[Streaming (for a little while) via NPR’s “First Listen.” -egg]
Like short stories forming a non-linear but narratively cohesive whole, the eleven songs on Divers travel from war zones to the wilderness, from a darkened coastline to a comfortable cottage in the hills. Their protagonists may be alive or dead, they may be ghosts or babies just born. Newsom is the omniscient but shifty narrator, speaking in an “I” that both inhabits her characters and stands a bit apart from them, showing them up. Her deepest concerns are about the perils of fixing meaning. Like that other cultivated innocent, William Blake, Newsom senses a godlike mystery at the heart of the imaginative process and recognizes its parallel in the entropy of nature, what she calls, at the album’s climax, “the nullifying, defeating, negating, repeating joy of life.” But she also knows that every artist — every person, in fact, who uses language, or traces the edges of her own body in the distance from the ones she longs to embrace — inevitably stills the rapture of fecundity by trying to give it shape. In that shape is the shadow of mortality. The sometimes rambling, sometimes rushing act of telling that is Divers ends mid-word.