Glass Mountain

I do, however, think that Joanna’s music makes important reference to childhood, and I wouldn’t want her or her supporters to miss the importance of that reference, just because it is so easily misunderstood. I hear the opening lines of “Emily” as a poem about childhood. It’s written in the past tense, the audience is likely Emily, Joanna’s sister and childhood playmate, the images that come to my mind are some strange blend of “Mary Poppins,” “The 10 Commandments,” illustrated Bibles and yes (with that “high window”) fairy tales. But these lines are in no way an escape from adulthood or an idealization of childhood, and they certainly aren’t cute or innocent or nostalgic. I hear a terrible sadness about the passage of time and the second law of thermodynamics. We’re doomed to experience all of these strange and beautiful things in “bodies that don’t keep,” and it’s this adult knowledge of our mortality that makes the mood of the entire album possible. Childish music would distract us from this knowledge. Joanna evokes childhood, not to promote the illusion that we could or should relive it, but partly to show how impossible the dream of reliving childhood really is. You can’t go home, because you can’t unlearn what you’ve learned. I think there’s a hardwired ambivalence about childhood in our minds that Joanna’s an expert at probing. On one level, we long for the days before we really understood death, and on another level, we know that this knowledge is what makes us who we are. And we wouldn’t want to just lose ourselves in some sort of nostalgic oblivion. In other words, while I think childhood is a constant theme in Joanna’s music, I think she’s writing songs about the pain and joy of losing childhood, which is a way of writing songs about being an adult.

—some extremely correct person named Andy, in response to Masculine Feminine: Have One On Her (via anygoddamnedcolleen) (via anygoddamnedcolleen) (via thedamnablebell)