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[Melissa’s editorial note: It has been a long while since Rachel and I have published a guest author, but our friend Cristina Calatayud Ferrández wrote an amazing, brilliant, academic essay on a song we have never discussed before on Blessing All the Birds: “Kingfisher” from Have One on Me. 

Please take the time to read about Arthurian mythology, the Mists of Avalon, gender, Ys, and fate a few weeks before we publish our essay on “Pin Light Bent” in our “Delving into Divers” series.]

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Eight years after the publication of Joanna Newsom’s triple album Have One On Me, ‘Kingfisher’ remains one of the most elusive and enigmatic songs of her career.

Compared to the majority of songs on the record, at first glance ‘Kingfisher’ doesn’t appear to fit into the narrative as smoothly. Here is an album exploring the downfall of the relationship between a man and a woman; a woman expressing her unconditional love (‘Easy’), the trials and tribulations of making a doomed relationship work (‘Good Intentions Paving Company’), the anger at having been used and abused by the man she loved (‘Go Long’) and, finally, her resignation to letting go (‘Does Not Suffice’). It seems like a perfectly self-enclosed narrative, one that explores the ups and downs, the complexity, the love and the anger that any profound relationship experiences during its downfall. But in the midst of all this, how does ‘Kingfisher’ fit in?

The answer, it would appear, is in the very title. At the crux of the song lie the major themes explored in the Fisher King legend, and further developed in Arthurian mythology. And particularly in the novel that inspired the title of Ys; The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley. In these, we find some of the themes explored in the album, but at an epic scale: the relationship between women and men, allegorically represented by the conflict between Christianity and paganism; the idea of a fertility that is tied to the land and the kingdom; and the inescapable and self-fulfilling prophecy that is Fate, with its archetypal re-rendering of History.

In exploring the Christian-pagan conflict, Newsom also continues a tradition of Christian imagery in her wider discography; most notably in ‘Emily’, with its references to the Eucharist (“Take this/Eat this”) and to God (“Loving him/We move within his borders”), and in ‘’81’, where she ponders the possibility of innocence and new beginnings in her relationship with her lover (“I found a little plot of land/In the Garden of Eden”).

Vanessa Rossetto