When I was a kid Joanna Newsom would have been the ideal girl for me. If we had been in school together I would have always tried to get the seat next to hers in biology class so we could laugh and giggle at anatomy diagrams, or I would stand behind her in the lunch queue to smell her golden locks, or even give up my space in the lunch queue so she could get the best choice of chicken breast. I would have tried to look deep and thoughtful by frowning a lot and growing a fuzz moustache and scratching ironic cries for help in to my desk. She would no doubt have spurned my somewhat creepy and stalker-like advances with just as much indifference as she would have spurned my chivalrous actions as she would have been, on the evidence of Ys, far too deep a thinker for my teenage brain, fascinated rather than amused by anatomy, and ironic and funny without having to pretend.

She would have been my kind of gal because she was beautiful in a non-threatening way, highly original in her thought process, creative, alternative, smart, and so cute you could almost commit the accidental crime of squeezing all of the life out of her with overbearing affection. Had I been a more interesting, original and talented guy and did not come across in the least bit creepy, then perhaps, had we ever met (I must remember that this is pure fantasy), she might have let me be her boyfriend and then a few years later when she recorded her masterpiece, Ys, I could have had the honour of performing the baritone male vocal accompaniment part on "Only Skin" which, due to it's tumbling and vibrant nature, is my personal highlight on this record which is packed full of highlights, so packed, in fact, that there is no room for choruses or traditional song structures as we were used to on The Milk-Eyed Mender. Instead we are treated to unravelling musical fairy tales which possess an undercurrent of the nightmarish world of Louis Carrol or the Brother's Grimm as the line between adolescence and adulthood is heartbreakingly blurred.

However, had Joanna and I met and fallen in love then it could not have been guaranteed that she would have ever recorded such a colossal record as this as, according to Doc Emmit Brown, the space/time continuum would have been disrupted and I may have dragged her down into my sad little life and not allowed her to follow the path of magic and wonder which she must have taken to invent the world in which the stories which comprise Ys take place in. I find it hard to imagine Joanna sitting down and having a normal breakfast of cereal; her music makes me presume that she runs through endless fields of corn causing butterflies to flee ahead of her skipping body as she gathers cereal and wheat with which to make bread through some magic process involving a nice equivalent of a cauldron. I hate to think that at night she relaxes in front of the television; I assume, by listening to her music, that she is no doubt out after dark, her path lit by glowing fire flies, gathering moon beams in a basket. She does not lie in bed and frolic with some hairy man who falls asleep after he has released his desire into her; she stays up all night and tells stories to the animals who gather in hushed wonder in the collected moonlight she leaves outside of her window.

No, had I ever met and seduced a young Joanna it is highly possible that none of these images would seem even remotely possible; the normality would overpower the magic as it inevitably does, and the world would have lost a precious gem. And for not depriving the world of that, I should be thanked.