Joanna Newsom’s world comes into clearer focus

Joanna Newsom is surely the only orchestral harp-playing, bird-watching, fairy tale-loving bestseller in indie pop. In the months before the arrival of her fourth studio album, “Divers” (Drag City), she appeared in and narrated Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2014 movie, “Inherent Vice,” and the director returned the favor by overseeing the video for her latest single, “Sapokanikan.”

With her warbling, childlike voice, dense wordplay and genre-melting arrangements, the Californian is nothing if not an original. She’s also been described as a “weirdo” and an outsider artist whose tastes run toward madrigals, ragtime and classical music, with glances in the direction of the singer-songwriter folk-rock movement of the ’70s. Her first three albums can be sticky going for all but dedicated fans, which number in the hundreds of thousands. Her 2010 album, the two-hour tripleCD “Have One on Me,” was packed with brilliant musicianship and elaborate songs, but it also tended to meander. It was an exhausting listen.

“Divers” is more concise and sharply focused, 11 songs over a relatively tight 51 minutes. For skeptics, it’s an entry point, a consolidation of her strengths that doesn’t sacrifice her quirks. Newsom’s production gives each song a distinctive cast. There are sweeping orchestral flourishes and bare-bones rural textures. One musician adds “five glorious seconds of Hammond organ” to “Goose Eggs,” and the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra lifts the second half of “Time, as a Symptom.” “Anecdotes” employs clarinet, English horn and a string section. “Same Old Man” evokes an old woman singing an Appalachian ballad accompanied by little more than a banjo.

The music serves some of Newsom’s most directly emotional writing, delivered in a distinctive warble that embraces a childlike openness and an aching, piercing beauty. Big themes — love, loss, time — play out in portraits of war and nature, urban life and rustic isolation. “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne” throws time-traveling soldiers into “a war between us and our ghosts.” In the end, they’re enveloped in the mist of a distant choir and a plaintive woodwind.

“Leaving the City” offers a dyspeptic but unexpectedly humorous view of New York’s claustrophobic bustle: “The longer you live, the higher the rent.” Birdcalls, piano and orchestral crescendos define the clash of hope and tragedy in “Time, as a Symptom.” And “The Things I Say” finds the narrator grappling with disappointment but refusing to give in. “The light and the wine conspire to make me think I’m fine,” she sings. “I’m not, but I have got half a mind to maybe get there, yet.” Who can’t relate?

Newsom can still be a daunting listen, and “Divers” requires time and attention to fully embrace. Those who do invest in it will find an artist whose highly personal art is edging toward the universal.

Greg Kot is a Tribune Newspapers critic.