JOANNA NEWSOM

THE HARP WANTS WHAT IT WANTS

IF YOU’VE EVER HEARD THE LABYRINTHINE MELODIES, nuanced instrumental arrangements and dense, poetic lyrics of Joanna Newsom’s music, you’ve probably gotten the sense that Newsom — the pop world’s pre-eminent harpist and perhaps one of the most respected songwriters of her generation — takes great care with every aspect of her music.

So naturally, she was annoyed when an early version of the title track from her fourth album, Divers, was recorded live and shared online with the incorrect title “The Diver’s Wife.”

“It’s kind of funny how mad it made me,” she laughs. “I almost wanted to join Twitter to just be like, ‘Stop calling it that!’ The reason that really got my dander up is that it’s crucial. It crucially changes the meaning.”

Newsom’s music has always been rich with meaning. She followed her folksy 2004 debut, The Milk-Eyed Mender, with Ys in 2006, an hourlong song cycle that turned a tragedy Newsom still won’t speak deeply about into five orchestral epics. By the 2010 release of her triple-LP Have One on Me (inspired partly by the life of revolutionary countess Lola Montez), she’d amassed a devoted, near-obsessive fan base that pored over her intricate compositions. They waited five years for a followup.

The lyrically rich, musically rewarding Divers marks a return to the conventional runtimes of her debut, but retains all the complex orchestral beauty of her lengthier albums. Thematically, it confronts death, love, gender duality and, on first single “Sapokanikan,” the passage of time, but she’s loath to discuss the specific meanings of the songs.

“It took so long to get the songs right where I felt like I was saying what I wanted to say, and to say anything else on top of that changes the meaning into something more heavy-handed, more clumsy. The lyrics are complementary to the music; [there’s] an immediate sense of meaning and a secondary meaning that sinks in over time.”

That might explain why the mistaken inclusion of the word “Wife” in Divers’ title track online irked Newsom so. While she’s happy that fans will interpret the album their own way once it’s released; until that point, sharing her own vision provides the incentive to create.

“We have to convince ourselves that it matters so much that it is sacred. How else are you going to commit to something for five years?”