2024 repress. "Drag City takes great pleasure in introducing to you a remarkable new musical singer, songwriter and all-around talent, Joanna Newsom. Joanna's music has more of an affinity with the folk revival of the 60s, or the bluegrass movement at present, than with most contemporary 'folk' (or 'anti-folk') scenes. Affinities aside, her style could hardly be called bluegrass; nor does it evoke the pastoral tonalities of 60s folk: she sings about whalebones, sleep, grammar, mollusks, accumulation, automobiles, owls, burning boats, string collections, milk, teeth, bridges, balloons, cake, colors, and kin, all in an otherworldly, ragged-sweet voice that defies convention. Her harp arrangements are at times ethereal and delicate, at others galloping and ornate, but never overwrought -- presenting not so much a mere fusion of influences, as an inquiry into the places where those influences naturally intersect. She considers the late composer Ruth Crawford Seeger (who was one of American folk music's earliest advocates, as well as a vanguardist composer) to be a major influence, because of Seeger's ability and desire to reconcile the tenets of experimentalism with her love for a beautiful melody.