Montez, an Irish dancer whose entire career hinged on her lying about being from Spain. (As someone who was also influenced by Lana Del Rey, Lola Montez was totally the Lana Del Rey of the mid-1800s!) So, over the course of Have One on Me, the narrator suffers greatly; sometimes, she’s also selfish, shallow, cowardly, and wrong. She falsely naturalizes her own relationship to the land she lives on as a settler. This album is about so many things, but it’s also about how colonialism creates new varieties of falsehood, something I had never seen explored in music before. (I grew up as a settler in California too, surrounded by excess in early 2000s SoCal. Starting in college, I wrote a whole album about this, which I couldn’t have done without this album as an influence.)

From a formal perspective, Have One on Me expanded my sense of what maximalism could do in art, outside of just shunting it aside as tacky. There’s totally tacky moments on this album (particularly a little Orientalism moment on what is otherwise one of Newsom’s best songs), but this album is about tackiness, about excess, and about the way resource extraction from colonized land allowed for the creation of excess in the colonial West in the first place. It’s also about gender as performance; heartbreak; tenderness; and trying to live with yourself when your life is falling apart. It’s so much–too much–and it’s beautiful. It really, really is.

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